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A Sea Change for Climate Science?

By David Stockwell | Quadrant Online | November 1, 2013

As CO2 climate models falter and even the IPCC backs off its estimates, it just may be that a radical shift in thinking is looming. Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the sun all along?

Remember Thomas Kuhn and his paradigm shift?  According to his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, theories change only when anomalous observations stress the ”dominant paradigm” to the point that it becomes untenable. Until then, failure of a result to conform to the prevailing paradigm is not seen as refuting the dominant theory, but explained away as a mistake of the researchers, errors in the data, within the range of uncertainty, and so on. Only at the point of crisis does science become open to a new paradigm.  So, does Kuhn inform the current climate debate, help identify important information or an alternative paradigm?

Climate models can be seen as encapsulating the dominant theory, even though they are composed of many different theories regarding land, the ocean and atmosphere.  Despite their differences they are also similar in many ways, sharing terminology such as the ‘radiative kernel’. Lets agree, for the purpose of argument, that the dominant AGW paradigm is of global temperature’s high sensitivity to CO2 doubling, resulting in an increase of around 3°C, which appears to be about the central estimate of the climate models. 

Does the 15-year ‘pause’ in global temperatures stress this theory? Certainly to some, the stress has already reached a ‘crisis’; while to others the divergence can be explained away by natural variation, uncertainty, and errors in the data.

Do failed models and their predictions of increasing extreme events, like hurricanes, droughts and floods, stress the climate models?  Possibly not.  From a physical perspective, these phenomena lie at the boundaries of the theory. Hurricanes, droughts and floods are ‘higher order’ statistics — extremes not climate averages. Surface temperature is only a part of the greater global climate system. Because anomalous behavior at the margins can be discarded without sacrificing the main theory, their power to confirm or reject the dominant paradigm is somewhat limited.

Ocean heat content, however, is in a unique position.  The world’s oceans store over 90% of the heat in the climate system. Arguably, therefore, increases in ocean heat determine overall global warming. Ocean heat represents the physical bulk of the global heat store, and so should carry the most weight in our assessment of the status of AGW. Observations of ocean heat uptake represent the crucial experiment  — observations capable of decisively dismantling a theory despite its widespread acceptance in the scientific community. The ARGO project to monitor ocean heat with thousands of drifting buoys is the crucial experiment of the AGW stable.

A number of climate bloggers have remarked on the very low rate of ocean heat uptake (here, and here, and here), much lower than predicted by the models (here, here, and here).  The last link is about Nic Lewis, a coauthor on Otto et al. 2013, who feels that recent findings of low climate sensitivity, many based on ocean heat content, have led a number of prominent IPCC authors to abandon the higher estimates of climate sensitivity. That may not be a ‘catastrophe’ for the dominant AGW paradigm, but it is certainly a lurch by insiders towards the lower ends of risk and urgency. … continue reading at Quadrant Online

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November 1, 2013 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?

Climatologists now require 20 to 30 years to even consider any climatic trend: Is that really honest, or is it just very convenient?

By Stephane Rogeau | Watts Up With That | October 1, 2013

So that’s it: the 15+ years period of no temperature increase is, according to the IPCC, a non-event, barely worth mentioning in the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). The explanation is simple: we are just witnessing short usual natural variations of the climate that are consistent with climate models. The question about whether those models had foreseen this so-called “hiatus” is just irrelevant: move along!

But let’s just imagine for a while that since around 2000, the world had seen a warming bigger than everything the IPCC had ever predicted. I mean a situation just opposite to what we have been experiencing until now with regard to model forecasts. What would have been the analysis proposed by the IPCC in its SPM report?

First possible analysis:

“The long-term climate model simulations show a trend in global-mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2012 that agrees with the observed trend (very high confidence). There are, however, differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 2000 to 2012). Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 12 years (2000–2012; 0.23 [+0.13 to +0.33] °C per decade), which begins after the effect of a strong El Niño disappeared, is bigger than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).

The observed extra increase in surface warming trend over the period 2000–2012, as compared to the period 1951–2012, is due in roughly equal measure to an increased trend in radiative forcing and a warming contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean.”

Second possible analysis:

“The rapid increase in surface warming during the last period of more than 12 years is a clear sign that, although climate models have gained in precision in their description of climate behavior, several factors had been under-estimated by the scientific community in the AR4. There is strong evidence that both lower and upper limits of the former estimation of transient climate response should be risen by as much as 1°C (very high confidence).

Projections for annual mean surface temperatures for the period 2081-2100 have therefore been reviewed to take into consideration the change in observed trend over the last period of 12 years. All different scenarios now show a very likely increase of global mean surface temperatures of more than 1.5°C by the end of the century, relative to 1985-2005, and up to 6°C in the RCP8.5 scenario.”

Let’s be honest: does anybody believe the IPCC would have chosen to write anything close to the first analysis?

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October 2, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment