Why Climate Change is Unbearably Naked

What do I find so impossibly sloppy to bear, about Climate Change in its contemporary definition, as the result of human activities (also known as “Anthopogenic Global Warming” or AGW, and usually associated to CO2 emissions caused by humans)?

Yesterday’s incredible (counter-)discovery by Anthony Watts on CO2 measurements getting corrected upwards after having gone downwards “for the first time in history” provides an opportunity for a non-exhaustive list (I may add links to each point next week) of all that depaupers Climate Change of actual meaning:

• Climate models are all based on forcings, something that cannot be measured. The tool has become the cause.
• Those same models are demonstrably “right” whatever happens, either warming or cooling (once again, as all they show is that forcings are supposed to do)
• Proponents are fixated on negativities (not just the newsmedia and the Stern Report…I have some interesting findings about a recent book on Climate Change, and I will publish them this week or next)
• Climate change is improbably comprehensive in its effects, and yet “Attribution”, the ability to pinpoint a particular change as having something to do with Climate Change, is still up in the air
• The IPCC itself cannot see much evidence for change in 2/3 (two-thirds!) of the planet
• The “truth” is that temperatures are going up but if one looks at actual measurements, they are continuously adapted and adjusted. Measurement stations are not increasing in the number, and locations are far from perfect.
• And now of course, on-the-fly upward adjustments of CO2 data appear just as values begin to go “the wrong way”.

I personally agree with Watts when he writes: “While nefarious motives may not be there, its just damn sloppy IMHO, and given this is the crown jewel for CO2 data I expect far better“.

And please don’t get me wrong…I am perfectly aware that such generalized sloppiness is part-and-parcel of modern Science, with genetists looking for Mendelian transmission of what is not Mendelian and a whole generation of Cosmologists trained on calling 96% of the Universe as “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”, two names for the same thing (”Total Ignorance”).

“Institutionalized Science” is of course 80% rubbish, as per the famous 80/20 rule.

But the whole Climate debate is much more than Science. And for that, there is still so much it needs to be dressed with, before it can be shown as properly thought of, and ready for being a solid basis for a revolution in societal mores.

If I read about “scientists demonstrating that train travel is impossible” I may get a laugh, as people at the time surely did. But when I see all the massive propaganda machine put in place to convince people to turn carbon-free by way of guilt, there isn’t much to be amused of.

If the keys to absolute gullibility are ever found, we may as well all turn back to live up the trees.

“Global” Warming Consensus Forgets Two-Thirds of the Landmass

More figures to understand how awfully incomplete is the current knowledge of global climate.

And it’s very clear for all to see in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report - Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2), in Chapter 1 and in the Summary for Policymakers.

A bumper 96% of reported changes are from Europe and Europe alone. And what does that mean?

It means that for the whole of Australia/New Zealand, the IPCC could find only 6 significant changes (SC). For the whole of Africa, 7 SCs. For the whole of Latin America, 58 SCs. For the whole of Asia, 114SCs.

In terms of SC per square kilometer, Europe has:

1- 11,978 more than Africa
2- 85 more than North America
3- 853 more than South America
4- 1066 more than Asia
5- 3,702 more than Australia/New Zealand
6- 270 more than Antarctica

But one may reply to that, I am putting too much emphasis on the 28,000+ European biological SCs.

Let’s recompute the above with reference to North America then. In terms of SC per square kilometer, North America has:

1- 142 more than Africa
2- 10 more than South America
3- 12 more than Asia
4- 43 more than Australia/New Zealand
5- 3 more than Antarctica

It is blazingly blatant that before we can speak of global warming, more data has to be collected at least about Africa/Asia/Australia-New Zealand/South America .

We are talking 67% of the total land area of the planet.

Is anybody in the IPCC/Al Gore/James Hansen/Tim Flannery crowd pushing hard to get a complete picture of what is changing where and how?

Why the NASA Planetary Atmospheres Website Doesn’t Mention Greenhouse Gases

Discussions with people holding a different view are obviously quite likely to help bring one’s reasoning forward (as long as there is no name-calling or other infantilism).

For an example of what can happen, look no further than this exchange with Ed Darrell at his Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub. The topic is, what is the relevance of the fact that the NASA Planetary Atmospheres website (PDS-A) doesn’t mention greenhouse gases.

To which my answer has been:

if the experts in the field don’t take it into consideration, I surely want to know why!!

Ed has replied with an interesting suggestion:

The site doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive resource for all studies of all atmospheres everywhere. It’s a site to get a line into work NASA has actually done.

But if that’s true, it means that in all these years, NASA has seldom if ever looked at ways to investigate the same greenhouse effect that keeps Earth’s average temperature above freezing, and Venus with a surface temperature higher than an oven. And furthermore, there is a dearth of data in this most practical of planetary atmospheric fields!!

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Let’s try to figure out if Ed’s interpretation is right. In its About page, the PDS-A site says “As an additional service, the Atmospheres Node provides information on relevant planetary atmospheres topics for educational purposes”.

There are links for Educators, including to the NASA Planetary Data System College Student Investigators (CSI) webpage that states

The objective of this activity is to involve undergraduate students in research and development projects related to the holdings of NASA.s Planetary Data System (PDS). Through the PDS College Student Investigators activity, the PDS strives to prepare the next generation of PDS science investigators.

A recent proposal is about investigating the role of dust in the thermodynamics of the Martian atmosphere. Neither there nor elsewhere there is any mention of greenhouse gases, a topic that evidently and mysteriously does not interest “next generation of PDS science investigators”.

Going back to PDS-A, there are educational links also to “Broker Forums“. One of them is the web site for the “Sun-Earth Connection” at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, curiously linking to another website “Space Weather” containing a few unorthodox remarks on the Sun and Earth’s climate.

Another link for the Broker Forums goes to NASA’s Solary System Educational website where (finally!) there is some serious content about the greenhouse effect (GH).

And what does that refer to? Step forward ESA’s Venus Express, that lists among its scientific objectives the investigation of

what is the role of the radiative balance and greenhouse effect in the past present and future evolution of the planet?

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Chapeau to Ed Darrel, then…for all intents and purposes, NASA has dedicated no mission to the study of the greenhouse effect. That’s why there is no mention of it in the PDS-A site, the Planetary Data System for Atmosphere: simply, there is no data to report. Because nobody ever looked for those.

Is the current state of Climatology on this planet and everywhere else sad or what? If Goddard’s Director and climate worrier James Hansen is unable to gather funds for a terrestrial or planetary mission on the greenhouse effect; or worse, if even he is not interested enough to put one together: then how solid will the science of the climate ever be?

ps Still, the PDS-A Encyclopedia could have had a page on the GH effect. Its equations albeit simplified, still are possible…

Surprising Remarks in NASA-Endorsed Website

Cosmic rays stream down into Earth’s atmosphere from the sun and elsewhere beyond the solar system. Recent studies show that these particles penetrate into the troposphere and alter the way that droplets condense to form clouds, rain and snow with important weather and climate consequences. Changes in the sun’s ultraviolet light affects the ozone layer and the energy input into the upper atmosphere. As the upper atmosphere is heated, it expands into space causing increased friction for satellites.

The ISS must be ‘re-boosted’ every three months to prevent it from burning up in the atmosphere. The Skylab station on July 11, 1979 reentered prematurely because of a solar storm event.

The above from the Solar Storms “Space Weather” website, listing NASA more than once in its endorsements page.

The below is instead from their Climate page:

Scientists have examined the climate record for other signs of the connection between space weather and climate-weather changes with many surprising results listed below.

The Trends page, alas, loses out on many of those “surprises”…

How the BBC Used the Wrong Picture to Talk About Media Accuracy

This is too funny to pass. Message just sent to the BBC:

Hi - you are using the wrong picture to accompany one article about the Ofcom ruling on the “Global Warming Swindle” documentary.

The page “Opinion: A reluctant whistle-blower” is using the IPCC TAR (2001) “Hockey Stick” graph

IPCC TAR (2001) Hockey Stick

The above can be seen in a 2004 BBC News article “Climate legacy of ‘hockey stick’“.

Obviously, you should have used the more recent IPCC (2007) temperature graph, as per your own website

IPCC AR4 (2007) Temperature Graph

That graph is published in the BBC News website’s “Climate Change: The evidence“.

Please have it fixed asap. After all, the article with the wrong picture is about…accuracy in the media!!

regards - maurizio

Why Rational Skepticism is Proper Response to AGW Claims

Many thanks to Ed Darrel at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub for pointing once again to the extraordinarily compelling case put together by Patrick Frank in “A Climate of Belief“, an article for the Skeptic society’s online magazine, Vol.14, no.1, May 2008, that:

the claim that anthropogenic CO₂ is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable

I had mentioned it at the time but had not had the time or memory to read it again. For those in need of a quick, heavily emphasized (by me) quote:

The proper response to adamant certainty in the face of complete ignorance is rational skepticism. And aren’t we much better off accumulating resources to meet urgent needs than expending resources to service ignorant fears?

Here a longer extract, from the final remarks (my emphasis):

It’s not that we, “lack … full scientific certainty,” it’s that we lack any scientific certainty. We literally don’t know whether doubling atmospheric CO2 will have any discernible effect on climate at all.

If our knowledge of future climates is zero then for all we know either suppressing CO2 emissions or increasing them may make climate better, or worse, or just have a neutral effect. The alternatives are incommensurate but in our state of ignorance either choice equally has two chances in three of causing the least harm. Complete ignorance makes the Precautionary Principle completely useless. There are good reasons to reduce burning fossil fuels, but climate warming isn’t one of them.

Some may decide to believe anyway. “We can’t prove it,” they might say, “but the correlation of CO2 with temperature is there (they’re both rising, after all), and so the causality is there, too, even if we can’t prove it yet.” But correlation is not causation, and cause can’t be assigned by an insistent ignorance. The proper response to adamant certainty in the face of complete ignorance is rational skepticism. And aren’t we much better off accumulating resources to meet urgent needs than expending resources to service ignorant fears?

So, then, what about melting ice-sheets, rising sea levels, the extinction of polar bears, and more extreme weather events? What if unusually intense hurricane seasons really do cause widespread disaster? It is critical to keep a firm grip on reason and rationality, most especially when social invitations to frenzy are so pervasive. General Circulation Models are so terribly unreliable that there is no objectively falsifiable reason to suppose any of the current warming trend is due to human-produced CO2, or that this CO2 will detectably warm the climate at all. Therefore, even if extreme events do develop because of a warming climate, there is no scientifically valid reason to attribute the cause to human-produced CO2. In the chaos of Earth’s climate, there may be no discernible cause for warming. Many excellent scientists have explained all this in powerful works written to defuse the CO2 panic, but the choir sings seductively and few righteous believers seem willing to entertain disproofs

Against-AGW-Consensus Article on the FPS Before Monckton’s

I can’t help but laugh at the incredible somersaults being performed by the Council of the American Physical Society (APS) to reaffirm thieir unshakeable belief in AGW, after allowing the publication in their “Forum on Physics & Society” (FPS) of an article by Christopher Monckton, “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered“.

Note: there is one thing I agree with the APS. Monckton’s paper has not undergone any scientific peer review. You see, he’s a Lord (a Viscount, no less) whilst on the ”Council of the APS”’s side there is obviously no trace of nobility. They have been “discorteous” indeed.

Time will tell about the position (and nobility) of Jeffrey Marque, the Editor of the FPS that has seen his July 2008 comments severely rebuked by the Executive Committee of the FPS. Who’s going to choose what will be published in the October 2008 issue, is anybody’s guess.

Interestingly, the FPS and the APS did not make too much of a fuss in the past, when publishing “heretical” climate-related opinions. For an example, see Gerald E. Marsh’s “Climate Stability and Policy” in April 2008.

Mr Marsh is not exactly your average AGW proponent: he argues that current CO2 levels are too low and contributing to climate instability, suggests that even 750ppmv could still be not enough to stop an upcoming, catastrophic Ice Age. and recommends that the IPCC switch its focus towards “determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide concentrations that will stabilize the climate, and extend the current interglacial period indefinitely”.

For some reason, the above did not cause any digestive pain at the FPS, either with its Editor, with its Executive Committee, or with the Council of the APS itself.

Is Monckton’s paper simply too hot to handle? Plenty of nutrients for conspiracy theorists there, no doubt.

NASA Planetary Atmospheres Website Doesn’t Mention Greenhouse Gases

Looks like there is at least one NASA website dedicated to planetary atmospheres, that cares not a zilch about the greenhouse effect.

The Planetary Atmospheres Node (Atmospheres Node, or Atmos) of the Planetary Data System (PDS) is responsible for the acquisition, preservation, and distribution of all non-imaging atmospheric data from all planetary missions (excluding Earth observations). The primary goal of the node is to make available to the research community the highest quality data possible. To this end, data are reviewed and re-formatted where necessary in order to meet the documentation and quality standards established by the PDS

The Education/Outreach section at least, says nothing at all about the greenhouse effect, whilst going into the details of lots of other things, such as how to compute the adiabatic lapse rate (dry).

CO2 and “greenhouse” are vaguely mentioned in few of the Abstracts but for some reason haven’t made it to the Education pages.

