The Science of Doom

When I started this blog I said:

Opinions are often interesting and sometimes entertaining. But what do we learn from opinions? It’s more useful to understand the science behind the subject.

Of late I’ve been caught up with work, other intellectual interests and (luckily) some fun stuff and haven’t spent any time on climate. So I feel it’s time to put forward a few opinions on climate.

The often-cited consensus on climate is:

a) we add CO2 and other GHGs to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (and other human activity)

b) these increase the inappropriately-named “greenhouse effect”

c) this increases the surface temperature over some time period

This scientific consensus is rock solid, like gravity or momentum. It’s not particularly intuitive, but tough luck, physics is often like that. By itself, the consensus doesn’t tell you a lot. It just says that if we keep burning fossil fuels then the earth’s surface temperature will increase.

This scientific consensus doesn’t say that urgent action is needed on climate, or that without urgent action society is doomed, or that rapid adoption of renewable energy towards 100% of current energy consumption is a net cost benefit.

These are different propositions.

Note to commenters – if you want to question the “greenhouse” effect post your comment in one of the many articles about that, e.g. The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms. Comments placed here on the science basics will just be deleted.

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At least 99.9% of physicists believe the theory of gravity, and the heliocentric model of the solar system. The debate is over. There is no doubt that we can send a manned (and woman-ed) mission to Mars.

Some “skeptics” say it can’t be done. They are denying basic science! Gravity is plainly true. So is the heliocentric model. Everyone agrees. There is an overwhelming consensus. So the time for discussion is over. There is no doubt about the Mars mission.

I create this analogy (note 1) for people who don’t understand the relationship between five completely different ideas:

• the “greenhouse” effect
• burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere, increasing the “greehouse” effect
• climate models
• crop models
• economic models

The first two items on the list are fundamental physics and chemistry, and while advanced to prove (see The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms for the first one) to people who want to work through a proof, they are indisputable. Together they create the theory of AGW (anthropogenic global warming). This says that humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels.

99.9% of people who understand atmospheric physics believe this unassailable idea (note 2).

This means that if we continue with “business as usual” (note 3) and keep using fossil fuels to generate energy, then by 2100 the world will be warmer than today.

How much warmer?

For that we need climate models.

Climate Models

These are models which break the earth’s surface, ocean and atmosphere into a big grid so that we can use physics equations (momentum, heat transfer and others) to calculate future climate (this class of model is called finite element analysis). These models include giant fudge-factors that can’t be validated (by giant fudge factors I mean “sub-grid parameterizations” and unknown parameters, but I’m writing this article for a non-technical audience).

One way to validate models is to model the temperature over the last 100 years. Another way is to produce a current climatology that matches observations. Generally temperature is the parameter with most attention (note 4).

Some climate models predict that if we double CO2 in the atmosphere (from pre-industrial periods) then surface temperature will be around 4.5ºC warmer. Others that the temperature will be 1.5ºC warmer. And everything in between.

Surely we can just look at which models reproduced the last 100 years temperature anomaly the best and work with those?

From Mauritsen et al 2012

If the model that predicts 1.5ºC in 2100 is close to the past, while the one that predicts 4.5ºC has a big overshoot, we will know that 1.5ºC is a more likely future. Conversely, if the model that predicts 4.5ºC in 2100 is close to the past but the 1.5ºC model woefully under-predicts the last 100 years of warming then we can expect more like 4.5ºC in 2100.

You would think so, but you would be wrong.

All the models get the last 100 years of temperature changes approximately correct. Jeffrey Kiehl produced a paper 10 years ago which analyzed the then current class of models and gently pointed out the reason. Models with large future warming included a high negative effect from aerosols over the last 100 years. Models with small future warming included a small negative effect from aerosols over the last 100 years. So both reproduced the past but with a completely different value of aerosol cooling. You might think we can just find out the actual cooling effect of aerosols around 1950 and then we will know which climate model to believe – but we can’t. We didn’t have satellites to measure the cooling effect of aerosols back then.

This is the challenge of models with many parameters that we don’t know. When a modeler is trying to reproduce the past, or the present, they pick the values of parameters which make the model match reality as best as they can. This is a necessary first step (note 5).

So how warm will it be in 2100 if we double CO2 in the atmosphere?

