The Spectator Is Hot for Global Warming Denial

If there is any credit due to the monstrous legacy of Britain's Margaret Thatcher it is that she -- with her background in science -- always accepted the reality of man-made global warming. The British Conservative Party never took the route of denial that Republicans in the U.S or the Liberal Party in Australia followed. The same cannot be said, alas, for Britain's predominantly right-wing press which has given a great deal of space to Global Warming time-wasting as it once did to denying the link between HIV and AIDS.

This week, the Spectator (a bit like a British counterpart to the National Review) has a front page splash: "Relax: Global Warming is All a Myth" with James Delingpole interviewing Australian denier, Ian Plimer, publicising his new book.

Global warming denial is not a set of scientific ideas -- it's a collection of bogus factoids which have a zombie-like ability to keep returning to life, seeking new brains to feed on no matter how many times they are shot down.

To give an example. Someone, somewhere at one time decided to claim that the carbon dioxide (CO2 -- our leading contribution to heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere) of volcanoes is greater than that of human industry and transport.

This claim is unambiguously false. Man-made carbon emissions exceed those of volcanoes by a factor of 130.

But no matter. When Martin Durkin's film The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast on the UK's Channel 4, there it was. Complete with a little cartoon of a volcano belching out CO2. In one of many edits for errors and distortions, the volcano claim was removed prior to the film's DVD release.

Now Ian Plimer has written a book, Heaven and Earth, getting a lot of people very excited, and guess what? The volcano factoid is back! Back from the dead, volcanoes are celebrated by deniers one again.

The process goes like this:

1. Global Warming Denier makes claim
2. Claim is comprehensively, indisputably debunked
3. Claim is withdrawn, while Denier publicly continues to assert they are the new Galileo and their critics are religious fanatics with no regard for facts
4. New Global Warming Denier makes exactly the same claim as if previous debate never happened

And on and on. Apparently forever. No matter how often the volcano factoid -- just one of many -- is shown to be false, it will come back. Maybe in a new book, film, newspaper article, bogus scientific paper produced by a think tank funded by industry, from the mouth of a TV pundit, or from a politician. It will survive in a fact-free vacuum, ready to be reborn as required.

The deniers constantly accuse those who understand the basic science of global warming enough to realize they are full of it, of being intolerant, fanatical adherents of dogma. But it is pretty clear who is, and who isn't, susceptible to changing their minds in the face of the facts.

Most of us would wish the deniers were right. The trouble is, the evidence is entirely against them. Unable make an argument, they will latch on to anything -- anything at all -- and reassure themselves with the same zombie factoids all over again.

Imagine a Universe Where Nothing Ever Had Any Consequences: Wouldn't That Be Nice?

Delingpole begins, "Imagine how wonderful the world be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore's imagination." Yes indeed, and imagine too how wonderful it would be if magical winged horses flew down from the sky each morning and made you breakfast and only Al Gore tried to stop them with a pernicious, envious flying-pony tax.

The ad hominem attacks on Al Gore are an obsessive constant of anti-environmentalist writing. Now Gore has become an ambassador for the science to the global public. But he didn't come up with it himself. His slide-show lecture is a collection of claims made by scientists with the relevant expertise. The message is theirs, not Gore's. The basic theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was proposed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1895. He's the guy you want. Him and the tens of thousands of climate scientists whose work followed from it.

Research claims in science are submitted in the form of a paper to established journals where they are then critiqued by others in the field before publication. This process allows old ideas to be challenged, but only after new ones have been tested. It's a process designed to remove fraudulent or obviously weak claims. New ideas are welcome -- but they have to prove themselves.

It's fairly common in any field to have leading scientists disagree about the data and its interpretation. But with the basic facts of global warming -- that burning fossil fuels releases gases that trap more heat in the atmosphere on a scale great enough to change climate, there is no dispute. None. There is not a single peer-reviewed paper among hundreds.

Ian Plimer -- a geologist, not a climatologist -- can challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus if he wants. He just has to write a real scientific paper and send it to an established journal for peer review. Writing a book full of bogus claims for the benefit of readers who don't know anything about science is not "going to change forever the way we think about climate change."

So far, no peer-reviewed from paper from Pilmer. Or any other global warming denier. Why? Because their arguments don't stand up to 30 seconds' scrutiny from anyone who gives it real thought, let alone climatologists.

Mmmmm, Carbon Dioxide...Yum!

Delingpole's article would not be complete without more than its fair share of zombie factoids, apparently taken from Plimer's book.

One favorite is the claim that "CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food." So if we lock ourselves up in a room full of CO2 in order to celebrate its life-giving qualities, what will happen as we breathe in this fine plant food?

Well done to those aged nine and up who learned at school that you would suffocate and die. In some contexts, CO2 is a pollutant. Oh, and it's not actually a food.

Not that either point is relevant -- what matters is that CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere. A lot of it traps more heat. Lots of extra heat is a potential problem for those who live on Planet Earth. Talking about the wonders of CO2 in some other, irrelevant context is a painfully transparent attempt to sound science-y while distracting your reader.

Also in there we have the claim: "...the CO2 in the atmosphere -- to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction -- is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface, rocks, air, soils and life."

Returning to the facts -- before the emergence of human industry, there were 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informs us, there are 387 ppm. Not "the tiniest fraction," but a significant jump -- the predicted result of pouring billions of tonnes of the stuff into the atmosphere every year at an ever-increasing rate.