ADDENDUM: I am discussing the above with Ed Darrell at his Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

ADDENDUM (2): It seems that we have an answer. That side doesn’t mention the GH effect because no interplanetary probe has bothered yet to study it. Things may be a-changing with ESA’s Vision Express.

On Satellite Observations and Climate Change

An open letter to the Planetary “Sponsored Global Warming” Society

Dear Directors of the Planetary Society, dear Editors of the society magazine “The Planetary Report”

Your decision to dedicate a whole issue of the Planetary Report magazine to Planet Earth is commendable.

Too often one forgets that for the study of the universe there is a celestial body available to study 24/7, without the need for expensive trips to outer space. And that “body” is our own planet, the “cradle of humanity”.

All “missions to planet Earth” in the forms of orbital satellites and probes are worthwhile almost de facto, as new data can help us better understand our “motherworld”, and together with the accompanying experience may allow us to build the satellites and probes needed to explore the rest of the Solar System, and beyond.

But the July/August issue of the Planetary Report is not a celebration of past “missions to planet Earth” nor a comprehensive description of all the challenges lying ahead, and of all the questions still unanswered about our planet.

It’s just a collection of articles about global warming.

Is that what I and surely many other members await two long months for, every time? (and yes, I do follow Emily Lakdawalla’s blog).

Let’s assume “global warming” is indeed a big planetary issue, if not an emergency. Is it not talked about already in countless newspaper articles, movies, Nobel Prize wins, parliamentary sessions the world over, and now even a major topic of discussion at the G-8 “major industrialized nations” meeting?

And what purpose could it ever serve for a space-advocacy group to throw in its lot, especially since the issue has become so heavily politicized? Then one reads behind the magazine’s cover, and the “partial sponsorship” by Northrop Grumman Corporation starts explaining things.

After all, They are definitely not the first ones to jump on the “global warming bandwagon”, as demonstrated by a recent article on the International Herald Tribune. In the Planetary Report, they are the Company using the picture of a polar bear to advertise on the back cover that their “satellites above are safeguarding life below”.

Too bad though, Northrop Grumman Corporation wouldn’t survive a week by sticking to the environmental satellites market, and has to build some other pieces of hardware far less safeguarding for the lives experiencing a close encounter with their weapons.

But the problem is not with Northrop Grumman. The issue is what is the Planetary Society doing by jumping head first in the “global warming” debate, and also how it is doing it: because oversimplifications and mistakes abound. And that is definitely a no-no for something like the Planetary Society, that bases all its work of course on Science and on precision.

Here a quick list of observations:

(1) Contrary to what the Editor Charlene M. Anderson writes in the opening column, the Earth’s climate is not being recorded as undergoing a “steady warming”. There has been no warming in the past 10 years. Previous decades have seen warming and cooling episodes. If we are undergoing a warming, it’s definitely “not steady”

(2) In “Earth is, after all, a planet”, Charles F Kennel talks about “moving from knowledge to action”, because “human actions change our planet in ways that are not beneficial”. Note that certitude in those words. Does Mr Kennel realize that those words could be used to demonstrate there is no real need for more satellites to observe our planet? On the other hand: if the “global perspective” can “be found only in space” and therefore more satellites are needed indeed, what is the certitude on global warming based upon?

(3) Editor Charlene M. Anderson is then back in action with a “Venus and Mars, Earth’ s sister worlds” box making improbable connections between Venus’s clouds of sulphuric acid and acid rains on Earth (the two phenomena have little in common apart from elementary chemistry) and between Mars’s tenuous atmosphere and the Antarctic “ozone hole” (UV levels for the former are way higher than for the latter).

(4) In the same piece, we are told that Mars and Venus have shown us how “fragile, precious and unique” Earth is: I am not sure how anybody familiar with the evidence of periodical “asteroidal bombardments” on the surface of the vast majority of solar system bodies could define Earth as “fragile”, given that it has deleted almost all traces of four billion years of impact.

(5) Finally some fresh air in Michael D King’s “The Earth’s changing environment as seen from space” that actually is a list of all that can be done with satellites to monitor our planet. King’s piece is a good reminder of what it means to stick to the facts, instead of trying to “knit” one’s preferred interpretation around them. On the same tone, Editor Charlene M. Anderson’s box “Here, there and not quite everywhere” about analogies (rather than forecasts of doom) between what is seen on Earth and what happens on other planets and on natural satellites.

(6) Things turn to the worse with 6 pages given to Richard J Sommerville to explain the results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We are told that it is “90% certain” that us humans have caused “Earth’s atmosphere to warm up in recent decades” by emitting “greenhouse gases” in all our activities: too bad there is no space to explain where is this 90% figure coming from, for example why not 85.6% or 92.4%. We are just told it means “very likely” (why not stick to those words then).

(7) Furthermore, in the section “Recognizing climate change” Sommerville does nothing of the sort, and instead further dwells in the IPCC statements, before listing a rather selective group of observations (he forgets to mention the expansion of Antarctic ice, for example). And then after stating that “the IPCC does not specifically forecast what the climate will do”, Sommerville nevertheless writes that “sea level will rise perhaps by 18 to 59 centimeters”, with uncertainties due to scientists being unable to “assess the potential for further sea level rise”. Perish the thought of being unable to assess the potential for lower-than-expected sea level rise…

(8 ) In section “Absolute certain truth” we are told that the IPCC is “simply an honest and competent assessment of published peer-review science”. Hopefully so. But then on what basis did the IPCC get the Nobel Peace Prize? Not to mention the fact, reported by Sommerville, that the IPCC Working Group reports are approved line-by-line by governmental representatives.

The IPCC must have performed the miracle of uniting “honest”, “competent” and “government” under the same roof for the first time in history.

(9) The pictures accompanying Sommerville’s articles seem chosen for old-style PR purposes. There is a refinery emitting gases (those are not greenhouse gases); impressive satellite pictures before and after cyclone Nargis (that had nothing to do with climate change); and another satellite picture of the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica seemingly breaking up into icebergs (there is little indication that the southernmost continent is warming at all, apart from its Peninsula).

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Ironically, there are other ways to advocate for more “missions to planet Earth”, rather than parroting the most trite global warming slogans.

For example, there is no mention in the Planetary Report issue of the first chapter of the IPCC’s Working Group Two report, where it is clearly shown that the overwhelming majority of data confirming the climate is changing come from Europe alone.

We are talking 96% of evidence coming from 7% of the planet’s land area.

A major Earth observation plan is definitely in order: for the most basics of reasons, in order to observe and understand what is truly happening. If the first step instead is to declare our knowledge more or less settled, a couple of satellites will suffice.

