Why the UN’s Climate Models Are Inherently Unreliable, and Should Be Abandoned

Those who have examined the Wallace, Christy, and d’Aleo (WCD) 2016 and 2017 reports discussed in recent months on this blog may be understandably confused as to how they relate to the numerous climate models used by the UN IPCC and the USEPA over many years in support of their climate alarmism.

Source: Why the UN’s Climate Models Are Inherently Unreliable, and Should Be Abandoned in Favor of More Top-Down Approaches

Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Fred Singer on the ‘failure of UN IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming’

By S. Fred Singer

Exploring some of the intricacies of GW [Global Warming] science can lead to surprising results that have major consequences.  In a recent invited talk at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC-12 [Twelfth International Conference on Climate Change], I investigated three important topics:

1. Inconsistencies in the surface temperature record.

2. Their explanation as artifacts arising from the misuse of data.

3.  Thereby explaining the failure of IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

A misleading graph

In the iconic picture of the global surface temperature of the 20th century [fig 1, top]  one can discern two warming intervals — in the initial decades (1910-42) and in the final decades, 1977 to 2000.

Fig 1  20th century temps;  top—global; bottom– US

 

Although these two trends look similar, they are really  quite different:  the initial warming is genuine, but the later warming is not.   What a surprise!  I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘fake,’ but it just does not exist; I try to demonstrate this difference as an artifact of the data-gathering process, by comparing with several independent data sets covering similar time intervals.

The later warming is contradicted by every available dataset, as follows:

**the surface record for the ‘lower 48’ [US] shows a much lower trend; [see fig 1, bottom]; presumably there is better control over the placement of weather-stations and their thermometers;

**the trend of global sea surface temp [SST] is much less; with 1995 temp values nearly equal to those of 1942 [according to Gouretski and Kennedy, as published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2012];

** likewise, the trend of night-time marine air-temperatures [NMAT], measured with thermometers on ship decks, according to data from J Kennedy, Hadley Centre, UK

** atmospheric temperature trends are uniformly much lower and close to zero (during 1979-1997), whether measured with balloon-borne radiosondes or with microwave sounding units [MSU] aboard weather satellites [see fig 8 in ref 2]

** compatible data on solar activity that show nothing unusual happening.  Interestingly, the solar data had been assembled for a quite different purpose – namely, to disprove the connection between cosmic rays and climate change [see here fig 14 of ref 2], assuming that the late-century warming was real.  In the absence of such warming, as I argue here, this attempted critique of the cosmic-ray–climate connection collapses.

** proxy data also show near-zero trends, whether from tree rings or …

Former Obama Energy official slams ‘consensus’ – Says ‘intense debates within climate science’ concealed

Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He served as undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term.

The Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2017

Steven Koonin, The Wall Street Journal
Put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.
Image result for red teaming

Tomorrow’s March for Science will draw many thousands in support of evidence-based policy making and against the politicization of science. A concrete step toward those worthy goals would be to convene a “Red Team/Blue Team” process for climate science, one of the most important and contentious issues of our age.

The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations. It is very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.

The public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science. At a recent national laboratory meeting, I observed more than 100 active government and university researchers challenge one another as they strove to separate human impacts from the climate’s natural variability. At issue were not nuances but fundamental aspects of our understanding, such as the apparent—and unexpected—slowing of global sea-level rise over the past two decades.

Summaries of scientific assessments meant to inform decision makers, such as the United Nations’ Summary for Policymakers, largely fail to capture this vibrant and developing science. Consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the “settled,” “hoax” and “don’t know” memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change. We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society’s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values. Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates.

Given the importance of climate projections to policy, it is remarkable that they have not been subject to a Red Team exercise. Here’s how it might work: The focus would be a published scientific report meant to inform policy such as …

New Paper: N. Hemisphere Temps Rose 4–5°C Within ‘A Few Decades’ 14,700 Years Ago – 40 Times Faster Than Today’s Rates

 Temperatures, Sea Levels ‘Naturally’ Rise

 30 – 40 Times Faster Than Today’s Rates


Modern Temperatures Only Rising 0.05°C/Decade


Since 1850, CO2 concentrations have risen from 285 ppm to 400 ppm.  During these ~165 years, the IPCC has concluded that surface temperatures have warmed by 0.78°C.  This is a warming rate of only 0.05°C per decade for 1850-2012 — which happens to be the same rate of warming over the 1998-2012 period.


IPCC AR5 (2013):     “The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85°C over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist. The total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78 °C, based on the single longest dataset available 4 (see Figure SPM.1). … [T]he rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 °C per decade).”