Somewhat warmer

Models also predict rainfall, drought and storms. But they aren’t as good as they are at temperature. Bray and von Storch survey climate scientists periodically on a number of topics. Here is their response to:

How would you rate the ability of regional climate models to make 50 year projections of convective rain storms/thunder storms? (1 = very poor to 7 = very good)

Similar ratings are obtained for rainfall predictions. The last 50 years has seen no apparent global worsening of storms, droughts and floods, at least according to the IPCC consensus (see Impacts – V – Climate change is already causing worsening storms, floods and droughts).

Sea level is expected to rise between around 0.3m to 0.6m (see Impacts – VI – Sea Level Rise 1 and IX – Sea Level 4 – Sinking Megacities) – this is from AR5 of the IPCC (under scenario RCP6). I mention this because the few people I’ve polled thought that sea level was expected to be 5-10m higher in 2100.

Actual reports with uneventful projections don’t generate headlines.

Crop Models

Crop models build on climate models. Once we know rainfall, drought and temperature we can work out how this impacts crops.

Will we starve to death? Or will there be plentiful food?

Past predictions of disaster haven’t been very accurate, although they are wildly popular with generating media headlines and book sales, as Paul Ehrlich found to his benefit. But that doesn’t mean future predictions of disaster are necessarily wrong.

There are a number of problems with trying to answer the question.

Even if climate models could predict the global temperature, when it comes to a region the size of, say, northern California their accuracy is much lower. Likewise for rainfall. Models which produce similar global temperature changes often have completely different regional precipitation changes. For example, from the IPCC Special Report on Extremes (SREX), p. 154:

At regional scales, there is little consensus in GCM projections regarding the sign of future change in monsoon characteristics, such as circulation and rainfall. For instance, while some models project an intense drying of the Sahel under a global warming scenario, others project an intensification of the rains, and some project more frequent extreme events..

In a warmer world with more CO2 (helps some plants) and maybe more rainfall, or maybe less what can we expect out of crop yields? It’s not clear. The IPCC AR5 wg II, ch 7, p 496:

For example, interactions among CO2 fertilization, temperature, soil nutrients, O3, pests, and weeds are not well understood (Soussana et al., 2010) and therefore most crop models do not include all of these effects.

Of course, as climate changes over the next 80 years agricultural scientists will grow different crops, and develop new ones. In 1900, almost half the US population worked in farming. Today the figure is 2-3%. Agriculture has changed unimaginably.

In the left half of this graph we can see global crop yield improvements over 50 years (the right side is projections to 2050):

From Ray et al 2013

Economic Models

What will the oil price be in 2020? Economic models give you the answer. Well, they give you an answer. And if you consult lots of models they give you lots of different answers. When the oil price changes a lot, which it does from time to time, all of the models turn out to be wrong. Predicting future prices of commodities is very hard, even when it is of paramount concern for major economies, and even when a company could make vast profits from accurate prediction.

AR5 of the IPCC report, wg 2, ch 7, p.512, had this to say about crop prices in 2050:

Changes in temperature and precipitation, without considering effects of CO2, will contribute to increased global food prices by 2050, with estimated increases ranging from 3 to 84% (medium confidence). Projections that include the effects of CO2 changes, but ignore O3 and pest and disease impacts, indicate that global price increases are about as likely as not, with a range of projected impacts from –30% to +45% by 2050..

..One lesson from recent model intercomparison experiments (Nelson et al., 2014) is that the choice of economic model matters at least as much as the climate or crop model for determining  price response to climate change, indicating the critical role of economic uncertainties for projecting the magnitude of price impacts.

In 2001, the 3rd report (often called TAR) said, ch 5, p.238, perhaps a little more clearly:

..it should be noted however that hunger estimates are based on the assumptions that food prices will rise with climate change, which is highly uncertain

Economic models are not very good at predicting anything. As Herbert Stein said, summarizing a lifetime in economics:

• Economists do not know very much
• Other people, including the politicians who make economic policy, know even less about economics than economists do

Conclusion

Recently a group, Cook et al 2013, reviewed over 10,000 abstracts of climate papers and concluded that 97% believed in the proposition of AGW – the proposition that humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels. I’m sure if the question were posed the right way directly to thousands of climate scientists, the number would be over 99%.

It’s not in dispute.

AGW is a necessary theory for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). But not sufficient by itself.

Likewise we know for sure that gravity is real and the planets orbit the sun. But it doesn’t follow that we can get humans safely to Mars and back. Maybe we can. Understanding gravity and the heliocentric theory is a necessary condition for the mission, but a lot more needs to be demonstrated.

The uncertainties in CAGW are huge.