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(10) As Berrien Moore III writes in the final article “As riders on the Earth together”, “to act wisely we require information and understanding”. Whoever is worried about global warming, they better concentrate on getting more environmental satellites up there, instead of declaring as a matter of principle that “we simply must take some of the pressure off Earth” as Mr Moore unfortunately states at the end of his article.

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Tellingly, we Members of the Society are not provided anything else from this issue of the Planetary Report. No Society news, no items on sale, no information about upcoming events, nothing about existing projects. Perhaps those folks at Northrop Grumman didn’t want to pay for the additional couple of pages. Or perhaps if climate change is afoot, all other activities of the Society will not be of interest any longer.

regards

maurizio morabito - london (uk)

Earth, then Mars…Venus Next in Line for “Giant Impact” Explanation

Big news today about Mars’ peculiar north-south terrain divide having been caused by the impact of a Moon-size object shortly after the planet formed. Since there is also strong evidence for Earth having undergone a similar impact, with a Mars-size planetoid, thereby forming our Moon, it would be odd to imagine that no such catastrophe ever occurred to Venus.

After all there’s lots still to explain about “Earth’s Twin”: a very slow retrograde rotation, an incredibly massive atmosphere and a relatively young (<500 million years) surface. To me, the whole setting cries out loud for an “impact” explanation, rather than the classic “it’s warm because of the CO2!” theory that says nothing about all the other peculiarities (and it’s not exactly necessary…).

Hansen’s “Desperation 350″ - And Still They Travel

Full-page ad on the IHT on June 23 by the Taellberg Forum:

<350

Remember this number for the rest of your life

It is left to the reader’s imagination to hear music like in an old Bela Lugosi movie…

Anyway: such an effort is apparently linked to the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s warning to the US Congress about global warming.

We are told, CO2 concentration at the time was 350 ppm, and now it’s 385. We are also told that “Science says” the worst effects happen above the level of 450ppm.

Looks like it’s not too much of a worry then? Don’t even think about it.

For unfathomable reasons (=otherwise a lot of people would become inconsequential), the ad says that we have to go back to levels lower than 350ppm anyway (and yes, there is no scientific basis at all for choosing the value “350″) “peacefully and deliberately, with all possible speed” (rather ominous words if you ask me…): because “<350 is essential to maintain human and planetary well-being“

(planetary???)

Why then “350″? Perhaps as a celebratory level for Hansen’s true guidance. But with planetary temperatures refusing to go up, I do expect lots more of this stuff in the near future

I have a small question though: if they believe in what the ad says then…why are they still travelling so much? For example, to the Taellberg Forum, june 26-29 in Sweden.

Why Are Weather Forecasters Skeptical of AGW?

An interesting topic via the Global Warming blog on Accuweather, where Brett Anderson points to an article by Bill Dawson of The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

Note in a couple of Dawson’s interviewees, a slight-but-steady series of slurs against weathercasters that don’t buy into the AGW faith:

Broadcast meteorologists are so busy disseminating information about near-term weather conditions[...] that they simply don’t have much time to keep up with scientific developments related to longer-term climate conditions

many “naysayers” [...] are coming from a perspective of the policy first

they’re against it because they think it will hurt the economy

[the "naysayers"] are putting their own personal views - sometimes even fundamentalist religious beliefs - first

[they] have no academic training or degrees in meteorology

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Luckily, Messrs Anderson and Dawson don’t engage in such awful rhetoric, with the former publicly declaring

“from what I personally see, there are also a number of current and retired TV meteorologists with a good deal of atmospheric science eduaction/professional background that are also skeptical about man-made global warming”

Myself, I have a weather forecasting background…who knows, that might explain my skepticism about AGW…in any case, I find it natural to respect people whose forecasts are challenged by thousands of viewers against the hard evidence of each day’s weather.

Is Global Warming Invisible?

Is “global warming” invisible, or at least very, very difficult to depict, one wonders. How else to justify image-rich weekly The Economist’s decision juxtapose to an article about “climate change talks”, a picture of a smog-choked Chinese city? A place where the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is surely the least of their pollution concerns…

Evidently they had absolutely no way to show in pictures what “climate change” and “global warming” actually look like…

This goes on par with Scientific American’s inability to find 10 “pictures of a warming world “ (slides 1 and 2 are just one single “evidence”; slides 4, 5, 7 and 10 are no evidence of anything; and slide 9 may be misleading…)

Economist: AGW Policies Mostly Hit the Poor

Any way you turn the topic, there is no escape: AGW policy interventions such as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions, will end up falling hardest on the poor.

That’s not my conclusion. It is what the Economist magazine (a convinced proponent of AGW) just published under the heading of “Buttonwood”. And it needs no commentary:

The fundamental problem is difficult to get round. If governments desire people to use less energy, they have to ration supply by price. They can limit frivolous use (gas-guzzling cars, televisions on standby and the like). But there may be a core demand for energy (heat, light, commuting) where consumers will resist cuts. For that part, the rich will always be able to outbid the poor (not to mention the politically powerful middle class). And that will plague green campaigners

Has Nordhaus Demonstrated We Better Do Nothing About CO2 emissions?

Kudos to the climate-change-believers at the New York Review of Books for providing almost 3 full pages to climate-heretic Freeman Dyson’s review of William Nordhaus’ “A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies” (Yale University Press) (and of Ernesto Zedillo (ed)’s “Global  Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto”).

Well it does provide a welcome change from the usual doom-and-gloom of Hansen, Flannery and McKibben, doesn’t it

Dyson (whose article has been rebuked on RealClimate with way too quick a contempt) doesn’t actually deal with the reasons for his skepticism on the dangers of global warming. After a long preamble on how efficient vegetation is at capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide, the NYRB article deals (among other things) with Nordhaus’s conclusions about costs and benefits of various possible climate-related policies, in a 100- and 200-year timeframe.

First of all, Nordhaus is very convinced about the need to put a “price” to carbon, to avoid “economic inefficiencies”.

It doesn’t sound such a bad idea, if the majority of people are truly convinced CO2 is a harmful emission. My main concern is, how does anybody find out what that “carbon price” should be, if not an arbitrary value?

As Dyson reports, Nordhaus follows “the conventional wisdom of economists” and does all computations for a 4% discount rate.

For mysterious reasons, this has become a point of contention, with the Stern Report using a discount rate close to 0%, and the RealClimate guys rather naively trying to argue for an equivalence between people actually living today and people possibly living in the future. Luckily, an AGW-believer with a solid experience in economics has torn such equivalence to pieces. It simply makes no sense, morally-economically speaking.

What is the point of stealing from the people of the present thereby removing plenty of resources from the very people of the future one is trying to provide resources to?

And what is the moral case, outside of economics? Well, let’s say you have a sick child and a single dose of medicine…would you really withold it just in case you would have another child, five or ten years in the future?

