I felt I should pen a postscript to the Climate Change series. This is for a couple of reasons:
First, to share with you two recent newspaper articles on Climate Change. The first is an advocate view on the part of USA Today and the second a skeptic view by Wall Street Journal. In my judgment one is factual. and the other is speculative relative to the debate. You can be the judge.
Second, a number of you have asked me throughout the series for my personal opinion on the debate. I indicated that I wouldn’t voice an opinion until the series was completed. Since the series is now completed, I will keep my word and voice my opinion which it noted below.
My Opinion: Based on the research, I came out of the debate favoring the skeptic view. I do so for the following reasons:
1. Climate Science: The hypothesis that the increased CO2 resulting from human-related emissions has increased global average temperature has never been proven based on my investigation. Therefore, for me, it remains an unproven hypothesis. It is possible that some small temperature rise could occur via a CO2 greenhouse effect but if so, it has been exaggerated by additional unproven hypotheses. Specifically: --The water vapor positive feedback effect – an unproven effect --The linear nature of the assumed CO2/temperature rise use in the General Circulation Models (GCMs) If there is a rise, the skeptics showed it would not be linear but would be logarithmic – unchallenged by the advocates. --The great uncertainty of how to model the cloud/water vapor effect. The models had it being a positive feedback effect continually when skeptics said it certainly would be negative some of the time with which I concur.
2. Historical Climate Data: --Historical climate data indicates that atmospheric CO2 has never driven temperature (as the hypothesis contends), but temperature has always driven CO2 levels. --Average global temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were equivalent or greater than today’s average global average temperatures with no presence of any human-related emissions. The Hockey Stick was an attempt to debunk this fact but failed to do so. 3. Empirical Data: Most importantly, the average global temperature has not increased in the last 17 years despite large increases in human-related CO2 emissions and predictions to the contrary by the GCM models.
My assertion on the entire debate is that IPCC politics got ahead of science and then felt they couldn’t back off. Specifically, the IPCC called the outcome of global warming due to fossil fuel emissions to early based on the Hockey Stick, thinking it confirmed the hypothesis. It didn’t and it has remained an unproven hypothesis ever since. This maybe the reason that a third of the Advocate authors said they would not enter into the climate science debate but would take as a starting point the overwhelming consensus of top global expects as laid out in the IPCC Climate Change summary reviews. I also could find no evidence supporting this consensus claim and even if true consensus in science is meaningless as many examples of history have shown.
[Note: My opinion only applies to the global warming aspect of Climate Change – other air quality aspects such as pollution is very real and needs urgent attention throughout the world].
Learning is Indeed Interesting, Harley
CLIMATE CHANGE POSTSCRIPT
USA TODAY 7/31/2018 – Our View: A fiery July validates global warming predictions This month’s weather has been downright hellish in parts of the United States and across the globe, providing further evidence that the impact of climate change is no longer relegated to starving polar bears and shrinking ice caps. In the USA, Americans awoke Monday to images of deadly wildfires scorching California and other Western states. July’s extreme weather stretched from an all-time high of 11 degrees recorded at UCLA to a record 16.4 inches of rain in Baltimore. The pattern of misery spread across the globe:
Tinder dry conditions and record heat triggered a firestorm in Greece, killing more than 90.
Historic heat (106 degrees in Kumagaya) in Japan left at least 77 dead.
Africa recorded its highest reliably recorded temperature in modern history: 124.3 degrees in Algeria
Record highs were also reported from Armenia to the United Kingdom to above the Arctic Circle. Torrential rains collapsed a dam in Laos, killing hundreds of people.
While no single event can be attributed to human-induced climate change, these are precisely the types of extreme weather that become much more likely because of it. “We’re now seeing decades-old scientific predictions being validated in the real world, right before our eyes,” UCLA climate researcher Daniel Smith told Axios.
Most of the political debate over climate change has been focused on whether the problem is being exaggerated. But some researchers worry that the models they’ve long relied upon to predict global warming effects might be actually underestimating changes that are underway.
The reason for all of this is uncomplicated. Greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise. Carbon dioxide levels reached 400 parts per million in 2016, likely higher than the Earth has experienced in millions of years. It exceeded 410 parts per million in April. The atmosphere is operating on steroids. This can actually provide a few benefits in the United States, as crop yields increase in a handful of northern states and cold-related deaths decline.
Such gains are easily overtaken by downsides frequent and destructive wildfires, more heat-related deaths in many Sunbelt states, excessive rainfall and rising sea levels along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast, and crop declines across the South and Midwest. It’s costing Americans money, both broadly across the national economy and in terms of household expenses.
A Universal Ecological Fund study last year priced the cost of climate change to the U. S. economy at an average of $240 billion a year. That total didn’t figure in the three devastating hurricanes, including the excessive rainfall in Houston, that struck Americans last year at a price tag estimated at $300 billion.
Studies show that extreme heat increases violent crime and slows productivity, particularly for the millions of Americans working outdoors. During the recent heat wave, electrical demand for cooling Texans peaked at the highest levels in state history, driving up air-conditioning bills.
Bloomberg tabulated a litany of other economic damage across the world. Stunted crops across West Texas’ cotton belt, threatening to halve the harvest. Hot rivers in France that can’t cool nuclear reactors, cutting electrical production. And wheat harvests in Russia, the largest exporter, potentially declining for the first time in years.
If there’s good news, it’s that more citizens understand the problem, even as Washington fritters away valuable time with its inaction: 73% now say that’s solid evidence of global warming, and a record 60% agree that humans are at least partially to blame, according to a University of Michigan survey.
The climate skeptics claim that the nation can’t afford to take the steps necessary to combat and adapt to global warming. Months like this one prove that America can’t afford not to. Source: 7/31/2018 U.S. Today article “A fiery July validates global warming predictions. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 6/22/2018– A Hot Summer on Capitol Hill James E. Hanson wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”
With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords and opportunity to see how well his forecast have done – and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.
Mr. Hansen’s testimony describes three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ‘80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios – enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Nino of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late 80s and 90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.
As observed temperatures diverged over the years of his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.
Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.
The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models – and the U.N.’s – is that they don’t consider more precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases. Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures. The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliable mainstream journal.
These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut the emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?
On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures. That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a luke-warming planet. Source: 6/22/2018 Wall Street Journal article “A hot summer on Capitol Hill.