Economic models that have no predictive skill are built on limited crop models which are built on climate models which have a wide range of possible global temperatures and no consensus on regional rainfall.

Human ingenuity somehow solved the problem of going from 2.5bn people in the middle of the 20th century to more than 7bn people today, and yet the proportion of the global population in abject poverty (note 6) has dropped from over 40% to maybe 15%. This was probably unimaginable 70 years ago.

Perhaps reasonable people can question if climate change is definitely the greatest threat facing humanity?

Perhaps questioning the predictive power of economic models is not denying science?

Perhaps it is ok to be unsure about the predictive power of climate models that contain sub-grid parameterizations (giant fudge factors) and that collectively provide a wide range of forecasts?

Perhaps people who question the predictions aren’t denying basic (or advanced) science, and haven’t lost their reason or their moral compass?

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[Note to commenters, added minutes after this post was written – this article is not intended to restart debate over the “greenhouse” effect, please post your comments in one of the 10s (100s?) of articles that have covered that subject, for example – The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms – Comments on the reality of the “greenhouse” effect posted here will be deleted. Thanks for understanding.]

References

Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity, Jeffrey Kiehl (2007)

Tuning the climate of a global model, Mauritsen et al (2012)

Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050, Deepak K. Ray et al (2013)

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, Cook et al, Environmental Research Letters (2013)

The Great Escape, Angus Deaton, Princeton University Press (2013)

The various IPCC reports cited are all available at their website

Notes

1. An analogy doesn’t prove anything. It is for illumination.

2. How much we have contributed to the last century’s warming is not clear. The 5th IPCC report (AR5) said it was 95% certain that more than 50% of recent warming was caused by human activity. Well, another chapter in the same report suggested that this was a bogus statistic and I agree, but that doesn’t mean I think that the percentage of warming caused by human activity is lower than 50%. I have no idea. It is difficult to assess, likely impossible. See Natural Variability and Chaos – Three – Attribution & Fingerprints for more.

3. Reports on future climate often come with the statement “under a conservative business as usual scenario” but refer to a speculative and hard to believe scenario called RCP8.5 – see Impacts – II – GHG Emissions Projections: SRES and RCP. I think RCP 6 is much closer to the world of 2100 if we do little about carbon emissions and the world continues on the kind of development pathways that we have seen over the last 60 years. RCP8.5 was a scenario created to match a possible amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and how we might get there. Calling it “a conservative business as usual case” is a value-judgement with no evidence.

4. More specifically the change in temperature gets the most attention. This is called the “temperature anomaly”. Many models that do “well” on temperature anomaly actually do quite badly on the actual surface temperature. See Models, On – and Off – the Catwalk – Part Four – Tuning & the Magic Behind the Scenes – you can see that many “fit for purpose” models have current climate halfway to the last ice age even though they reproduce the last 100 years of temperature changes pretty well. That is, they model temperature changes quite well, but not temperature itself.

5. This is a reasonable approach used in modeling (not just climate modeling) – the necessary next step is to try to constrain the unknown parameters and giant fudge factors (sub-grid parameterizations). Climate scientists work very hard on this problem. Many confused people writing blogs think that climate modelers just pick the values they like, produce the model results and go have coffee. This is not the case, and can easily be seen by just reviewing lots of papers. The problem is well-understood among climate modelers. But the world is a massive place, detailed past measurements with sufficient accuracy are mostly lacking, and sub-grid parameterizations of non-linear processes are a very difficult challenge (this is one of the reasons why turbulent flow is a mostly unsolved problem).

6. This is a very imprecise term. I refer readers to the 2015 Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton and his excellent book, The Great Escape (2013) for more.

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A long time ago I wrote The Confirmation Bias – Or Why None of Us are Really Skeptics, with a small insight from Nassim Taleb. Right now I’m rereading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

This is truly a great book if you want to understand more about how we think and how we delude ourselves. Through experiments cognitive psychologists demonstrate that once our “moral machinery” has clicked in, which happens very easily, our reasoning is just an after-the-fact rationalization of what we already believe.

Haidt gives the analogy of a rider on an elephant. The elephant starts going one way rather than another, and the rider, unaware of why, starts coming up with invented reasons for the new direction. It’s like the rider is the PR guy for the elephant. In Haidt’s analogy, the rider is our reasoning, and the elephant is our moral machinery. The elephant is in charge. The rider thinks he is.

An an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion..

..The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

As they put it, “skilled arguers ..are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.” This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it. It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind)..

..In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons..