My criticism of Nordhaus is different. I would have rather preferred computations based on a progressively fuzzier discount rate, since the future gets harder and harder to predict (obviously) the further we try to look into the…future!

Leaving the rate at 4%, Nordhaus’ 1-century results are the following, compared to a “do nothing/business-as-usual” (BAU) situation:

(a) with a continuously-adjusted carbon tax, a $3 trillion net gain
(b) with an updated Kyoto protocol, a $1 trillion net gain (with the US), and zero (without the US)
(c) with draconian, Stern-like limits on emissions, a $15 trillion net loss
(d) with drastic-but-gradual, Gore-like limits on emissions, a $21 trillion net loss
(e) if a cheap way to capture and store CO2 (”low-cost backstop”) is discovered, a $17 trillion net gain

Dyson reports the conclusions as:

(1) Avoid the ambitious proposals
(2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop
(3) Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails
(4) Avoid an international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent.

These objectives, according to Dyson, are valid for economic reasons, independent of the scientific details of global warming.

I am not sure I can agree with the above.

What I see is a strong case for doing absolutely nothing.

In scenario (a), in fact, the total loss for BAU is about $15 billion per year. Not much to cry about, really. 

Just the complex mechanism that needs to be setup and run for a continuously-adjusted carbon tax, with its load of intrinsic inefficiencies, should be more than enough to bring such a loss to zero.

Kyoto-like interventions (scenario (b)) look absolutely irrelevant, and of course both Stern and Gore (scenarios (c) and (d)) have the single-minded goal to make us all miserable (starting with the Chinese).

The one “hope” is in carbon capture and storing, something presented by Dyson in his preferred terms of genetically-modified trees that could reduce the atmospheric CO2 content “by half in fifty years”.

But…if you believe in CO2 as a greenhouse gas, reducing its atmospheric concentration by half will surely sound like absolute madness…a one-way trip to a worldwide refrigerator?

=======

All in all, then, it looks like the work of a convinced AGWer such as William Nordhaus has been useful in identifying what to do regarding CO2 emissions: nothing, zero, zilch, nada.

Will that accelerate the end of the AGW madness? I don’t think so. Perhaps the above is why Lord Stern, well aware of the overall situation, went through all the pains of trying to argue for a quasi-zero discount rate.

If logical arguments show the best course of action is to do nothing, that concept by itself will simply convince AGWer to become gloomier prophets of doom than ever.

You see…there simply is no AGW worry without catastrophism.

Discounting the Future: Economics 1 - AGW 0

How can we evaluate future costs against present ones? Could it be right to apply a discount factor, so that $1 of today is equivalent to, say, $37 in the year 2100 (rate=4%), and to base on that, for example, climate change policy ?

The answer (”yes it may well be right!“) is buried deep among the dozens of comments to RealClimate’s quick rebuttal of Freeman Dyson’s ideas on global warming. And it is written in clear and concise explanations by a “card-carrying economist” signing as “Bob Murphy” (and no, I don’t think he considers himself as an “AGW skeptic”).

I report Murphy’s comments below (for my own convenience, mostly). Nothing against RealClimate here: there are plenty of blogs with hundreds and hundreds of replies by readers, and who knows how much truly insightful stuff is simply lost in the crowd.

One thing to note is that the reactions to Murphy’s perfectly reasonable remarks clearly show what the political and ethical slants of the RealClimate scientists are. Gavin’s conclusion is that “ethics are not discountable [so] there is no reason to think that [we should use] the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions“. I am sure those are not the last words on this subject.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 3:04 PM

Like Lou above, I also am a card-carrying economist, so you may want to discount what I say (ha ha)…

For the people who think economists have nothing to contribute to this issue, I guess all I can do is remind them that the various solutions being proposed to tackle climate change involve things economic. E.g., a tax on carbon or a cap-and-trade program. The hard sciences alone don’t tell us how many dollars per ton a carbon tax should be, just as it would be ridiculous for an economist to try to calculate that figure without asking help from the climatologists.

As far as discounting for future generations: You need to use a discount rate to make sure you’re helping them as much as possible. It seems that some posters here are objecting not to the discounting per se, but to the conversion of everything to dollars and cents. I have no problem with that objection.

However, if we’re going to quantify future damages from climate change into dollar terms, then we need to discount those numbers to sensibly determine how much it’s worth spending today to try to mitigate those damages. The reason is simple: We could take the money and invest it, giving a larger inheritance to future generations. Discounting makes sense even if the recipient isn’t alive yet. Presumably our grandkids would rather get something worth more than something worth less. And so that’s why it would be silly, say, to spend $900 today to avert $1000 in damages in the year 2100. It would make more sense to take that $900 and buy T-bills, and keep rolling them over for our descendants.

Again, if that talk sounds crazy to you, because “you can’t put a number on climate damage!” OK fair enough. But your problem isn’t with the discounting per se.

[Response: My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation? David]

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:47 PM
David wrote:

My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation?

If the ancient Greeks had attained our current level of technology, then right now I think we would all be thousands of times wealthier than we currently are. If the Earth were a bit warmer than it is right now, that would definitely be worth the extra wealth; everyone would turn up the AC in his or her hovercraft on the way to his or her 10-hour-per-week job.

Yes this is a fanciful scenario, but only because you gave me a fanciful assumption and asked about its implications.

There are billions of people who right now lack basic utilities like clean drinking water and dependable electricity. If they are encouraged (forced?) to try to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go right to solar or whatever, their development will be hindered. And hence their grandchildren will be much poorer than under the business-as-usual case.

I used the T-bill example just to make the point, but it doesn’t rely on direct lineage. E.g. you and I benefit right now from the capital accumulation of earlier generations. When people work with tools and equipment, their labor is much more productive than if we all had to start from scratch with just nature and our bare hands.

Obviously, if you think that business-as-usual will lead to catastrophic damages, then a rational response would be to limit GHG emissions in the present, notwithstanding the high cost. But I’m just saying, the way to handle this in economic terms is to realize that the future damages are so high (measured in $$) that, even with discounting, they are still higher than the present costs of mitigation.

One other point: I want to second the statement of a previous poster, that yes Stern actually does discount future climate damages. This is because of the small probability that those generations won’t exist to enjoy the fruits of our current, costly mitigation efforts. E.g. there could be nuclear war, an asteroid could blow up the world in 2025, etc.

But Stern does not allow a “pure” discount rate, where the utility of future generations is discounted simply because of its futurity. So that’s why his overall discount rate is lower than Nordhaus’, who bases his on the market’s observed discount rate.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:53 PM
David Benson wrote:

Lamont (48 ) wrote “Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?” It can. I opine that it largely will be, due to ingenuity and innovation.

