December 29, 2015 | Last Updated: Dec 30 11:30 AM ET
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Without an understanding of natural climate, there’s no strong basis for predicting climate change
The world’s leaders are touting a victory over the 2015 agreement in Paris to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and so to prevent dangerous climate change.
A number of scientists have spoken out, saying that the Paris agreement is merely political theater and will do little to reduce global warming.
Ironically, many scientists on both sides of the climate debate agree regarding the potential efficacy of the Paris agreement to alter the trajectory of climate change: i) scientists who view the proposed emissions reductions as insufficient to significantly alter the warming trajectory, and ii) scientists who regard climate variations to be relatively insensitive to carbon dioxide emissions and hence insensitive to such policies.
MIGUEL
The 2013 Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the dire projection that we can expect about 4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the 21st century if carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced.
To assess the credibility of this prediction in terms of the actual trajectory of the 21st century climate, it is important to point out that the global climate models cannot predict future major volcanic eruptions or solar cycles, and do not adequately predict the long-term oscillations in the ocean.
What is the global warming hiatus, and why does it matter?
The credibility of the IPCC’s projections of 21st century climate has been called into question by a slowdown of the rate of warming in the early 21st century, relative to a more rapid rate of warming in the last quarter of the 20th century.
This slowdown is referred to as the “global warming hiatus.”
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Climate models can’t explain the warming from 1910-1945 or the mid-century grand hiatus
The 2013 IPCC assessment made the following statement: “the rate of warming over the past 15 years . . . is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951.”
Most significantly, the observed rate of warming in the early 21st century was slower than climate model predictions.
The growing discrepancy between climate model predictions and the observations has raised serious questions about the climate models that are being used as the basis for national and international energy and climate policies.
A comparison of three global surface temperature datasets is shown in Graph 1 for the period since the 1990s.
The data set with the largest trend since 1998 (0.1 C per decade) is the new NOAA data set (the black line), which has a trend that is 50 per cent greater than some of the other data sets.
However, even the larger NOAA trend is just below the lower end of the climate model projections for the early 21st century warming of 0.11 to 0.43 C per decade.
The warming hiatus is most clearly revealed in the global satellite data sets of lower atmospheric temperature in Graph 2.
Scientists disagree on the reasons for the discrepancies between the variations of surface temperature and the lower atmospheric temperatures. The presence of El Nino and La Nina events compounds the difficulty in interpreting trends. Scientists working with the global surface temperature datasets have predicted an 85 per cent probability that 2015 will be the warmest year on record. However, scientists working with the satellite data of lower atmospheric temperatures do not foresee 2015 as being among the warmest years.
Scientists continue to debate these temperatures and investigate the reasons for discrepancies among the data sets. It will likely be five years into the future before we have the perspective to identify whether the warming hiatus has ended, or whether the warming in 2015 from the large El Nino event will be followed by several cool years, as is often the case following El Nino events.
What are the implications of the warming hiatus for our understanding of how much of the recent warming has been caused by humans?
The significance of a reduced rate of warming since 1998 is that during this period, 25 per cent of human emissions of carbon dioxide have occurred.
The key conclusion of the 2013 Assessment Report of the IPCC is that it is extremely likely that more than half of the warming since 1950 has been caused by humans, and climate model simulations indicate that all of this warming has been caused by humans.
Global surface temperature anomalies since 1850 (from the Hadley Centre and the UK Climate Research Unit) are shown in Graph 3.
If the warming since 1950 was caused by humans, what caused the warming during the period 1910-1945? In fact, the period 1910-1945 comprises over 40 per cent of the warming since 1900, but is associated with only 10 per cent of the carbon dioxide increase since 1900.
Clearly, human emissions of greenhouse gases played little role in causing this early warming. The mid-century period of slight cooling from 1945 to 1975 – referred to as the “grand hiatus” – also has not been satisfactorily explained.
Apart from these unexplained variations in 20th century temperatures, there is evidence that the global climate has been warming overall for the past 200 years, or even longer.
While historical data becomes increasingly sparse in the 19th century, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has assembled the available temperature data over land, back to 1760 in Graph 4.
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Australia’s hottest day?
Not 2010, BUT 1828 at a blistering 53.9 °C
Back before man-made climate change was frying Australia, when CO2 was around 300ppm, the continent savoured an ideal pre-industrial climate…….. RIGHT?
This is the kind of climate we are spending $10bn per annum to get back too….. Right again?
We are told today’s climate has more records and more extremes than times gone by, but the few records we have from the early 1800’s are eye-popping.
Things were not just hotter, but so wildly hot it burst thermometers.
The earliest temperature records we have show that Australia was a land of shocking heatwaves and droughts, except for when it was bitterly cold or raging in flood.
In other words, nothing has changed, except possibly things might not be quite so hot now!
Silliggy (Lance Pidgeon) has been researching records from early explorers and from newspapers.
What he’s uncovered is fascinating! It’s as if history is being erased!
For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.
In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks.
The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states.
Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days.
Links to documentary evidence (1)(2)(3)
The maximum at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight!
Use the several links below to read the news reports at the time for yourself ……
1. By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets.
2. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, thermometers recorded 109F at midnight.
3. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F.
4. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”.
5. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels).
6. Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains.
As reported at the time, the government felt the situation was so serious that to save lives and ease the suffering of its citizens they added cheaper train services:
What I found most interesting about this was the skill, dedication and length of meteorological data taken in the 1800′s. When our climate is “the most important moral challenge” why is it there is so little interest in our longest and oldest data?
Who knew that one of the most meticulous and detailed temperature records in the world from the 1800′s comes from Adelaide, largely thanks to Sir Charles Todd.
The West Terrace site in Adelaide was one of the best in the world at the time, and provides accurate historic temperatures from “Australia’s first permanent weather bureau at Adelaide in 1856″.
Rainfall records even appear to go as far back as 1839. Lance Pidgeon went delving into the National Archives and was surprised at what he found.
The media are in overdrive, making out that “the extreme heat is the new normal” in Australia.
The Great Australian Heatwave of January 2013 didn’t push the mercury above 50C at any weather station in Australia, yet it’s been 50C (122F) and hotter in many inland towns across Australia over the past century.
See how many are in the late 1800′s and early to mid 1900′s.
You can’t blame those high records on man-made global warming!
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