..I have tried to make a reasoned case that our moral capacities are best described from an intuitionist perspective. I do not claim to have examined the question from all sides, nor to have offered irrefutable proof.

Because of the insurmountable power of the confirmation bias, counterarguments will have to be produced by those who disagree with me.

Haidt also highlights some research showing that more intelligence and education makes you better at generating more arguments for your side of the argument, but not for finding reasons on the other side. “Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries.. people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”

The whole book is very readable and full of studies and explanations.

If you fancy a bucket of ice cold water thrown over the rationalist delusion then this is a good way to get it.

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I’ve been a student of history for a long time and have read quite a bit about Nazi Germany and WWII. In fact right now, having found audible.com I’m listening to an audio book The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard Evans, while I walk, drive and exercise.

It’s heartbreaking to read about the war and to read about the Holocaust. Words fail me to describe the awfulness of that regime and what they did.

But it’s pretty easy for someone who is curious about evidence, or who has had someone question whether or not the Holocaust actually took place, to find and understand the proof.

The photos. The bodies. The survivors’ accounts. The thousands of eyewitness accounts. The army reports. The stated aims of Hitler and many of the leading Nazis in their own words.

We can all understand how to weigh up witness accounts and photos. It’s intrinsic to our nature.

People who don’t believe the Nazis murdered millions of Jews are denying simple and overwhelming evidence.

Let’s compare that with the evidence behind the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the inevitability of a 2-6ºC rise in temperature if we continue to add CO2 and other GHGs to the atmosphere.

Step 1 – The ‘greenhouse’ effect

To accept AGW of course you need to accept the ‘greenhouse’ effect. It’s fundamental science and not in question but what if you don’t take my word for it? What if you want to check for yourself?

And by the way, the complexity of the subject for many people becomes clear even at this stage, with countless hordes not even clear that the ‘greenhouse’ effect is a just a building block for AGW. It is not itself AGW.

AGW relies on the ‘greenhouse’ effect but also on other considerations.

I wrote The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms to make it simple, yet not too simple. But that article relies on (and references) many basics – radiation, absorption and emission of radiation through gases, heat transfer and convection. All of those are necessary to understand the greenhouse effect.

Many people have conceptual misunderstandings of “basic” physics. In reading comments on this blog and on other blogs I often see fundamental misunderstanding of how heat transfer works. No space here for that.

But the difficulty of communicating a physics idea is very real. Once someone has a conceptual block because they think some process works a subtly different way, the only way to resolve the question is with equations. It is further complicated because these misunderstandings are often unstated by the commenter – they don’t realize they see the world differently from physics basics.

So when we need to demonstrate that the greenhouse effect is real, and that it increases with more GHGs we need some equations. And by ‘increases’ I mean more GHGs mean a higher surface temperature, all other things being equal. (Which, of course, they never are).

The equations are crystal clear and no one over the age of 10 could possibly be confused. I show the equations for radiative transfer (and their derivation) in Understanding Atmospheric Radiation and the “Greenhouse” Effect – Part Six – The Equations:

I_λ(0) = I_λ(τ_m)e^-τ_m + ∫ B_λ(T)e^-τ dτ [16]

The terms are explained in that article. In brief, the equation shows how the intensity of radiation at the top of the atmosphere at one wavelength is affected by the number of absorbing molecules in the atmosphere. And, obviously, you have to integrate it over all wavelengths. Why do I even bring that up, it’s so simple?

Voila.

And equally obviously, anyone questioning the validity of the equation, or the results from the equation, is doing so from evil motives.

I do need to add that we have to prescribe the temperature profile in the atmosphere (and the GHG concentration) to be able to solve this equation. The temperature profile is known as the lapse rate – temperature reduces as you go up in altitude. In the tropical regions where convection is stronger we can come up with a decent equation for the lapse rate.

All you have to know is the first law of thermodynamics, the ideal gas law and the equation for the change in pressure vs height due to the mass of the atmosphere. Everyone can do this in their heads of course. But here it is:

So with these two elementary principles we can prove that more GHGs means a higher surface temperature before any feedbacks. That’s the ‘greenhouse’ effect.

Step 2 – AGW = ‘Greenhouse effect’ plus feedbacks

This is so simple. Feedbacks are things like – a hotter world probably has more water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor is the most important GHG, so this amplifies the ‘greenhouse’ effect of increasing CO2. Calculating the changes is only a little more difficult than the super simple equations I showed earlier.

You just need a GCM – a climate model run on a supercomputer. That’s all.