I agree that human ingenuity will always find ways to make a given situation better. But the point is, requiring a reduction in CO2 emissions takes away our range of options. Other things equal, it necessarily makes us poorer.

Now of course, most posters here would say other things aren’t equal. They would say the costs of mitigation are outweighed by the avoided damages of further global warming.

I’m not arguing that point right now. I’m merely saying that it’s not correct to, say, count up the “green jobs” as a benefit of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. This is because you would have to then include all the jobs that were destroyed (in SUV manufacturing, coal-fired power plants, etc.) by those measures.

If the government passed a law forbidding the production of anything that was yellow, that could only make us poorer. By the same token, if the government says industry has to reduce its carbon emissions by x% next year, in and of itself that makes us poorer.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 9:26 AM

The real problem with doing nothing now will be the cost in lives not air conditioning later. That means you, your kids and the rest.

But this is also the “real problem” with severe restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. As I said earlier, there are billions of people who don’t have what we consider to be necessities of life. They really are dying every day in ways directly traceable to this lack.

So if your criterion is, “Minimize the number of premature deaths over the next 200 years” or something like that, it doesn’t automatically follow that a massive carbon tax now is the answer. It could be the answer, but it is an empirical question. Many posters here are acting as if altruism for others necessarily implies support for radical curbs on carbon emissions, when it doesn’t. You would have to (a) care about future generations, and (b) agree with some of the more catastrophic predictions, in order to support radical measures today.

On the issue of discounting, I agree that on the face of it, it sounds crazy to even ask, “How many future people are worth one person today?” But as I tried to get across (obviously not very persuasively) in earlier posts, the fact is that the price of current purchasing power is higher than (right now) the price of purchasing power in the year 2100. So there needs to be some discount rate (and people can argue about how high it should be) to make sure present mitigation efforts are as effective as they can be.

One final note: I am not saying that the psychological motivation of most “deniers” is concern for people dying of dysentery in Africa today. Of course not. But even so, it is a fact that there are people we know are dying today from poverty. Their efforts to climb out of poverty will be hampered by mitigation proposals. So it’s not simply a matter of, “Do you value human lives?” It’s an empirical an ethical issue of, “Is allowing x more people to die for sure over the next 20 years, counterbalanced by models that lead us to believe we will thus save x+y people over the next 200 years?”

Incidentally I am not being sarcastic in writing the above. The answer may very well be “yes, it is worth it.” I’m only trying to show that it is a question of balance, to quote Nordhaus. It’s not simply, “Do I value my SUV more than 80 kids 100 years from now?”

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:25 PM
In response to post #70, raypierre wrote:

The two points you make have been quite thoroughly addressed, but you weren’t paying attention….Besides [Nordhaus’ dubious model], there’s the highly questionable issue of the discount rate assumed by Nordhaus and many other economists. David addressed that specifically in his post.

Hang on a second. The following is David’s addressing of the issue of discount rates:

I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now.

There’s no polite way I can say this, but the above is honestly analogous to me (an economist) criticizing the IPCC at a website like WeHateGore.org and saying, “Personally, I don’t see why we should put any faith in these models. They can’t even tell me if it’s going to rain next week, so when the time scale goes to hundreds or thousands of years…!”

So whatever your thoughts on discounting, David’s expression of personal confusion over the practice of economists hardly counts as a thorough disposal of the practice.

And yes, some people pointed to Weitzman’s work, and the RFF paper. Again, this is analogous to me pointing to Lindzen and saying, “Look, even an MIT expert on this stuff agrees with me! These models are bunk!”

It’s hard to keep the different objections separate on this thread. As I keep pointing out, a lot of people here don’t like the idea of using dollar measurements in the first place, in which case the discussion of discounting is superfluous.

But if you are prepared to accept that a cost/benefit test of proposed mitigation measures isn’t absurd, then the next step is to ask whether future costs and benefits should be given equal weight to present ones.

And I’m saying the answer is no, because whether we agree with it or not, the market right now undervalues future dollars. So we can achieve our aims more cheaply by recognizing this basic fact, rather than declaring it immoral.

I’ll try one more analogy to get the point across. Suppose there is a homeowner trying to decide whether to spend $1000 renovating the insulation in his house, in order to save $100 on utility bills per year. Should he do it or not?

If David is right, then before we can answer that question, we need to know how old the homeowner is. After all, if he’s going to die in two years, then clearly the expenditure isn’t worth it, right?

(The standard answer of course is no, the age of the homeowner is irrelevant, assuming he wants to pass on as much wealth as possible to his heirs. They will reap the benefits of the efficient purchase of insulation. They would rather get the insulated home, and $800 less in cash, than the non-insulated home, and $800 more in cash. [The $200 comes from the two years of life left in the homeowner, in which he lowers his utility bills from the new insulation.])

[Response: There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time. There is a difference and pretending that only the economically illiterate think so, is not constructive. It is however an ethical decision, and can’t be proven one way or another using economics alone. - gavin]

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:28 PM
One final comment, and then I think I should quit while I’m ahead (or not too far behind): Nordhaus is actually on “your” side in this. He has been one of the most vocal economists on the importance of climate change.

If you think he is unduly activist, it might be because, as a professional economist, he sees costs of your personally favored policies that you aren’t considering.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:52 PM
Whoops–typo: I meant above to say that if you think Nordhaus’ isn’t activist enough, then it might be because he is worrying about drawbacks to mitigation policies that you aren’t taking seriously. I.e. there seems to be a sense here that because he’s skeptical of some approaches, he must not care about the environment as much as Gore (or Stern) does. And I don’t think that’s it at all. Believe me, I have been a critic of Nordhaus on this very issue, so it’s odd that I’m defending him here.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 2:54 PM
Well shoot, I said I was done pestering you guys, but then Gavin goes and makes a great analogy that I hope will really clarify our different positions on this. So if you’ll forgive me for one more attempt:

There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time.

OK thanks, as I said this really crystallized our differences on this. Note that we’re actually closer to agreement than you seem to think; all along I have said, “If you don’t want to put a dollar value on lives or the environment, that’s fine. But if you do then you need to discount.” I think we’re both agreed, then, that the basic problem with Nordhaus is his attempt to monetize everything, rather than his application of a discount rate to those monetary values.

But anyway, back to your example: First of all, under the law you will get a lighter sentence (today) for planting a bomb set to go off in one year, than if you planted one that went off two minutes ago. And the difference of course is that you haven’t actually killed anybody with the first bomb. This is relevant to the climate discussion, because those future harms might not actually occur. And I don’t even mean, maybe carbon-munching trees will be developed. As I said, Stern discounts the future because of the possibility that those people won’t exist (asteroid, nuclear war, etc.).