Plimer and Delingpole are propounding the withdrawn-from-their-backsides Law of How Small Things Don't Have Major Effects. It's an idea that has no real basis in science and relies of emotional demagoguery -- look at those tiny parts per million! They're so small! They wouldn't hurt a fly! The testable, provable effectiveness of small amounts of CO2 molecules in trapping heat is swept away using irrelevant appeals to ignorance.

The same logic would lead us to conclude that viruses and bacteria are harmless because they are very, very small. Why, the anthrax virus must be only a tiny fraction of your body weight. Therefore, it is safe to eat, as proven by percentages.

Global Warming Doesn't Exist And It's Not Even That Bad Anyway

Plimer and Delingpole, like most professional deniers, are men of contradictions, as we have already seen. At the beginning of the piece, Pilmer explains why his background as a geologist is even better in understanding the climate than a climatologist, who actually studies it: "They're only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they're doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casblanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can't. It doesn't work."

OOOH! Smackdown! How could anyone be so foolish as to make conclusions out of a mere 150 years of data, when the planet's climate has been developing and changing over billions of years?

Well, apparently Plimer can, within three paragraphs:

"There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998."

Climatologists can't work in a time frame of 150 years, says Plimer, but Plimer can work in a time frame of the 11 years since 1998. Never mind, it will still get published in the Spectator.

While we're at it, are those claims actually true? Do climatologists work in a frame of 150 years? Did global warming stop in 1998? Well, no. And also no.

Climatologists have used a number of methods to learn how climate has changed over longer time periods and shown that the current warming exceeds anything humanity has experienced in at least a thousand years. Among them, Michael Mann famously produced a graph of temperature in the Northern Hemisphere over the last thousand years and deniers have dedicated a great deal of their time failing to discredit it. How could Delingpole have forgotten the denier nemesis, the hated, wicked, tricksy, false and demonstrably accurate "Hockey-Stick Graph"?

As for 1998 -- that was an unusually hot year, exceeding even the temperature of the previous record-holder way back in 1997. Average temperatures in 1998 were exacerbated by the short-term effects of a record-breaking El Nino in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the long-term trend towards global warming. Nonetheless, global average temperatures have continued to rise since 1997 and NASA recorded fractionally higher temperatures in 2005 -- when there was no additional El Nino effect. A graph makes the upward trend, and the denier cherry-picking, clear.

Medium and short term trends (such as the ocean cycle) can work both ways -- they can cool the planet down for a while, even as CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. But they don't effect the long-term trend as greenhouse gases accumulate.

If climate scientists had ever said, "Because global warming is taking place, it will never be cold anywhere, ever again and each day will be hotter than the last", then the observation that some years have been cooler than 1998 would matter. Since they don't, loudly and often, there are no excuses for the "It's-cold-today-so-global-warming-is-a-fraud!" time-wasters.

Global Warming Doesn't Exist and Historically It's Always Been Fun for Everyone

Global warming is part of a natural cycle, nothing to do with people. Also, global warming has stopped. Global warming is associated with nice things like warm, sunny days and wine-growing. Also, the world is getting cooler. The ice caps have melted before anyway. Also, global warming has caused mass extinctions in the past quite naturally.

All of those claims appear in Delingpole's piece. Is there anyone who can't see the contradiction between them? Global warming is not happening, but it also is happening and it's a natural process that shouldn't bother anybody. And it isn't happening. And it happens all the time in Earth's history! And it stopped in 1998!

The one fact that those in deep denial have is that the climate of the Earth does indeed change over time without man-made causes and has done many, many times in the planet's history. It's not a magical process, though. The climate changes because of a forcing. A forcing can be any of a number of things -- including changes in solar activity and variations in the Earth's orbit and rotation.

The evidence shows now that human beings, by releasing the energy stored in fossil fuels into the atmosphere, can also create a climate forcing. The only forcing that explains current warming. There isn't a contradiction between these facts.

Now if the global warming currently taking place were not caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, it would still be a very serious matter and cause for, yes, alarm. But the deniers' main interest -- their only consistency -- is to say anything that will prevent people from thinking that industry or government need to act. They have a particular need to ridicule the thought that global warming is a potential destroyer of the lives of hundreds of millions of people. You will never come across a denier who says that global warming is not man-made but nonetheless worrying and we should prepare for it.

They are in the difficult and multi-contradictory position of insisting that climate change is a natural process which is always going on and also there is no need to worry.

Usually the trick is to look at various moments of past natural climate change and pick out cutesy-wutesy anecdotes like how in the Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP), people in the North of England used to grow grapes for wine or how during the Little Ice Age around the 17th-19th centuries, people in London used to hold ice fairs on the frozen River Thames, which currently does not freeze over at all.

Delingpole does not disappoint those on the look out for these zombie-stories:

"...the Earth's warmer periods -- such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian's Wall [in England] -- were times of wealth and plenty."

Sigh. The actual scientists at RealClimate.org persist in pointing out that, actually, wine is still made in the North of England, and it wins international prizes for its quality. Readers could play a drinking game where you whip out a bottle of English wine whenever you hear a denier make this fatuous claim yet again.

But over in Central America you can look at the still-standing ruins of the once-mighty Mayan civilization, its glorious cities abandoned during the MWP. There isn't a consensus on this, but some scientists have claimed that the period of warming triggered centuries-long droughts in their part of the world, not wealth and plenty -- a suggestion you won't hear deniers mention during discussions of natural climate change. Perhaps the Mayans all left Central America for England where they could grow wine and live happily ever after.