Modern Sea Levels Only Rising 0.17 Of A Meter/Century


IPCC AR5 (2013):     “[T]he rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 mm yr between 1901 and 2010

Historical Hemispheric Temperatures Rose 2.0°C/Decade


According to a new paper, the Bølling Warming event 14,700 years ago raised the surface temperature for the entire Northern Hemisphere by 4 to 5°C within a few decades.  This is a hemispheric warming rate of approximately 2.0°C per decade, which is 40 times faster than the 0.05 °C per decade global warming rate since 1850 (and 1998).


Historical Sea Levels Rose 5.3 Meters/Century


Central Greenland’s surface temperatures rose by as much as 12°C during this time frame (14,700 years ago to 14,500 years ago).  Consequently, glaciers and ice sheets disintegrated rapidly and sea levels rose by about 18 meters (“12-22 m”) in 340 years.  An 18 m rise in 340 years is the equivalent of 5.3 meters per century, which is more than 30 times faster than the rate of sea level change (0.17 m per century) between 1901 and 2010.


Ivanovic et al., 2017     “During the Last Glacial Maximum 26–19 thousand years ago (ka), a vast ice sheet stretched over North America [Clark et al., 2009]. In subsequent millennia, as climate warmed and this ice sheet decayed,

Chris Wallace goes full warmist: Touts UN ‘guesswork’ as hard science & ‘carbon pollution’ in interview with EPA chief

Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace uncritically cited “guesswork” by UN scientists as some sort of hard science during an interview with EPA chief Scott Pruitt on April 2. Wallace also hyped discredited “hottest year” claims and referred to carbon dioxide, a trace essential gas humans exhale as “carbon pollution.” Wallace also praised China’s emission efforts and implied that EPA regulations and UN agreements would impact climate change. (Full transcript & video here)

Wallace asked Pruitt about his recent statement noting that carbon dioxide was not the control knob of the climate. See: EPA chief says CO2 not primary contributor to ‘global warming’ – Calls UN Climate Treaty ‘a bad deal’ (Note: Pruitt’s statement was scientifically sound and climatologists defended his comments. See:  Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on EPA chief Pruitt’s CO2 comments: ‘I think these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct’ – Curry: ‘I do not find anything to disagree with in what Pruitt said’)

Wallace claimed: “Mr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you.” He then cited the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 claim that there it a “95% likely” that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

Wallace even featured this onscreen graphic to make his question look official:

Apparently absent in Wallace’s show preparation was the fact that the UN IPCC’s “95%” claim is nothing more than guesswork and has no statistical basis whatsoever.

Even Reuters news service recognized this in a 2013 article.  Reuters explained that the UN IPCC’s 95% confidence of human causation of global warming was “based on a discussion among the authors,” not a scientifically sound statistic. 

Reuters essentially exposed that the fact that UN scientists (who are hand-picked by governments to support the IPCC’s political mandate that it seeks to further the human climate change narrative) talked their way to the 95% claim!

“Scientists use a mixture of data and ‘expert judgment’ to decide how likely it is that climate change is man-made and rule out other factors, such as changes in the sun’s output,” Reuters wrote. [Note: Many UN scientists have turned against the organization. See UN Scientists Who Have Turned on the UN IPCC & Man-Made Climate Fears — A Climate Depot Flashback Report]

‘No more scientific a process than a show of hands’

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former …

Climatologist Dr. John Christy tells Congress: ‘Consensus Science is not Science’

Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017

Full Congressional Statement here:

 

Red Teams needed because Consensus Science is not Science
One way for congress to receive better (less biased) information about claims of climate science is to organize “Red Teams” as is done in other parts of government and industry when critical systems, programs or infrastructure are under consideration. I have discussed this idea is several previous congressional hearings. I will include here the section describing Red Teams from my testimony on 20 Sep 2012 before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The term “consensus science” will often be appealed to regarding arguments about climate change to bolster an assertion. This is a form of “argument from authority.” Consensus, however, is a political notion, not a scientific notion. As I testified to the
Inter-Academy Council in June 2010, wrote in Nature that same year (Christy 2010), and documented in my written House Testimony last year (House Space, Science and Technology, 31 Mar 2011) the IPCC and other similar Assessments do not represent for
me a consensus of much more than the consensus of those selected to agree with a particular consensus. The content of these climate reports is actually under the control of a relatively small number of individuals – I often refer to them as the “climate
establishment” – who through the years, in my opinion, came to act as gatekeepers of scientific opinion and information, rather than brokers. The voices of those of us who object to various statements and emphases in these assessments are by-in-large dismissed
rather than accommodated. This establishment includes the same individuals who become the “experts” called on to promote IPCC claims in government reports such as the Endangerment Finding by the Environmental Protection Agency. As outlined in my [31 Mar 2011] House Testimony, these “experts” become the authors and evaluators of their own research relative to research which challenges their work. But with the luxury of having the “last word” as “expert” authors of the reports, alternative views vanish.
I’ve often stated that climate science is a “murky” science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do. As a result what passes for science includes, opinion, arguments-from-authority, dramatic press releases, and …

