Home/Blog…we are the “Red Team”; the “Blue Team” has had their say since the late 1980s.
PREFACE: What follows are my own opinions, not seen by my four co-authors of the Dept. of Energy report just released, entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Starting sometime tomorrow, the comment docket at DOE will be open for anyone to post comments regarding the contents of that report. We authors will read all comments, and for those which are substantiative and serious, we will respond in a serious manner. Where we have made mistakes in the report, we will correct them. That is the formal process for adjudicating these issues. Regarding the informal process, tomorrow I expect we will agree on how to handle media requests to respond to objections from the few “climate alarmist” scientists that journalists usually turn to for such comments. To those journalists I would say: read our report, as journalists used to do; you might be surprised to learn a lot of the published science does not support what the public has been led (by you) to believe.
Yes, Increasing CO2 Causes a Warming Tendency in the Climate System… So What?
In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)
But there is a lot of room between those two extremes for the truth to reside. Among other things, our report presents the evidence supporting the view that (1) long-term warming has been weaker than expected; (2) it’s not even known how much of that warming is due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (3) there are good reasons to believe the warming and increasing CO2 effects on agriculture have so far been more beneficial than harmful to humanity; (4) there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions; and (5) the few dozen climate models now being used to inform policymakers regarding energy policy are not fit for purpose.
Those models, even after decades of improvement, still produce up to a factor of 3 disagreement between those with the least warming and with the most warming (and ALL produce more summertime warming in the critically-important U.S. Corn Belt than has been observed). How can models that are advertised to be based upon “basic physical principles” cause such a wide range of responses to increasing CO2?
And there are many more than those 5 elements contained in our report; those are just my favorites as I sit here thinking at 4:30 a.m.
One of the things we did not delve into was costs versus benefits of energy policies. Clearly, the politically popular switch to energy sources from only wind and solar involves large tradeoffs. If it were not so, there would already be a rapid transition underway from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Yes, those “renewable” sources are growing, and becoming less expensive. Yet, global energy demand is growing apace. But there are practical problems which make ideas such as “Net Zero emissions” essentially impossible to achieve. Maybe that will change in the distant future, who knows? I personally don’t really care where our energy comes from as long as it is abundant, available where it is needed, and is cost-effective. But I won’t buy an EV until it can transport me 920 miles in 14 hours during winter.
But I digress. Yes, recent warming is likely mostly due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. But is this necessarily a bad thing, in the net? Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. Increasing CO2 is causing global greening and contributing to increased agricultural yields. These are things that need to be part of the national conversation, and things our Report begins to address.
Virtually everyone on Earth endures huge changes in weather throughout the year, with as much as 130 deg. F swings in temperature. Can we really not adapt to 2 or 3 degrees more in the yearly average?
Sure, if we can “fix” the “problem” without sending us back to the Stone Age, then do it. But the public has been grossly misled about what that would entail in terms of human suffering (energy is required for literally everything we do), and they have been grossly misled about how much climate change has actually occurred. Read the report.
Why Would Climate Science Be Biased Toward a Specific Outcome?
I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere. And there was a lot of that pollution as late as the 1970s. In the 1960s during my family’s car trips between Iowa and Pennsylvania, every pass through Gary, Indiana was dreaded. You could see maybe one or two blocks away, because there was so much industrial pollution. I could not understand how anyone could live in those conditions.
Then the EPA was formed in 1970. Messes were cleaned up, on land, in the air, and in our waterways. We came to believe any environmental problem we created could be fixed.
Then we had the ozone depletion scare. With the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 the countries of the world agreed to gradually phase out production of chlorinated compounds that are believed to cause destruction of the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere.
Finally came the Big Kahuna of manmade pollution: Carbon Dioxide, and fears of global warming. By the late 1980s the U.N. formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the science of greenhouse gases and how they affect the climate system. Large amounts of federal funds went into this new area of science.
