Written evidence submitted by the Scottish Climate and Energy Forum (IPC0048)

For 30 years from 1910 to 1940 it warmed by 0.48C. This must be largely natural
For 30 years from 1970 to 2000 it warmed by 0.48C. This must be largely natural
This is said by the IPCC to be unprecedented and so must be man-made

Produced by Mike Haseler BSc. MBA
for the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum

Introduction

In Star Trek the motion picture, a mysterious and immensely powerful alien cloud called V'Ger approaches Earth, destroying everything in its path. The Starship enterprise (the pinnacle of human technology) is sent out to investigate this cloud. The Enterprise penetrates the cloud only to be confronted by a vessel so advanced and so massive that it could not possibly hope to win a fight. The super advanced alien technology and power is so overwhelming that it not only swallows the Enterprise whole, but could have swallowed a whole fleet of such ships. Travelling further into the vessel, the crew finally come to the heart of the ship, where to their surprise, they do not find a super-complex “alien being”, but instead something very human, very old, very fragile, very simple and ultimately quite meaningless within its context: the Voyager probe.

This is a very good analogy for the IPCC. The IPCC present an argument on climate and energy which looks as if it is mysterious and “scientific” and filling hundreds of pages must be immensely powerful and sophisticated. But at its heart is a a very simple, human, fragile and ultimately meaningless argument:

It is warming – we (public sector academics) don't know why most of the change occurred, but we can't think of a better reason than all that man-made CO2, from private business and so we think they should stop.

Just as the alien intelligence in the film was hugely technologically advanced, but in the end unable to answer a simple question about its own existence, so the IPCC is a massive machine thirsting for knowledge about the climate, but for all their endeavours they have been defeated by the simplest question: “what causes climate to change”?

But unlike “V'ger” who does attempt to answer the fundamental question about its “creator”, the IPCC do not. Instead almost the entire output of the IPCC is consumed by other two questions that are largely irrelevant if they cannot answer the fundamental question about the causes of climate change. The first is akin to the proverbial “when did you last beat your wife”. Or in this case: “how much warming are humans causing”. Like the “when did you last beat your wife” question, the question contains an implicate assertion: that warming is caused by humans. The rest of the IPCC output is in the form “it will warm … so what WILL happen to ... hurricanes, droughts, floods, pests, plagues, rivers or blood, etc.”

But from a policy maker's point of view there are three key questions one should ask about the IPCC output:

• Do they know enough about the climate to model it with enough accuracy to predict what will happen?

• If they can predict the climate, can they determine the effects?

• Is there a good basis for government action? Is there any human activity where we are reasonably certain that the harm caused from the activity is so much greater than the benefits of that activity, that it justifies the cost of acting to end the activity? That is:

harm-from-activity > Benefits-of-activity + cost-to-act-to-end-activity

To all three questions, the answer is no! Or largely no!

First, whilst the IPCC will assert time and time that it understands the climate, the simple fact is that all they know about the global climate is encapsulated in their models, of which not one predicted the current “pause” in global temperatures.

Second, as the IPCC cannot predict even the coarsest variables of the climate (temperature), it is obvious that it would be all but impossible for them to predict the finer detail of the effect of human activity, except in one respect: CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Hidden in the detail of the IPCC report is a simple fact: that almost all experts (& sceptics) are agreed that the greenhouse effect of CO2 would cause about 1C rise in global temperature for a doubling over a century. However this good science is a small part of the theory of what is called “global warming”. As the cover image shows, the greenhouse effect of CO2 does not explain 20th century warming nor does it support the vast bulk of IPCC predictions on temperature or climate.

Third, using standard economic scenarios (not dreamt up figures of discount rates as used by Stern), even at the very highest predicted rates of warming, the costs of any action far outweighs the harm done: to the economy by removing cheap energy; to society through rise fuel bills and rising winter deaths, and to the environment by the industrialisation of the countryside through windmills which many rightly call “bird mincers”.

Natural Variation

The reason why the IPCC fail to understand climate is very simple. As an electronic engineer I understand that even the simplest component in the simplest circuit has noise. This is true of the climate, but ...

… the IPCC do not understand noise or natural variation.

And as a result, and unlike any real system or models used by the engineers who understand the real world is full of noise, the climate models do not include within them any concept of noise. How can this be? The real world is full of noise, but not the climate models!