And the MWP was limited in its scope -- it affected the North Atlantic region, not the entire globe.

In the same paragraph of factoids where Delingpole lists wine from the North of England, he also states breezily that, "extinctions of life are normal". So just relax, guys, and enjoy your extinction!

Nasty Rich Socialists Want to Stop the Poor From Enjoying Global Environmental Catastrophe

Finally, and inevitably, we have a consideration of the mysterious and dark motives of environmentalists, particularly the nasty rich socialists who want stop the world's poor from enjoying environmental catastrophe.

Delingpole's article covers the life of Plimer growing up in working-class Australia, a part that interests me because my own Dad grew up there at the same time. It didn't turn my Dad into a global warming denier, so it can't be especially relevant. Unless this is part of some inverted, bizarre Class War which is contrasting Plimer's working-class authenticity with the supposed wealth and privilege of members of Greenpeace. Which, of course, it is.

The point of this biographical detail is that environmentalism is the product of the disordered minds of the rich, those terrible "metropolitan liberals" who live in cities and are liberal, proving their infamy for everyone to see. American readers will know this script.

"Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury," Plimer asserts, arguing that some people he has met in rural Turkey and Iran have no time for this science nonsense. Real working-class people want to improve their lives by burning more fossil fuels. They must not be held back by hateful rich left-wingers who envy rich people and are rich, seeking to impose their fanciful notions of environmental aesthetics enviously on the poor. (NB: I am not caricaturing that argument in the slightest -- read it yourself and see.)

This is a particularly obnoxious lie, another complete reversal of the truth. Global warming is a major concern of the world's poor who will be (and are being) hit hardest by it. It is denial that is a luxury for those who can afford to protect themselves from environmental catastrophes from New Orleans to India to Darfur. Here is Johann Hari (declaration -- a friend of mine), interviewing a Bangladeshi teenager in a country where the effects of global warming are obvious and ominous:

I clambered back on to one of the 42 school-boats in this area. Young children were in the front chanting the alphabet, and teenagers at the back were browsing through the books. I asked a 16-year-old boy called Mohammed Palosh Ali what he was reading about, and he said, "Global warming." I felt a small jolt. He was the first person to spontaneously raise global warming with me. Can you tell me what that is? "The climate is being changed by carbon dioxide," he said. "This is a gas that traps heat. So if there is more of it, then the ice in the north of the world melts and our seas rise here."

I asked if he had seen this warming in his own life. "Of course! The floods in 1998 and 2002 were worse than anything in my grandfather's life. We couldn't get any drinking water, so the dirty water I drank made me very sick. The shit from the toilet pits had risen up and was floating in the water, but we still had to drink it. We put tablets in it but it was still disgusting. What else could we do?"

Eco-guilt isn't a luxury. It's the normal, non-sociopathic emotion you get when you realize what the effects of our carbon-intense lifestyles are on others.

There are no arguments in Plimer's article that stand up. His book has already been doused elsewhere in the acid of scrutiny by people who know what they're talking about. It has not fared well.

But it won't stop the arguments it contains from doing their work. Too many people, really, really do not want to believe that life on Earth is changing and that drastic changes in our economy and society will be necessary, possibly costing industry a lot of money. That's why the story of the volcanoes that produce more CO2 than burned fossil fuels lives on and are destined to be repeated over and over.

Expect too, to hear about wine in Northern England again, how CO2 is only a small part of the atmosphere, that climate change is cyclical and unthreatening but also world-changing, that CO2 is good for plants so we can put it in the atmosphere without consequences, that global warming stopped in 1998. I'm only surprised they left out the one about the time when all scientists in the 70s in the world thought there was going to be an ice age except for the majority who didn't.

And when every one of those is knocked down again by the facts, you'll hear deniers proudly boast that they are bold truth-tellers who refuse to tow the party line (watch out for that one in the comments below!), wrongly persecuted for their courageous stance by the mindless sheep who accept the overwhelming weight of the evidence. When this appears in the national press, it merits a stern, clear response.

Meanwhile, global average temperatures and man-made greenhouse gases both rise inexorably.

Comments

[Kruddler]

Example 9 (Europe):

Linderholm and Chen (2005) derived a 500-year history of winter (September-April) precipitation from tree-ring data obtained within the Northern Boreal zone of Central Scandinavia. This chronology indicated that below-average precipitation was observed during the periods 1504-1520, 1562-1625, 1648-1669, 1696-1731, 1852-1871, and 1893-1958, with the lowest values occurring at the beginning of the record and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These results demonstrate that for this portion of the European continent, twentieth century global warming did not result in more frequent or more severe droughts.

Linderholm, H.W. and Chen, D. 2005. Central Scandinavian winter precipitation variability during the
past five centuries reconstructed from Pinus sylvestris tree rings. Boreas 34: 44-52.

Example 10 (Europe):

Wilson et al. (2005) developed a summer (March-August) precipitation chronology from living and historical ring-widths of trees in the Bavarian Forest region of southeast Germany for the period
1456-2001. Results indicated that the region was substantially drier than the long-term average during the periods 1500-1560, 1610-1730, and 1810-1870, all of which intervals were much colder than the bulk of the twentieth century.