In the early 1990s I visited Robert (Bob) Watson at the White House who was Al Gore’s science advisor on environmental matters. Bob, a stratospheric chemist, was instrumental in getting the 1987 Montreal Protocol established. In that meeting, Bob remarked on the formation of the IPCC something to the effect of, “We are now regulating ozone-depleting chemicals, and carbon dioxide is next”.
I was astounded that the policy goal had already been decided, and now all we needed to do was to fund enough science to support that goal. That was how I interpreted his statement.
In the early years the IPCC was relatively unbiased in its assessments, and conclusions were tentative. All scientists, whether climate alarmists or skeptics, were allowed to participate. But as the years went by, those with skeptical viewpoints (e.g. John Christy) were no longer invited to participate as lead authors of IPCC report chapters.
Other scientists simply chose to stop participating because their science was being misrepresented (e.g. Chris Landsea from the National Hurricane Center, who thought the hurricane data did not support any human influences.)
Today, global warming is big business. According to Grok, since 1990 the U.S. Government has spent $120-$160 Billion on climate change research. As one of the NASA instrument lead scientists on “Mission to Planet Earth”, I was also a beneficiary of that funding, and most of my funding over the years has come from climate-related appropriations.
So, why is climate science biased? First, when we decided that essentially 100% of research funding would come from the government, we put politicians (and thus policy goals) either directly or indirectly in charge of that funding.
Second, Congress only funds problems to be studied… not non-problems. As President Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address, these forces could lead to a situation where “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.
That has now happened. We now have a marching army of scientists (myself included) whose careers depend upon that climate funding, and possibly trillions of dollars in renewable energy infrastructure in the private sector dependent upon the whims of government regulation and mandates. If the climate change threat were to disappear, so would the government grants and regulations and private investments.
As they say, follow the money.
I used to say there are two kinds of scientists in the world: male and female. (Now I’m probably not even allowed to say that). My point was that scientists are regular people. They have their own opinions and worldviews. I went into a science field because I thought science had answers. How naive of me. I should have been an engineer, instead. In the field of climate science (and many other sciences) two researchers can look at the same data and come to totally opposite conclusions. Your data can be perfect, but what the data mean in terms of cause and effect is often not obvious. With engineering, either it works or it doesn’t.
We proved this cause-vs-effect conundrum in the context of climate feedbacks (positive feedbacks amplify climate warming, negative feedbacks reduce it) back in 2011 in this paper. We showed that natural variations in clouds, if not accounted for, can make the climate system seem very sensitive (lots of warming) when in fact it is insensitive (little warming).
The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign. Who forced him? Well, from the Climategate emails we get a hint: as it was revealed by one of the “gatekeepers” of climate publications, “[name redacted by me] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
That same morning I was called by a particle physicist who heard all of this news and said something to the effect of, “What’s wrong with you climate guys? We have people who believe in string theory and those who don’t, but we still work together”. We both laughed over the divisive nature of climate science compared to other sciences.
Which tells you there is more than science — and even more than money — involved in the disagreement. Every environmental scientist I have ever met believes Nature is fragile. That is not a scientific view, but it is a view that colors how they interpret data, and then what they tell environmental news reporters as it is passed on to the public.
Finally, wouldn’t everyone like to work on something that can make a difference in the world? And what higher calling could there be than to Save the Earth™?
About unreliable “renewables” the economics was thoroughly studied by Google engineers few years ago. Google invested billions pursuing them (es: Ivanpah solar plant, among other things). Their conclusions? “Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work'”. You should add those findings in you report. Here the link I bookmarked, you should easily go to the source.
https://www.theregister.com/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/?page=2
“there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions”
IPCC is wrong?