But, natural variation or noise was stated in the first IPCC report as the null hypothesis:

We take a conservative view as a starting point namely that the magnitude of natural variability is such that all of the warming of the past century could be attributed to this cause (Note that this is not the same as denying the existence of an enhanced greenhouse effect)1

So the question we must ask is this: “can the effect of the rise in CO2 in the 20th century be distinguished from the normal level of natural variation”. The answer is clear and even the Met Office admit that:

With the driftless model [ARIMA(3,1,0)], ... the rise in temperatures since 1880 is not significant.2

This conclusion is supported by numerous pieces of evidence. The most obvious is shown by a comparison shown on the cover of the period from 1910-1940 with that of the period of “man-made” warming from 1970-2000. This shows the two are identical. The first is generally accepted to be largely natural, so a similar level of warming over a similar period within the same century is not only not unprecedented, but entirely normal and to be expected.

This is backed up by more technical appraisals by Green et al:

Policy-makers need to know whether prediction is possible and, if so, whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantially more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. An inspection of global temperature data suggests that temperature is subject to irregular variations on all relevant time scales, and that variations during the late 1900s were not unusual.3

As well as direct evidence from ice cores by Thomas et al:

The record shows that this region has warmed since the late 1950s, ... however, this warming trend is not unique. More dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, suggesting that at present, the effect of anthropogenic climate drivers at this location has not exceeded the natural range of climate variability in the context of the past ~300 years.4

Neither the IPCC nor those like the UK Met Office who contribute to it, have shown any ability to predict the main variable of this global warming namely: global temperature. This is shown by the following:

• In the 1970s climate academics predicted global cooling. This did not happen. Indeed, I believe the reason CO2 warming was thought to be so high was because the IPCC in 1990 was in effect blaming rising CO2 for “hiding the cooling” from their own failed prediction of global cooling.

• No climate modeller predicted the current “pause” in global temperature.

• All the IPCC reports have predicted surface temperature that have proven to be consistently higher than recorded and recorded temperature is now below the range of predicted temperature given IN ALL THE IPCC REPORTS.

• The UK Met Office (considered by itself to be the foremost global warming forecasting unit) produced a series of yearly global temperature predictions. These were almost always high to such an extent, that based on the Met Office's own probabilities, I calculate that there was less than a 1 in 10,000 chance that forecasts were so poor just be chance. These “forecasts” did not produce significantly better forecasts than simply using the temperature in the last year and the yearly error was larger than the predicted warming.

• Similarly, the UK Met Office also produced a decadal global warming prediction of 0.3C temperature rise from 2004 to 2014. It has not warmed significantly in this period.

The climate modellers have not shown any skill in predicting global temperature. It is therefore reasonable to conclude, unless or until evidence is shown to the contrary, that they cannot predict global temperature.

Therefore, for all the complexity of their argument, for all the massive bulk of the “vessel” in which they deliver their message, for all the massive effort that has been undertaken to assess how a temperature rise would effect the planet and undoubtedly some of it by the very best scientists in their area, at the core of the IPCC is a simple belief which is not grounded in science: that they understand the climate well enough to predict it.

The sum total of all that the IPCC know is contained in these climate models. These models have proven incapable of predicting the climate, therefore for all the IPCC claim to know about the climate, the truth is that they know diddly squat!

Whilst the IPCC reports are overflowing with measurements of climate & with the predictions of impacts, they are devoid of science to back the warming predictions. I think the fact the science is only limited to the greenhouse effect of CO2, is deliberately hidden from policy-makers.

As such, given the huge uncertainty which I would argue makes it impossible to predict global temperature beyond the direct CO2 greenhouse effect, one must ask why this is not apparent from the IPCC reports which do not distinguish between CO2 warming and feedbacks. What one would expect to see from a careful consideration of the evidence is a hierarchy of confidence. We should expect to see a clear demarcation between those assertions which are scientific, and those which are not.

Foundation

The foundation of science is careful measurement in which we rightly have high confidence. In climate research this foundation is the measurement of meteorological data such as temperature and e.g. CO2.

Adjusted & homogenised data

As thermometer were not at every location on the earth (particularly at the poles) we can only estimate a global temperature from this network. In 2001 the first IPCC report gave a range for 20th century warming of between 0.4C and 0.8C.

CO2 greenhouse warming

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Using spectral data for the sun, CO2 and other gases it is possible to work out the likely heat trapping effect of CO2 in what is called the “Greenhouse effect”. The estimates of the greenhouse effect of CO2 vary. A typical figure is about 1C but estimates go from 0.65C by Prof Herman Harde5 up to the 1.2C by Hansen6 & Bony7 used by the IPCC8. However, for such a key it is remarkable that only one report (AR4) states a figure for the temperature rise from CO2 and even this is hidden under a very opaque subject heading:

8.6.2.3 What Explains the Current Spread in Models’ Climate Sensitivity Estimates?

“...to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating (but allowing for the enhanced radiative cooling resulting from the temperature increase), the global warming from [climate models] would be around 1.2°C”

For a problem portrayed as “CO2 warming”, for which the solution is to “cut down on CO2 output” for which the only scientific basis of warming is this 1C of CO2 warming

… is there a clearer case of hiding a key figure from policy makers?