(Now in fairness, you could say, “OK, if the bomb is set to go off in one week, versus one year.” I don’t know what the legal treatment of these cases would be, but in either case you would not be charged with murder, because no one is yet dead.)

But now let’s make your bomb scenario a little closer to the climate change one, and hopefully you’ll see why I keep insisting that discounting is important. Suppose that instead of just an outright government crackdown on bomb-planting, the government capitulates to the bomb lobbyists and only imposes a $35 tax on every bomb planted. (Maybe most citizens view bomb planting as essential to their way of life.)

Now in that case, it really would be crazy to not discount the fine based on the timer setting, because otherwise the same crime would be penalized at different levels. E.g. someone today plants a bomb set to go off in one year, and he gets fined $35. Then next year, someone plants a bomb to go off in 24 hours, and he also gets fined $35.

Both bombers killed one person in the year 2009. But the first bomber paid a higher fine, because he had to pay $35 in 2008, while the second guy had to pay it in 2009. During his trial, the first guy in 2008 could have said, “Hang on a second! Don’t make me pay it now, make me pay the $35 when it actually kills someone.” And naturally he would prefer that outcome, because he could set aside less than $35 today (in 2008 when he’s convicted), and let it roll over to $35 in 2009 when his bomb actually causes damage.

So that’s one way of seeing why, if you’re going to bring monetary incentives into it, which plenty of environmentalists want to do, then it matters that “current money” is more expensive than “future money.”

To insist that monetary fees (carbon taxes, prices for cap-and-trade permits, etc.) reflect the prevailing exchange rate between present and future dollars, is no crazier than saying a carbon tax expressed in Japanese yen has to be higher per ton than a carbon tax expressed in US dollars.

To push the bomb analogy even further, yes it certainly would be better if the bomb planters could be persuaded to set their timers farther into the future, even if we’re solely concerned about minimizing the damages from their actions. This is because we have more time to adapt to the bombs. People in the vicinity can move away, they can buy armor for their cars, etc.

Obviously I’ve carried the analogy a bit far, but I’m just trying to show that the closer you make it to the actual situation of carbon emissions causing future damages, and especially where the government’s response is to inflict monetary fines on the parties doing the damaging, then you need to use discounting. Otherwise you end up with an outcome that is inferior from everyone’s viewpoint, to what would be achievable if discounting were used.

[Response: My point was only that ethics are not discountable. It is equally unethical to plant the bomb with a one day setting as with a century setting. Your extension to my analogy is really a stretch to make an ethical point into an economic point - I don’t see that any of your additional assumptions are necessarily valid. But nonetheless, there are clear uncertainties with future actions that mean that something that is almost certain to happen if I plan it for a day ahead, is less certain if I plan for a century ahead. Fine - some kind of allowance needs to be made for that (as Stern does). But there is no reason to think that it should be the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions. - gavin]

Positive Feedback…or Oscillation?

A very interesting remark by Roy Spencer in a guest blog at Roger Pielke Sr’s:

[...] Oscillation, or any other mode of internal variability will ALWAYS look like positive feedback - even if there is no feedback present.  The question of how the neglect of this effect has contaminated observational estimates of feedback has never even been addressed, let alone answered.

I repeat: to the extent that any non-feedback radiative fluctuations occur, their signature in climate data LOOKS LIKE positive feedback.  And when modelers use those relationships to help formulate cloud parameterizations, it can lead to models that are too sensitive. [...]

Obviously the above does not mean there is _no_ positive feedback. It “just” means that this “fake feedback” effect has to be removed from the data BEFORE announcing to the world how sensitive climate is eg to CO2 concentrations.

Warming World Affecting the Minds of Nature Editors

Much fanfare on Nature and elsewhere about a paper by Rosenzweig et al that appears to be a re-hash of chapter 1 of the IPCC AR4-WG2 report.

Now, there is one thing that is very evident: the vast majority of reported changes are about Europe.

Nature reporter Emma Marris admits “the bulk of the observations come from Europe”. That statement is somewhat incomplete. In the IPCC report, for example, there are, from Europe, 28,115 observed biological changes out of a worldwide total of 28,671.

That’s 98%. Just from Europe. And most of it, just from a single meta-analysis.

Perhaps Marris should have substituted “bulk” with “pretty much the absolute totality”.

========

So the years are passing by, but the question remains: what if Global warming is just European?

ps I am worried about Californian birds (the ones with plumage, that is). There’s a researcher studying them, Cagan Sekercioglu of Stanford University, but he doesn’t show much interest in the real world:

““We shouldn’t even need to publish such papers at this point,” he says. “This paper is an argument that climate change is causing the observed changes. This should be a given. Thirty years later we are still trying to convince people of this.”

Well, Mr Sekercioglu, with an attitude like this, I bet you’re going to make lots of unexpected discoveries, aren’t you?

A Real Climate of Misunderstanding

What Climate Science?
Are AGW climate scientists and science-prone skeptics talking about the same subject? I thought so, but am not sure of that any longer.

Having read Real Climate (RC)’s “Butterfly” blog and engaged in some commentary about it at that site, and having followed the AGW debate for the last five years, my impression is that:

• the AGW climate scientists are just doing what they can, after heavily restricting their area of research
• I and some other fellow science-minded skeptics are simply pointing out to the vast, unexplored regions outside of your average climate modeller’s understanding and computational ability.

Imagine if paleontologists had decided to concentrate on the skulls of Rift Valley hominids, treating with disdain (aka as “noise”) all of a find’s context, including other human bones, remains of other animals, local geography (and climate). And deliberatingly ignoring every other hominid find, anywhere else in the world.

That’d still be science, but within such a very focused line of research quite unlikely to add much knowledge or understanding, apart than about itself.

There Must Be Some…
If such a colossal misunderstanding is indeed in place, that would go a long way in explaining the extraordinary ill feelings surrounding the whole of climate science at the moment (and I am deliberately keeping politics outside of this), with one side treating skepticism itself as a dishonest scandal that should be stamped out of existence once and for all, and the other side dismissing years and years of research as pretty much irrelevant gibberish written by incompetent liars.

No wonder they (we) can’t see each other eye-to-eye…how could two judges agree at a canine show contest, if one of them were only interested in (and had built a whole theory of canine beauty about) the shape of the tails?

Climatology: An Abridged History
The story of how contemporary climatology has ended up like this is illuminating.

At first, basic laboratory experiments gave some indications on how atmospheric constituents could interact with one another, and with the incoming solar radiation. Notable among them, the study of CO2’s “greenhouse effect” by Arrhenius in 1896. But the real world of meteorology (including climate) is somewhat more complex than a lab’s setting.

For example, vast energy exchanges manifest in atmospheric cell circulation, oceanic heat exchanges, and whole climate-affecting cycles currently known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, el Nino/la Nina, etc etc.