Wilson, R.J., Luckman, B.H. and Esper, J. 2005. A 500 year dendroclimatic reconstruction of spring-summer precipitation from the lower Bavarian Forest region, Germany. International Journal of Climatology 25: 611- 630.

[realpolitic]

"The drought and heatwaves in summer 2003 affected not only central Europe, but also the west central Mediterranean area (cf. Fig. 1). In this context, Grazzini and Viterbo (2003) note record-breaking high sea surface temperatures in this area peaking above 30 °C. While small-scale forest fires were observed all over central Europe and the western Mediterranean, the forest and
bush fires on the Iberian peninsula were especially devastating. In Portugal, a total of 390 000 ha of forest and bush land were destroyed (the previous annual record loss of about 182 000 ha occurred in 1991) and 125 000 ha were burned in Spain. In much of Europe, the reduced crop yields, and shortages in green fodder supply to and increased mortality in the livestock and
poultry stocks caused major financial losses to farmers."

http://www.meteo.uni-koeln.de/content/downloads/fbklpu_weather_artikel2004_online.pdf

[Kruddler]

Example 7 (Asia):

Ducic (2005) analyzed observed and reconstructed discharge rates of the Danube River near Orsova, Serbia, over the period 1731-1990. The discharge rate for the last decade of the record (1981- 1990), was “completely inside the limits of the whole series,” and only slightly (0.7 percent) less than the 260-year mean. As a result, Ducic concluded that “modern discharge fluctuations do not point to dominant anthropogenic influences­.”

Ducic, V. 2005. Reconstruction of the Danube discharge on hydrological station Orsova in pre-instrumental period: Possible causes of fluctuations. Edition Physical Geography of Serbia 2: 79-100 (this took me ages to track down).

Example 8 (Asia):

Davi et al. (2006) developed a reconstruction of streamflow that extends from 1637 to 1997. Of the 10 driest five-year periods of the 360-year record, only one occurred during the twentieth century (and that just barely: 1901-1905, sixth driest of the 10 extreme periods).

Davi, N.K., Jacoby, G.C., Curtis, A.E. and Baatarbileg, N. 2006. Extension of drought records for central Asia using tree rings: West-Central Mongolia. Journal of Climate 19: 288-299.

[realpolitic]

"The 1998-2002 droughts spanning the United States, southern Europe, and Southwest Asia were linked through a common oceanic influence. Cold sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the eastern tropical Pacific and warm SSTs in the western tropical Pacific and Indian oceans were remarkably persistent during this period. Climate models show that the climate signals forced separately by these regions acted synergistically, each contributing to widespread mid-latitude drying: an ideal scenario for spatially expansive, synchronized drought. The warmth of the Indian and west Pacific oceans was unprecedented and consistent with greenhouse gas forcing. Some implications are drawn for future drought. "

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5607/691

"All currently available climate models predict a near-surface warming trend under the influence of rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In addition to the direct effects on climate—for example, on the frequency of heatwaves—this increase in surface temperatures has important consequences for the hydrological cycle, particularly in regions where water supply is currently dominated by melting snow or ice. In a warmer world, less winter precipitation falls as snow and the melting of winter snow occurs earlier in spring."

"With more than one-sixth of the Earth's population relying on glaciers and seasonal snow packs for their water supply, the consequences of these hydrological changes for future water availabili­ty—predict­ed with high confidence and already diagnosed in some regions—are likely to be severe."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7066/abs/nature04141.html

[Kruddler]

Example 5 (Asia):

Kalugin et al. (2005) state that the period between 1210 and 1480 was more humid than that of today, while the period between 1480 and 1840 was more arid. In addition, they report three episodes of multi-year drought (1580-1600, 1665-1690, and 1785-1810). It is problematic for the IPCC to claim that global warming will lead to more frequent and more severe droughts, as all of the major multi-year droughts detected in this study occurred during the cool phase of the 800-year record.

Kalugin, I., Selegei, V., Goldberg, E. and Seret, G. 2005. Rhythmic fine-grained sediment deposition in Lake Teletskoye, Altai, Siberia, in relation to regional climate change. Quaternary International 136: 5-13.

Example 6 (Asia):

Touchan et al. (2003) developed two reconstructions of spring precipitation for southwestern Turkey from tree-ring width measurements. They found that the longest period of reconstructed spring drought was the four-year period 1476-79, while the single driest spring was 1746.

Touchan, R., Garfin, G.M., Meko, D.M., Funkhouser, G., Erkan, N., Hughes, M.K. and Wallin, B.S. 2003.
Preliminary reconstructions of spring precipitation in southwestern Turkey from tree-ring width. International Journal of Climatology 23: 157-171

[realpolitic]

Droughts are already being observed all over the world as they are in the southwestern United States!

[Kruddler]

I'd be hesitant to attribute current regional droughts as a consequence of increasing temperatures, given what I've read about drought history. Of course, you are free to reach your own conclusions.

[realpolitic]

In Nigeria, a potentially massive '"environemtal refugee migration will occur. For a 1-m rise, more than 3 million people are at risk, based on the present population. The estimated number of people that would be displaced ranges from 740,000 for a 0.2 meter rise to 3.7 million for a one meter rise and 10 million for a two meter rise (Awosika et al., 1992).