If the IPCC report is intended to support a policy of reducing
CO2 warming from the greenhouse effect,
why isn't this the most prominent figure in the report?

Positive Feedbacks – the failed layer.

The greenhouse effect of CO2 is based on well established science using the HITRAN database which is compiled from laboratory data. However as shown on the cover diagram, this effect is far too small to have caused the 20th century warming. So climate researchers include in their models “enhancements” which are not based on proven science except in so far as the models require them, because without these feedbacks the models would not look anything like the actual recorded global temperature.

However, since the inclusion of these feedbacks is justified by the need for the models to have feedbacks in them to fit past data, then it is inherent in that justification that the models MUST fit future data. And if the models do not fit future data as has occurred with “the pause” this invalidates the inclusion of these feedbacks.

Fig 1: Comparison of yearly HadCru & UAH data with IPCC 1990 predictions

The key justification for having these feedbacks, which are not otherwise proven in any scientific way, is that the models must fit the actual global temperature. So a key question for this inquiry is this:

Have the IPCC, or any like the Met Office advising them, shown the ability to select a measurement of global temperature and forecast it even one year in advance?

The argument: Any weak link breaks the chain!

There is no doubt in my mind that the argument that “human CO2 must be stopped” is false. This is because there are so many tenuous links to this argument that even if one link in the “chain” is wrong, even one broken link, breaks the chain.

To take a simple example. If it were found that the level of CO2 is largely determined by surface temperature, so that the recent changes in the atmospheric level of CO2 were not caused by man, but were instead a natural response to a natural change in global temperature (as has occurred in the past), then it would not matter if all the other steps about the warming effect of CO2, predictions of damage, etc. were true, the whole argument is wrong because the one step is wrong.

This also means, that even if every step in the argument is very likely to be true (for example an 85% confidence), that the overall argument is very likely to be false (14%). For the (12 step) argument below, this can be expressed mathematically as follows:

probability (argument being right) = probability (each step being right) 12

= 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85

Probability (argument being right) = 0.14

The link in the argument chain for CO2 causation:

1. Do we know the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere?
Reliable data is only available from 1958.

2. What was human contribution to rising CO2?

(a) How much CO2 do humans cause to be emitted into atmosphere?
Difficult to quantify globally.

(b) How much CO2 do humans cause to be absorbed?
Some activity reduces CO2 by e.g. introducing nitrogen into waters that increase plant growth and take in CO2.

(c) How much do natural processes absorb & emit into atmosphere?
Over 90% of all CO2 flows both into and out of the atmosphere are natural. In historic time series, CO2 rises in response to increasing temperatures. Temperature appears to drive CO2 levels. It is therefore quite possible that all man-made CO2 can be absorbed, so that whether or not we produced any CO2, that changes in atmospheric levels would occur naturally as a result of naturally changing temperature (as has occurred naturally many times).

(d) What is the net human contribution to rising CO2?
The IPCC assert that all the rise is human. Prof Murry Salby9 has shown this assertion is false and that at least in part the change must be natural. And at a local level it is known naturally CO2 levels increase in warmer period in S. America due to ENSO.

3. What will be the human contribution to CO2 in atmosphere?

(a) How much human activity is there? (Economic estimates)

(b) How much CO2 will be produced? (Energy usage estimates)

(d) Based on above, what will be human induced increase in CO2?

4. What will be the temperature change due to the “greenhouse” effect of CO2

(a) Based on the measured absorption properties of CO2, what will be the net change in energy flow to the earth?
The IPCC give a figure of about 0.015 Wm-2 ppmv-1 (using formula 5.35 x ln (C / C0)) but the figure of 5.35 is out of date and based on an out of date spectral database. Prof. Hermann Harde5 has used a more recent database and obtained a figure 30% lower.

(b) What is the relationship between changes in energy flow and surface temperature?

Assuming the earth is a black body the figure is: 0.27 K W-1 m2

Based on the radiative data for CO2 most people agree that the earth will warm about 1C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 although estimates vary in the range between 0.65 to 1.2C

5. Do we know how much the temperature rose in e.g. the 20th century?

20th century warming is given as about 0.6C to 0.8C.

6. How much of this was due to the greenhouse effect of CO2?

(a) What was the change in CO2 in the 20th century?
CO2 was measured at 369ppm in 2000 and estimated at about 290ppm in 1900. The change in the 20th century was about 79ppm

(b) How much was due to mankind?

The IPCC would say all of it. This is almost certainly wrong as shown by Prof Salby9.