With no way of replicating that in controlled laboratory conditions, climatologists opted at one point to computational models of the atmosphere. This was of course possible only and after a minimum of computational power became available.

Computers of course understand only numbers and formulas/commands. In order to get to that, a momentous assumption was made: in an approach curiously reminiscent of the science of aeronautics, climate was taken as the response of the atmosphere to “forcings”, i.e. discernible components pushing and pulling the atmosphere in one or the other direction.

“Climate” is then the resulting overall effect of the action of each forcing, averaged over a certain lentgh of time.

In that context, “forcings” were purely operational, “digitizational” tools, providing some basis for computing the climate. By definition, in fact, forcings cannot be measured: all observations of the actual atmosphere will (obviously!) include the effect of them all. If “forcings” exist or not is therefore irrelevant. For all they were worth, forcings could have been substituted by Fourier analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, or whatever other technical tool that can transform a set of signals (and formulas) of any sort into computer-friendly figures (and procedures).

However, alongside a steady increase in available computational power, there came the a shift in focus, from real (observable) climate to forcings: in a first dichotomy with the real world, models became ways of investigating the (possible) effect of each forcing, instead of forcings being ways of investigating the (possible) evolution of the planet’s climate.

This change is less subtle than it appears. It entails throwing one’s hands up in the air about trying to understand the actual atmosphere, choosing instead to concentrate on known (pre-set) effects of known causes. Models in fact are far from independent from assumptions about forcings: they are made out of them. The effect of each forcing is already written in the code of each model, and model runs will show that effect at work. Even if results could vary for example modifying a model’s representation of geography, there is no way that model will be able to run contrary to its pre-assumed behaviour, for example in the case of increased CO2 concentration.

If I write a computer program that just adds one every time a white objects traverses a camera’s field of view, there is no way my program will ever count down, say to minus 20. And the fact that the counter always increases says nothing about how many white objects there are in the real world. It just shows how the counter works.

Nothing But Parameters
What can you do when all you have are models only useful to investigate what a particular forcing’s effect might be? You are left with playing with the parameters, modifying them to “fit” observations and “plausibility”. This is manifest for example in Hansen et al’s 2007 article, “Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE“, literally saddled with innumerable “estimations”, six of them explicitly “subjective” (little more than guesses, that is) but still able somehow to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific article.

Note that comparison to the real world is but a side issue in that paper. “Observations” (25+ years of averages) are useful to evaluate what the parameters are likely to be, i.e. the relative importance of each forcing. There is nothing important outside of them. In a second dichotomy with the real world, in such a vision of the world everything that is not included in the modelling is “noise”, in other words “irrelevant”.

There is no “going back to the lab” in contemporary mainstream forcings-based climate science, eg to learn anything new after finding unexpected observations, because those are “noise” (sometimes called, “weather”) and thus have to be ignored. And there is no meaningful effort to measure what if anything is going wrong: for example, comparisons between model results and observations are simply visual.

The good thing about this is that there are enormous avenues of research left open to future generations. The downside is that the reality of climate models is, at present, literally set in stone, whatever the real climate is out there.

Can climate models predict anything?
Skeptics and non-skeptics alike seem to agree that models cannot predict (i.e. make predictions that can be falsified, or confirmed, by observations) for timeframes shorter than around 25 years from the time of computation.

In fact, RealClimate seems to be willing to take a quarter of a century, more or less, as the minimum amount of time needed to get “averages” that can be called “climate” rather than mere “weather”. That is a second example of AGW climate scientists pigeonholing themselves: just as anything that cannot be modelled by forcings is “noise”, so anything that doesn’t cancel itself over 25 years is “noise” too.

So we started with “climate science” only to get stuck into “multi-decadal averaging to evaluate parameters to use in estimating the effect of forcings”.

Can anything ever disprove a forcings-based model?
No. Nothing at all ever will. Some AGWers are answering that with improbable claims about Popper being long dead, an eery reply one would expect only from inventors of perpetual-motion machines.

Actually, the prove/disprove question may simply be the wrong question. Models are only tools to investigate the possible effect of each forcing. Hansen et al talk about “using the model for simulations of future climate change”.

The key word there is of course “simulations”.

Models are not a weather-predicting tool (remember, they are about “climate”, not “weather”). And they are not a climate-predicting tool either, even if they are often abused as if they were. In its 2001 report the IPCC itself stated as much, in no uncertain terms: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (from the IPCC TAR-WG1, 2001).

What models can do is simulate the effect of individual forcings in isolation, something that can never be observed anyway. They also simulate the cumulative effect of forcings, with added uncertainty as interactions must be modelled too. Such a cumulative effect is not necessarily expected to be observable either.

It must be stated that as far as I can remember RC has never claimed anything more. Good for them. Perhaps they could have been clearer before more clear and more often, but things are starting to move in the right direction, of late. As already quoted in a previous blog: “[...] The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world. [...]“

And Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.”

Compounded Weaknesses
Don’t get me wrong: on its own, doing an estimation is part-and-parcel of conducting scientific research; computer modelling is a great tool for very complex situation; forcings are a good way to translate a system into a manageable model; and scenarios are the standard way to evaluate risk.

But with regards to forcings-based climate science, all of those combine together compounding their weaknesses rather than their strenghts: estimations are often subjective, computer models are used to study forcings rather than climate, forcings are taken as “real” even if they cannot be measured, and scenarios are interrogated not for current sensitivities but as forecasts.

They have become the basis for a large Intergovernmental organization, tens of international meetings, the collective action of thousands of people, one Oscar and one Nobel Peace Prize, all in the name of what every knowledgeable person knows it is impossible to predict.

What Kind of Science is Climate Science?
Restricted to “the computation of scenarios (the ‘what-ifs’ projections)”, climate modelling is a science (the “science of climate forcings”, in fact). And RealClimate is as good as it gets. The same applies to much of contemporary AGW scientific journalism and publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Nature, Science. And the BBC.

Just try, next time you read their reports, to imagine a world view (a “climate narrative“) where climatology, the most uncertain of exact sciences, is applied science, a policy-making tool where only forcings count and, among the forcings, only those of anthropogenic origin are relevant (as there is little to make policies about, for non-anthropogenic forcings).

That is too narrow a view to be useful for risk management, let alone to bring science forward. It may lead to worries wasting time worrying about possible future stronger hurricanes, rather than about certain concentrating on preventi present-day catastrophical levee failure for present-day storms.

Time to Expand the “Climate Narrative”
Models have been the cradle of climatology, Tsiolkovsky would have said, but we cannot live in the cradle forever. It is time to expand the “climate narrative”, by getting climate science of the models-forcings-scenarios hole.

Because “real” climate is much, much more than RealClimate.