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=US8lwO64wrUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=Regional+Impacts+of+climate+change&ots=RVi_w37LhN&sig=03js8ynXbagiOC4yHVLLwfYFg_w
p. 66

[Kruddler]

Example 3 (Africa):

Verschuren et al. (2000) developed a decadal-scale history of rainfall and drought in equatorial east Africa for the past thousand years. They found that the Little Ice Age was generally wetter than the Current Warm Period; but they identified three intervals of prolonged dryness within the Little Ice Age (1390-1420, 1560-1625, and 1760-1840), and of these “episodes of persistent aridity,” as they refer to them, all were determined to have been “more severe than any recorded drought of the twentieth century.”

Verschuren, D., Laird, K.R. and Cumming, B.F. 2000. Rainfall and drought in equatorial east Africa during the past 1,100 years. Nature 403: 410-414.

Example 4 (Africa):

In the late 1960s, the African Sahel had experienced “one of the most persistent droughts recorded by the entire global meteorological record.” However, in a high-resolution study of a sediment sequence extracted from an oasis in the Manga Grasslands of northeast Nigeria, Holmes et al determined that “the present drought is not unique and that drought has recurred on a centennial to interdecadal timescale during the last 1500 years.”

Holmes, J.A., Street-Perrott, F.A., Allen, M.J., Fothergill, P.A., Harkness, D.D., Droon, D. and Perrott, R.A. 1997. Holocene palaeolimnology of Kajemarum Oasis, Northern Nigeria: An isotopic study of ostracodes, bulk carbonate and organic carbon. Journal of the Geological Society, London 154: 311-319.

[realpolitic]

Yet, there are droughts all over Africa and increased risk of droughts as the mountaintop glaciermelt for the people of India, Vietnam, and China

[realpolitic]

"Khafagy et al, (1992) estimate that for a 1-m sea-level rise, about 2,000 km squared of land in coastal areas of the lower Nile delta may be lost to inundation. Substantial erosion should be expected, possibly leading to land losses of as much as 100 km squared. A very rough estimate of the agricultural land area that might become unusble is 1,000 km squared(100,000 ha). With a average land value of US$1.5/m squared, the value of land loss in the lower Nile delta as a result of flooding alone will be on the order of US$750 million (2,500 million Egyptian pounds."

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=US8lwO64wrUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=Regional+Impacts+of+climate+change&ots=RVi_w37LhN&sig=03js8ynXbagiOC4yHVLLwfYFg_w
p. 66

[Kruddler]

Example 1 (Africa):

Nicholson (2001) says that “rainfall conditions over Africa during the last 2 to 3 decades are not
unprecedented,” and that “a similar dry episode prevailed during most of the first half of the 19th
century,” when much of the planet was still experiencing Little Ice Age conditions.

Nicholson, S.E. 2001. Climatic and environmental change in Africa during the last two centuries. Climate Research 17: 123-144.

Example 2 (Africa):

Therrell et al. (2006) developed what they describe as “the first tree-ring reconstruction of rainfall in tropical Africa using a 200-year regional chronology based on samples of Pterocarpus angolensis [a deciduous tropical hardwood known locally as Mukwa] from Zimbabwe.” This project revealed that “a decadal-scale drought reconstructed from 1882 to 1896 matches the most severe sustained drought during the instrumental period (1989-1995),” and that “an even more severe drought is indicated
from 1859 to 1868 in both the tree-ring and documentary data.”

Therrell, M.D., Stahle, D.W., Ries, L.P. and Shugart, H.H. 2006. Tree-ring reconstructed rainfall variability in Zimbabwe. Climate Dynamics 26: 677-685.

[realpolitic]

A drought that occured a hundred years ago is as severe as one that occured just recently and this event somehow says that co2 is not causing warming?

[realpolitic]

Recent rainfall fluctuations in Africa....

"This paper examines the rainfall conditions which have prevailed over Africa during the last two decades. Throughout this period rainfall has been abnormally low over most of the continent.­.... trend towards increasing aridity since about 1970 has been neither continuous nor apparent in all regions but is evident as an increase in the area affected by subnormal rainfall and in the size of the deficit in the semi-arid regions. These conditions contrast markedly with the 1950s and are unlike any which occurred earlier in the century, and may signal a major change in prevailing global- scale climate...­... The patterns are supportive of an underlying climatic cause for recent desertification in Africa."

http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/121

[Kruddler]

And yet I saw this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2811

Africa's deserts are in "spectacular" retreat

"The southern Saharan desert is in retreat, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa.

Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago, is growing so much greener than families who fled to wetter coastal regions are starting to go home.

New research confirming this remarkable environmental turnaround is to be presented to Burkina Faso's ministers and international aid agencies in November. And it is not just Burkina Faso.

New Scientist has learned that a separate analysis of satellite images completed this summer reveals that dunes are retreating right across the Sahel region on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Vegetation is ousting sand across a swathe of land stretching from Mauritania on the shores of the Atlantic to Eritrea 6000 kilometres away on the Red Sea coast.

Nor is it just a short-term trend. Analysts say the gradual greening has been happening since the mid-1980s, though has gone largely unnoticed. Only now is the evidence being pieced together."

[Kruddler]

Realpolitic states below in accordance with the IPCC report that droughts are likely to increase with global warming.

All 19 of the models used in preparing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report were unable to adequately simulate the basic characteristics of what Lau et al. call one of the past century’s “most pronounced signals of climate change.” This failure of what the authors call an “ideal test” for evaluating the models’
abilities to accurately simulate “long-term drought” and “coupled atmosphere­-ocean-lan­d processes and
their interactions” vividly illustrates the fallibility of computer climate models.