Using figures from (4), the estimated warming is 0.35C = {0.27 x 5.35 x ln(369/290)}

7. How much of the rise was natural?
The IPCC effectively have a position that not only is the 20th century warming man-made, but that any natural variation has countered and hidden man-made warming. This is shown by the way that even in the first IPCC report (with the lowest predicted warming) their predicted warming was significantly higher than the current trend. This scale of prediction can be explained if they expected about 0.07C/decade additional cooling which they perceived as being added to observed warming.

However, the reality is that in the last 15 or so years the climate has not warmed contrary to all the IPCC model predictions. This shows that even if there were man-made warming as large as they suggest, then there is also natural variation of the same scale whose cooling influence exactly matches their predicted warming.

Perhaps more importantly even the Met Office have admitted that there is a statistical test that shows the 20th century warming cannot be distinguished from noise. 2

8. Are there feedbacks? If so, how large?
Asserting that the 20th century warming is due to humans (as well as “hidden” warming of as much as 0.07C/decade) the IPCC are in affect claiming there must be “feedbacks” without needing to prove them. The true nature of these unproven and therefore unscientific feedbacks are hidden from policy makers. But as fig 2 shows their effect is massive and dominates the warming predictions. They mean that a greenhouse effect of doubling CO2 over the next century which can be calculated as about 1C is multiplied up by these unproven feedback effects by 1.5x to 5.5x. So, for each 1C of warming from the greenhouse effect, there is up to an additional 4.5C being caused by these unproven “feedbacks”.

This is a ridiculous figure which if true would mean that the 0.35C of greenhouse warming over the 20th century had caused 1.9C warming of which 1.55C must be natural cooling – making natural variation much much larger than man-made effects.

9. Can they predict the rise in temperature from CO2?

I do not think the temperature predictions is determined by CO2 warming. As such it is doubtful that if a different figure of CO2 warming is used, that the predicted warming figures would be different. This is because these are largely based on the inference:

              GREENHOUSE-EFFECT x FEEDBACK = OBSERVED-WARMING-TREND

So if the CO2 effect is 30% smaller (as suggested by Harde5) then the feedbacks would be changed to be 30% larger so that the models matched the observed warming. This means the predicted warming is largely given by the following:

              PREDICTED-WARMING-TREND = GREENHOUSE-EFFECT x FEEDBACK
or
              PREDICTED-WARMING-TREND = OBSERVED-WARMING-TREND

So predicted trend is largely independent of the actual greenhouse effect of CO2. This may explain why the CO2 greenhouse effect is so unimportant to the IPCC, that the actual temperature change from CO2 greenhouse warming has only been stated once in any IPCC report and then it was effectively hidden from policy makers.

10. What are the predicted effects of this rise in terms of severe weather rising sea level etc.

(a) When does warming stop being beneficial?
There are known benefits such as the beneficial effect of CO2 on plant growth and warmer temperatures on winter deaths. Global temperatures have always varied and typically historians have linked colder periods to historical problems. So, initially we expect warming to be beneficial, but at what temperature will this end?

(b) What is the cost of these predicted effects?
Largely unknown but estimates always seem to the worst possible scenario and the positive benefits such as CO2 being a plant food and winter deaths are ignored?

(c) What is the cost of reducing CO2?
Even at the highest levels of warming, Lord Monckton10 has calculated that it vastly more expensive to act on CO2 than to wait to see whether problems arise.

(d) Even if costs of acting are less than costs of impacts, can we actually do anything?

All economic activity consumes energy. Therefore anything we attempt to do such as manufacturing wind or Solar PV consumes vast amounts of energy which in turn release CO2. Some estimate this is greater than the CO2 reduction.

(e) Even if we can do anything is the current policy favouring wind the answer?
Even if we needed to reduce CO2, it is doubtful the current policies are “the answer” as much of the policy around 2000 was driven by the wind developers for the wind developers.

(f) If we can increase temperature, can't we geo-engineering a way to reduce it?.
Could we e.g. just carry on as we are … and in a very simplistic way “explode a few nuclear bombs” causing the so called nuclear winter.

11. Even if the benefits exceed the cost, what is the opportunity cost?
Could we spend the money of better things like e.g. a cure for cancer. In other words, would future generations prefer we had invested in a cure for cancer or trying to reduce warming?

12. And lastly even if it’s financially a good idea, is it morally right?
Is it right that the poorest in society are for example denied fuel in Scotland where there are estimates that 50% are in fuel poverty. Is it right that we ask the poor of today to sacrifice in order to make the richer part of the richer society of the future even richer?

And what if the real solution were found to be to cut the world population? A logical solution would be for us all to continue using the same amount of fossil fuel but cut the number of people. But would it be morally right to e.g. sterilise a significant proportion of women to prevent population growth?

Are there some things where morality means we have to put up with minor problems like some small amounts of warming even if there is an overall benefit to society from acting?