There are many misconceptions about climate models but only people who are determined to believe a lie can possibly believe them.

As an example, many people think that the amplifying effect, or positive feedback, of water vapor is programmed into the GCMs. All they have to do is have a quick read through the 200-page technical summary of a model like say CAM (community atmosphere model).

Here is an extract from Description of the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 3.0), W.D. Collins (2004):

As soon as anyone reads this – and if they can’t be bothered to find the reference via Google Scholar and read it, well, what can you say about such people – as soon as they read it, of course, it’s crystal clear that positive feedback isn’t “programmed in” to climate models.

So GCMs all come to the conclusion that more GHGs results in a hotter world (2-6ºC). They solve basic physics equations in a “grid” fashion, stepping forward in time, and so the result is clear and indisputable.

Step 3 – Attribution Studies

I recently spent some time reading AR4 and AR5 (the IPCC reports) on Attribution (Natural Variability and Chaos – Seven – Attribution & Fingerprints Or Shadows? and Natural Variability and Chaos – Three – Attribution & Fingerprints).

This is the work of attributing the last century’s rise in temperature to the increases in anthropogenic GHGs. I followed the trail of papers back and found one of the source papers by Hasselmann from 1993. In it we can clearly see the basis for attribution studies:

Now it’s very difficult to believe that anyone questioning attribution studies isn’t of evil intent. After all, there is the basic principle in black and white. Who could be confused?

As a side note, to excuse my own irredeemable article on the topic, the actual basis of attribution isn’t just in these equations, it is also in the assumption that climate models accurately calculate the statistics of natural variability. The IPCC chapter on attribution doesn’t really make this clear, yet in another chapter (11) different authors suggest completely restating the statistical certainty claimed in the attribution chapter because “..it is explicitly recognized that there are sources of uncertainty not simulated by the models”. Their ad hoc restatement, while more accurate than the executive summary, still needs to be justified.

However, none of this can offer me redemption.

Step 4 – Unprecedented Temperature Rises

(This could probably be switched around with step 3. The order here is not important).

Once people have seen the unprecedented rise in temperature this century, how could they not align themselves with the forces of good?

Anthropogenic warming ‘writ large’ (AR5, chapter 2):

There’s the problem. The last 400,000 years were quite static by comparison:

From ‘800,000 Years of Abrupt Climate Variability’, Barker et al (2011)

The red is a Greenland ice core proxy for temperature, the green is a mid-latitude SST estimate – and it’s important to understand that calculating global annual temperatures is quite difficult and not done here.

So no one who looks at climate history can possibly be excused for not agreeing with consensus climate science, whatever that is when we come to “consensus paleoclimate”.. It was helpful to read Chapter 5 of AR5:

There is high confidence that orbital forcing is the primary external driver of glacial cycles (Kawamura et al,. 2007; Cheng et al., 2009; Lisiecki, 2010; Huybers, 2011).

I’ve only read about 350 papers on paleoclimate and I’m confused about the origin of the high confidence as I explained in Ghosts of Climate Past -Eighteen – “Probably Nonlinearity” of Unknown Origin.

Anyway, the key takeaway message is that the recent temperature history is another demonstration that anyone not in line with consensus climate science is clearly acting from evil motives.

Conclusion

I thought about putting a photo of the Holocaust from a concentration camp next to a few pages of mathematical equations – to make a point. But that would be truly awful.

That would trivialize the memory of the terrible suffering of millions of people under one of the most evil regimes the world has seen.

And that, in fact, is my point.

I can’t find words to describe how I feel about the apologists for the Nazi regime, and those who deny that the holocaust took place. The evidence for the genocide is overwhelming and everyone can understand it.

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

By comparison, understanding climate means understanding maths, physics and statistics. This is hard, very hard. It’s time consuming, requires some training (although people can be self-taught), actually requires academic access to be able to follow the thread of an argument through papers over a few decades – and lots and lots of dedication.

The worst you could say is people who don’t accept ‘consensus climate science’ are likely finding basic – or advanced – thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and statistics a little difficult and might have misunderstood, or missed, a step somewhere.

The best you could say is with such a complex subject straddling so many different disciplines, they might be entitled to have a point.

If you have no soul and no empathy for the suffering of millions under the Third Reich, keep calling people who don’t accept consensus climate science ‘deniers’.

Otherwise, just stop.

Important Note: The moderation filter on comments is setup to catch the ‘D..r’ word specifically because such name calling is not accepted on this blog. This article is an exception to the norm, but I can’t change the filter for one article.

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