Lau, K.M., Shen, S.S.P., Kim, K.-M. and Wang, H. 2006. A multimodel study of the twentieth-century simulations of Sahel drought from the 1970s to 1990s. Journal of Geophysical Research 111.

So let's compare droughts in the twentieth century with historical droughts and see if there's any evidence for the claim that droughts would be more severe under a warmer climate

See above:

[realpolitic]

Regarding African drought, "The potential effect of climate change is uncertain. At a local level, increased temperatures are likely to lead to increased moisture demand. The balance betwen rainfall and higher evapotranspiration implies more frequent water scarcity. However, a great deal depends on vegetation response to higher co2 concentrations and the timing of rainfall. The combination of higher evapotranpiration and even a small decrease in precipitation could lead to significantly greater drought risks. ....The temperatur­e-precipit­ation-co2 forcing of seasonal drought probably is less significant than the prospect of large-scale circulation changes that drive continental droughts that occur over several years. A change in the frequency and duration of atmosphere-ocean anomalies, such as the ENSO phenonmenon, could force such large-scale changes in Africa's rainfall climatology. However, such scenarios of climate change are not well developed at the global level, much less for Africa."

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=US8lwO64wrUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=Regional+Impacts+of+climate+change&ots=RVi_w37LhN&sig=03js8ynXbagiOC4yHVLLwfYFg_w
p. 55

[realpolitic]

"The combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system. A 21st-century global warming projection far exceeds the natural variability of the past 1000 years and is greater than the best estimate of global temperature change for the last interglaci­al."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/5477/270

Such studies mean little to Kruddler who says AGW is a religion and that the IPCC is driven by politics, not science. How does one argue with such nonsensical comments? Of course, the only thing that he has presented that disagrees with anything said by the IPCC is a combination of studies that suggest the Midieval warm period may have been a global phenomenon

[Kruddler]

"the only thing that he has presented that disagrees with anything said by the IPCC is a combination of studies that suggest the Midieval [sic] warm period may have been a global phenomenon­."

You forgot about the lack of ability of IPCC climate modelling to accurately predict weather, as shown below. I'm just getting started on providing peer-reviewed science that questions many of the IPCC claims. Bear with me, as I'm trying to juggle work and family and don't have the luxury of spending hours finding evidence for you.

Your cited paper above is based on modelling/­projection­s, so you're right, they do mean little to me. And there's nothing non-sensical about questioning the motives of an organisation clearly driven by political agendas, such as cap-and-trade.

[realpolitic]

i don't think it is the intention of the IPCC to predict weather. Most of what they say is based on physical observations. For example, "The temperature increase is widespread over the globe and is greater at higher northern latitudes (Figure 1.2). Average Arctic temperatures have increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years."

"Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3]mm per year over 1961 to 2003 and at an average rate of about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8]mm per year from 1993 to 2003."

"There is observational evidence of an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, and suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater."

According to kruddler: "Your cited paper above is based on modelling/­projection­s, so you're right, they do mean little to me."

"The combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system."

What does this statement have to do with models? Again, to dismiss it is silly!

[Kruddler]

"Of course, the only thing that he has presented that disagrees with anything said by the IPCC is a combination of studies that suggest the Midieval warm period may have been a global phenomenon"

Thank-you for your grudging admission :-)

[realpolitic]

Yes, there is scholarly debate on the subject. If that was your point, I would have conceded it long ago. Now will use concede the fact that co2 is a greenhouse gas and CO2 absorbs the sun's infrared waves. This infrared radiation makes the CO2 molecule unstable. The molecule can only return to its stable state by emitting the thermal radiation back into the atmosphere. Therefore, because more CO2 remains in the atmosphere, and because CO2 in the atmosphere generates atmospheric heat,more atmospheric heat is being generated.

Will you also concede the point that the EPA states "Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations tend to warm the planet."

Will you concede the National Oceanc and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) states: "Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point. Global surface temperatures have increased about 0.74°C "

And whether you concede it or not, it stands that: "The conclusion that global warming is mainly caused by human activity and will continue if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced has been endorsed by more than 50 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.­"

[realpolitic]

(Cont.)

Co2 is a known greenhouse gas that increases temperatures in the atmosphere. To say otherwise is to also say physics is not a true science. But then deniers are never wrong they just shift from one denier talking point to the next.

[Kruddler]

I wouldn't categorise myself as a denier, more a questioner :-)

I don't deny that warming has occured in the instrumental record, but would question the cause and some of the claims raised by the IPCC. I have done and will continue to document evidence that is at odds with the IPCC-sponsored claims. At the very least you would have to admit that the IPCC report is hardly infallible.

[realpolitic]

I would not call deniers "questioners" because they too easily toss aside information that does not back their preconceived views. For example, studies that show coral reefs have tolerance and are resilient do not mean that they are not at risk of widespread coral bleaching. A widespread consensus that co2 is a greenhouse gas that is linked to climate change is not easily tossed aside with a wave of the hand and by saying models are imperfect. Not being about to admit to misinformation like, for example, that warming was constant over the 20th centurt seems disingenuous. Pointing to right-wing sites like JunkScience and phony lsts of scientists as prove of disagreement about climate change when the lists are obviously phony and then laughing when I point to a scientific consensus is adolescent. Deniers are just protecting some impulse that consumption is good and their statements have little to do with the science

[Kruddler]

I found this quite interesting.

http://www.ruralsoft.com.au/ClimateChange.doc

"The findings clearly show that any gas with an absorption line or band lying within the spectral range of the radiation field from the warmed earth, will be capable of contributing towards raising the temperature of the earth. However, it is equally clear that after reaching a fixed threshold of so-called Greenhouse gas density, which is much lower than that currently found in the atmosphere, there will be no further increase in temperature from this source, no matter how large the increase in the atmospheric density of such gases.
While some of the ‘pictures’ painted in this discussion may seem at odds with expectations, none of the apparently extreme circumstances described will appear as unusual to anyone with even modest experience in optical spectrosco­py."

