A Short Critique of Climate Change. Jr. Elgin L Hushbeck
2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.
The Fourth Assessment Report was in 2007, so this sounds impressive as the IPCC defines extremely likely as “over 95%.” Yet there is the Hiatus or the Pause, i.e., the fact that warming stopped in the mid-1990’s and did not start up again until 2015, and this was likely due to the beginning of an El Nino, not CO2 emissions. The first question becomes how could they be so confident in 2014 that human actions caused most of the warming, when the planet had not been warming for over 16 years by that point? How could the evidence that we cause the planet to warm grow, when the planet was not warming?
The Hiatus is so problematic, some supporters try to deny it even exists, but many scientists who support Climate Change know it happened and have attempted to explain it in such a way as to be consistent with Climate Change theories. An article in the January 15, 2014 edition of Nature titled, “Climate change: The case of the missing heat” is just one of many trying to solve the problem caused by the Hiatus.
The basic problem is that Climate Change, which is based on computer models of the climate, predicted we would warm, but we did not. Normally this would call the models and thus the theory into question, but that never seems to happen with Climate Change. So, the question becomes; where did the heat go?
There have been numerous suggestions put forth. The Nature article above being just one of many. It looked to the oceans, suggesting, “perhaps” the El Niño of 1997–98 tipped “the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.” Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t. Maybe the explanation is in one of the other theories put forth, or perhaps, maybe, there just wasn’t any warming.
As the Hiatus went on and became more uncomfortable (how do you proclaim the danger of warming when there is no warming) other scientists went back over the data and wouldn’t you know it, they found there had in fact been warming. This is not surprising as there are a tremendous number of assumptions that must be made in these calculations. In fact, this is one of the problems as things are so complex and there are so many variables and unknowns, all it takes is a few tweaks to a few variables and you get a different answer.
For example, it is well known there are Urban Heat islands, i.e. when people come together in groups they warm up the immediate area. It can get fairly cold (-30 F) in the winter where I live. My car gives me the outside temperature and as I drive through different municipalities I notice the temperature rise as much as 10 degrees for larger towns (-29 to -19 for example) only to fall back down again as I leave. The increase is not as much in smaller towns, as larger towns produce more heat than smaller ones.
Over the last century many cities have grown with the result that thermometers that were once outside the city and its heat, are now inside the city with it warmer temperatures. These thermometers will show an increase, not because the climate has warmed, but simply due to the fact that the city has expanded to surround the thermometer. This artificial increase, while significant to the local area, is insignificant to the global temperature and must be estimated so it can be removed. How big is this? It changes from city to city and even then the effect is not constant. On windy days the difference between country and city will be small, if it exists at all. Considering the warming we are supposedly seeing from Climate Change is a tiny fraction of the warming of the Urban Heat Effect, it does not take much of a change in the estimate to go from warming to cooling.
The Urban Heat Effect is only one of the many factors that must be estimated in order to reach a global temperature. In the mid-1990s satellites were launched that could measure the global temperature. These satellites would not be affected by many of the sources of error affecting terrestrial measurements, so they were heralded at the time by supporters as being able to definitively show the earth was warming. Yet when the satellite data started coming in, no warming has was seen. Climate Change supporters now believe their launch just happened to coincide with the beginning of the Hiatus. For skeptics, this raises questions about the earlier claims of warming.
Some supporters now claim after looking over the data again, we had in fact warmed a little. But had we? Or does the ability to go back and find warming just cast even more doubt on the pre-satellite data? We are left with some scientists accepting the Hiatus and proposing various theories as to where the missing heat went, while others reevaluated the data and claim to have found some warming after all.
A key problem is that oceans along with the atmosphere and clouds all play a huge role in climate, much of which we simply do not yet understand. We have a major phenomenon, the Hiatus, which so far has not been explained and there are many conflicting views. Given the models were all wrong, and the uncertainty about exactly what happened, how does this square with a claim of 95% confidence? Frankly, it amounts to “We are 95% sure humans are the cause of the warming that should be there but for some unknown reason isn’t, but rest assured we do have some theories and one of those might explain it.”
While it is a bit more complex than this, basically in science the accuracy of an answer or prediction cannot be better than the inputs. I would know instantly there was a problem with your claim, if I give you a tool that could measure length to plus or minus 0.25 inches, and using that tool you claimed to have measured some sticks and came up with a total length of 33.24385489 inches.
When applied to the climate, the bottom line is we do not really know what is going on with the missing heat, or if in fact there was missing heat, or even much about how the oceans really affect the climate. It was only in the year 2000 that the Argo project began deploying a network of 3000 “floats” to measure the temperature and salinity of just the upper 2000 feet of the oceans. This is certainly a great improvement. As the Argo web site points out,
Lack of sustained observations of the atmosphere, oceans and land have hindered the development and validation of climate models. An example comes from a recent analysis which concluded that the currents transporting heat northwards in the Atlantic and influencing western European climate had weakened by 30% in the past decade. This result had to be based on just five research measurements spread over 40 years. Was this change part of a trend that might lead to a major change in the Atlantic circulation, or due to natural variability that will reverse in the future, or is it an artifact of the limited observations?
Still, while Argo is a great improvement, with 139 million square miles of ocean surface, that is only one float for every 46,566 square miles, which is the size of the States of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. A lot can, and does, happen in 46,566 square miles a single sensor simply misses. If this was the visibility we had on land, we would be unaware of all but the biggest weather events, and things like tornados might still be unknown. And this is assuming an even distribution, which there is not. Supporters must argue that the smaller events and processes that are missed are unimportant and can be ignored, but is this really true?
We do not know why the Hiatus occurred and there are many theories. “Perhaps” it was the oceans? Perhaps something else. We really know little about the oceans and their role in the climate, let alone the atmosphere and clouds. So how could any scientist claim 95% certainty? Scientifically they cannot. You cannot start from this much uncertainty and end up at 95% certainty. Therefore, this is not a claim based on science, ultimately this is a political statement, and in this we gain another insight into the problem.
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