Skeptical Scientist Dr. Willie Soon: Create a ‘place in hell’ for UN climate science – ‘Seriously, just close UN IPCC’

Willie Soon, a rock star among climate change skeptics, pitched the idea of shutting down the United Nations’ panel of climate change researchers on Thursday, calling it an “anti-science movement.”

Soon said he would create a “place in hell” to put the U.N.’s climate science and predictions. “There will be a very special place I will create for them. Please go there. It’s nonsense. Even a little kid will know this is wrong.”

Soon was in Washington to discuss new findings that refute the U.N.’s predictions on the disappearance of Arctic sea ice as a result of increasing global temperatures due to manmade carbon pollution. He discussed the research and took questions from the audience as part of the Heartland Institute’s annual two-day conference of climate skeptics being held this year in the nation’s capital.

The conference comes as President Trump is drafting a new executive order to repeal much of the work of the Obama administration to combat manmade climate change, much of which is based on climate assessments and research from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

“Just close IPCC,” Soon said. “Seriously, just close it,” he said, in responding to a federal worker’s question, asking why Soon has not met with the IPCC.

“I think you didn’t see my white hair,” Soon added. “I have a lot of white hair. I have tried a lot.”

• Things have gotten too bad to fix: “Oh yes, we tried for years and years and years, but the strategy has become so bad that I say we just have to close IPCC. Seriously, just close it. Because they are really [an] anti-science movement,” he said.

“There are too many of these people now, growing too large year-by-year,” Soon said. “Every year there is just conferences … [but] nothing has been done.”

Once a friend of the IPCC: “Second and third [climate assessment], IPCC cited my work very prominently,” Soon said. “And then, all of a sudden” they stopped reaching out “because we are running out of favor, in a sense.”

Also from the Washington Examiner

Trump Budget: US To Stop Funding UN Climate Process

In a budget blueprint released on Thursday morning, US president Donald Trump proposed sweeping cuts to US financial support for the global fight against climate change. The title page called it the “America First” budget. “Our aim is to meet the simple, but crucial demand of our citizens – a Government that puts the needs of its own people first,” said Trump in a foreword addressed to the US Congress.

Source: Trump Budget: US To Stop Funding UN Climate Process

Report: Trump Commands State Department to Slash $10 Billion UN Funding in Half

President Donald Trump has instructed the State Department to slash its $10 billion budget for funding United Nations programs by as much as 50 percent, Foreign Policy is reporting.

The article said the move is “signaling an unprecedented retreat by [the] administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen.”

FP used three unnamed sources for its report, which also called Trump’s directive “draconian measures” taken ahead of the planned release on Thursday of his 2018 federal budget proposal.

The budget “is expected to include cuts of up to 37 percent for spending on the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign assistance programs, including the U.N., in next year’s budget,” according to the report, which went on:

It remains unclear whether the full extent of the steeper U.N. cuts will be reflected in the 2018 budget, which will be prepared by the White House Office of Management and Budget, or whether, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has proposed, the cuts would be phased in over the coming three years. One official close to the Trump administration said Tillerson has been given flexibility to decide how the cuts would be distributed.

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told FP these budget cuts would create “chaos.”

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR), for example, received nearly 40 percent of its budget from the United States in 2016. Cutting the U.S. contribution would “leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” according to Gowan.

The left-leaning FP cites Trump’s intention to cut diplomacy and foreign assistance programs will help him increase the funding for the U.S. military by $54 billion, a “shift” from the Obama administration’s approach to the federal budget.

“State Department officials, for instance, were told that they should try to identify up to $1 billion in cuts in the U.N. peacekeeping budget, according to one source,” FP reported. “The United States provides about $2.5 billion per year to fund peacekeepers.”

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, cautioned against “slash-and-burn cuts” during her Senate confirmation hearing but is said to be reviewing the U.N.’s 16 peacekeeping missions for possible cuts.

The United States