[realpolitic]

The effect of co2 in the atmosphere is logarithmic, which means that it takes a doubling of concentration to produce the same amount of warming that the previous doubling produced, Example: if you double concentration from 2 to 4, you have to double it again from 4 to 8 to get the same effect. This is why there can not be a "runaway" warming, but make no mistake, there is enough carbon dioxide and methane locked in permafrost and clathrate ice to double atmospheric CO2 all on its own.

The author of the study does not take into account the feedback effects of lower albedo, methane gas, release, additional water vapor added to atmosphere, and so on.

[Kruddler]

I'm getting bored with giving detailed citations showing major differences between the models
and real-world measurements, so also read the following 4 papers published in 2007 (the same year as the IPCC report ar4:

Allan, R.P. and Soden, B.J. 2007. Large discrepancy between observed and simulated precipitation trends in the ascending and descending branches of the tropical circulation. Geophysical Research Letters 34

Lin, J.-L. 2007. The double-ITCZ problem in IPCC AR4 coupled GCMs: Ocean-atmosphere feedback analysis. Journal of Climate 20: 4497-4525.

Wentz, F.J., Ricciardulli, L., Hilburn, K. and Mears, C. 2007. How much more rain will global warming bring? Science 317: 233-235.

Yu, L. and Weller, R.A. 2007. Objectively analyzed air-sea heat fluxes for the global ice-free oceans (1981-2005). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 88: 527- 539.

The science is settled??? Yeah, right!

[realpolitic]

As I said, climate change is mostly an observtaional science and slight variations with models mean little. It is another distraction deniers hide behind.

As Dr. Josh Willis, a climate scientist and ocean expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says:

"It is easy to pick on computer climate models for not simulating certain things or point out the odd measurement that isn’t well understood. Despite this, models and data of all different types tell the same story about the past century: the oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, the temperature of the atmosphere is increasing and carbon dioxide levels continue to go up. Given that, you don’t need a fancy computer model or an Argo buoy to tell you that the future will be warmer."

"The real debate is not over whether global warming exists, but how we as a society will address it. The climate system is already committed to a certain amount of warming from carbon dioxide emissions of the past..."

Besides according to the IPCC: "Of the more than 29,000 observational data series, from 75 studies, that show significant change in many physical and biological systems, more than 89% are consistent with the direction of change expected as a response to warming."

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf

Of course, Kruddler will counter by saying they could be wrong and in his mind, I guess, that is enough to deny any evidence to the contrary.

[Kruddler]

"models and data of all different types tell the same story about the past century: the oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, the temperature of the atmosphere is increasing and carbon dioxide levels continue to go up"

I've never once disagreed with any of this. These are effects, not causes.

"Given that, you don"t need a fancy computer model or an Argo buoy to tell you that the future will be warmer."

How's that crystal ball going?

Swanson and Anastasios (2009) say “a break in the global mean temperature trend from the consistent warming over the 1976/77– 2001/02 period may have occurred.” Moreover, the episodic nature of temperature changes during the past century is “difficult to reconcile with the presumed smooth evolution of anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosol radiative forcing with respect to time”

Swanson, K.L. and Tsonis, A.A. 2009. Has the climate shifted? Geophysical Research Letters 36

[Kruddler]

"slight variations with models mean little"

Are you kidding me? A significant proportion of models have failed to even predict the sign of changes.

[Kruddler]

Example 10:

Brankovic and Molteni (2004) attempted to model the Indian monsoon with a much higher-resolution GCM, but its output also proved to be “not realistic.­”

Example 11:

Lau et al. (2006) found that that “only eight models produce a reasonable Sahel drought signal, seven models produce excessive rainfall over [the] Sahel during the observed drought period, and four models show no significant deviation from normal.” In addition, they report that “even the model with the highest skill for the Sahel drought could only simulate the increasing trend of severe drought events but not the magnitude, nor the beginning time and duration of the events.” All 19 of the CGCMs employed in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, in other words, failed to adequately simulate the basic characteristics of “one of the most pronounced signals of climate change” of the past century—as defined by its start date, severity and duration.

Lau, K.M., Shen, S.S.P., Kim, K.-M. and Wang, H. 2006. A multimodel study of the twentieth-century simulations of Sahel drought from the 1970s to 1990s. Journal of Geophysical Research 111radiation. Journal of Climate 11: 137-164.

[realpolitic]

"In addition, they report that "even the model with the highest skill for the Sahel drought could only simulate the increasing trend of severe drought events but not the magnitude, nor the beginning time and duration of the events.""

Yes, the forecasts by the IPCC have been too conservative to date. "Climate change is happening much faster than the world's best scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a global scale, a new report warns."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353590/Climate-change-accelerating-far-beyond-the-IPCC-forecast-WWF-says.html

"The MIT study concludes that, without significant ("stringent") reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we might see far more significant climate change in the 21st century than previous assessments have suggested.­"

http://globalchange.mit.edu/pubs/abstract.php?publication_id=990

"We present recent observed climate trends for carbon dioxide concentration, global mean air temperature, and global sea level, and we compare these trends to previous model projections as summarized in the 2001 assessment report of the IPCC. The IPCC scenarios and projections start in the year 1990.....T­he data available for the period since 1990 raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates.­"

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5825/709

[Kruddler]

Example 9:

Gadgil et al. (2005) performed a historical analysis of the models forecast skill over the period 1932-2004 for the summer monsoon season of India. The empirical models Gadgil et al. evaluated generated large differences between monsoon rainfall measurements and model predictions. In addition, the models often failed to correctly predict even the sign of the precipitation anomaly, frequently predicting excess rainfall when drought occurred and drought when excess rainfall was received. The dynamical models fared even worse. In comparing observed monsoon rainfall totals with
simulated values obtained from 20 state-of-the-art GCMs and a supposedly superior coupled atmosphere-ocean model, Gadgil et al. reported that not a single one of those many models was able “to simulate correctly the interannual variation of the summer monsoon rainfall over the Indian region.”
And as with the empirical models, the dynamical models also frequently failed to correctly capture
even the sign of the observed rainfall anomalies.

Gadgil, S., Rajeevan, M. and Nanjundiah, R. 2005. Monsoon prediction—Why yet another failure? Current Science 88: 1389-1400Climate 16: 1551-1561.

[Kruddler]

Example 8:

Zhou et al. (2007) found “large differences between model and observations in the rain spectrum and the vertical hydrometeor profiles that contribute to the associated cloud field", when comparing the cloud and precipitation properties observed from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) instruments against simulations obtained from the three-dimensional Goddard Cumulus Ensemble (GCE) model during the South China Sea Monsoon Experiment (SCSMEX) field campaign of 18 May-18 June 1998.

Zhou, Y.P., Tao, W.-K., Hou, A.Y., Olson, W.S., Shie, C.- L., Lau, K.-M., Chou, M.-D., Lin, X. and Grecu, M. 2007. Use of high-resolution satellite observations to evaluate cloud and precipitation statistics from cloud-resolving model simulations. Part I: South China Sea monsoon experiment. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 64: 4309- 4329.

[Kruddler]

Example 7:

L’Ecuyer and Stephens (2007) show that “a majority of the GCM models [9 of them] examined do not reproduce the apparent westward transport of energy in the equatorial Pacific during the 1998 El Niño event.” They go on to say that “deficiencies remain in the representation of relationships between radiation, clouds, and precipitation in current climate models,” and they say that these deficiencies “cannot be ignored when interpreting their predictions of future climate.”

L’Ecuyer, T.S. and Stephens, G.L. 2007. The tropical atmospheric energy budget from the TRMM perspective. Part II: Evaluating GCM representations of the sensitivity of regional energy and water cycles to the 1998-99 ENSO cycle. Journal of Climate 20: 4548-4571.­JD005021.

[Kruddler]

Example 6:

Zhang et al. (2005) compared basic cloud climatologies derived from 10 atmospheric GCMs with satellite measurements obtained from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) and the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) program. First, Zhang et al. report a four-fold
difference in high clouds among the models. Secondly, the majority of the models simulated only 30 to 40 percent of the observed middle clouds. The researchers also report that “differences of seasonal amplitudes among the models and satellite measurements can reach several hundred percent.”

Zhang, M.H., Lin, W.Y., Klein, S.A., Bacmeister, J.T., Bony, S., Cederwall, R.T., Del Genio, A.D., Hack, J.J., Loeb, N.G., Lohmann, U., Minnis, P., Musat, I., Pincus, R., Stier, P., Suarez, M.J., Webb, M.J., Wu, J.B., Xie, S.C., Yao, M.-S. and Yang, J.H. 2005. Comparing clouds and their seasonal variations in 10 atmospheric general circulation models with satellite measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research 110: D15S02

[Kruddler]

Example 5:

Siebesma et al. (2004) report that “simulations
with nine large-scale models [were] carried out for
June/July/August 1998 and the quality of the results
[was] assessed along a cross-section in the subtropical
and tropical North Pacific ranging from (235°E,
35°N) to (187.5°E, 1°S),” in order to “document the
performance quality of state-of-the-art GCMs in
modeling the first-order characteristics of subtropical
and tropical cloud systems.” The main conclusions of
this study, according to Siebesma et al., were that “(1)
almost all models strongly underpredicted both cloud
cover and cloud amount in the stratocumulus regions
while (2) the situation is opposite in the trade-wind
region and the tropics where cloud cover and cloud
amount are overpredicted by most models.”

Siebesma, A.P., Jakob, C., Lenderink, G., Neggers, R.A.J.,
Teixeira, J., van Meijgaard, E., Calvo, J., Chlond, A.,
Grenier, H., Jones, C., Kohler, M., Kitagawa, H., Marquet,
P., Lock, A.P., Muller, F., Olmeda, D. and Severijns, C.
2004. Cloud representation in general-circulation models
over the northern Pacific Ocean: A EUROCS
intercomparison study. Quarterly Journal of the Royal
Meteorological Society 130: 3245-3267.

[realpolitic]

Good, the analysis of the models continues and the improvemet of the models continue.