It is an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial time, in particular for temperature extremes. Evidence of observed changes in extremes and their attribution to human influence (including greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions and land-use changes) has strengthened since AR5, in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including dry/hot events and fire weather). Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. {11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.6, 11.7, 11.8}
Regional changes in the intensity and frequency of climate extremes generally scale with global warming. New evidence strengthens the conclusion from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) that even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5°C) cause statistically significant changes in extremes on the global scale and for large regions (high confidence). In particular, this is the case for temperature extremes (very likely ), the intensification of heavy precipitation (high confidence) including that associated with tropical cyclones (medium confidence), and the worsening of droughts in some regions (high confidence).
What I stated was FROM THE IPCC. Read the report. You have been misled. -Roy
Dear Dr. Spencer,
Please accept my deepest condolences for your loss. I am truly amazed at your continued ability to produce high-level work during this time. I have followed your research, particularly your and Dr. Christy’s satellite temperature records, for decades. I also want to commend your common-sense perspective on CO2-induced climate change.
It raises a significant question: how can anyone definitively attribute recent warming trends? While a doubling of CO2 alone is estimated to cause approximately 1°C of warming, the extent of climate feedbacks remains largely uncertain. I have skimmed your new report and intend to read it much more carefully soon. I am curious to understand your reasoning behind attributing most of the recent warming to increases in CO2, and I ask this not necessarily as a disagreement, but out of genuine interest in your insights.
Respectfully,
Dave
I have a technical question. Any Climateball player should be able to guess who wrote which chapter, except for the one on sea level.
So, who wrote it, and is it the same author that has decided to talk about “neutralizing ocean alkalinity”?
We all contributed to each chapter, but a few chapters depended much more on one or 2 of the authors, due to their niche nature. But I take the blame when it comes to using “alkaline” then referring to ocean pH. I *THOUGHT* I had gotten all the references to “alkalinity” removed, because chemically that is something different from the oceans being alkaline, having to do with the pH buffering ability of seawater. So, we need to remember to fix that next time around.
If your “report” had been peer-reviewed, gross errors of this nature could have been caught. What other nuggets of error are there throughout the entire thing?
We all contributed to each chapter, but some chapters had one author who had the most experience. We all agreed “ocean acidification” was misleading. “Alkaline oceans” was what I insisted on as terminology… but I tried to remove all references to “ocean alkalinity”, which is a different issue (chemically) having to do with pH buffering ability. But from your comment it looks like at least one reference remained. So, that’s one of the needed fixes.
For my fairly new description marrying climate and political science on this all, in a what-how-why summary of three student-papers, search amazon.com/books for “climate-certainty trough”.
You might want to consider the one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant negative feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this is cheating logic and physics, but a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-climate-kill-switch-why-feedbacks-are-actually-negative
No, the models do not specify lapse rate. That’s why different models produce different lapse rate feedbacks. The fact that the (negative) correlation between lapse rate feedback and water vapor feedback across models is pretty strong is because POSITIVE WATER VAPOR FEEDBACK AMPLIFIES UPPER TROPOSPHERIC WARMING (NEGATIVE LAPSE RATE FEEDBACK).
Thx for your response.
As explained in the article, it is a simple mathematical problem. Either you “cheat” around it, or feedbacks turn negative. Theoretically if you look at an emagram, you should get ~1.7K of warming at average emission altitude for every 1K warming of the surface. Let us do the math:
255^4*5.67e-8 = 239.74
256.7^4*5.67e-8 = 246.2
246.4 – 239.74 = 6.46W/m2 dOLR per K warming of the surface.
You can also reduce this by Planck Feedback and get..
6.46 – 3.3 = 3.16W/m2 negative LRF
You can play around with this, try different assumptions on how much the lapse rate shrinks, or introduce multiple emission layers, but the problem prevails and can not be fixed. You get a dominant negative feedback. An LRF of only -0.5W/m2, as central estimate in AR6, would only be compatible with a negligible change in the lapse rate. But that is not what the models have.
Having trouble with comments appear, I’ll try again…
What you are seeing is the fact that all climate models have positive water vapor feedback. The stronger the water vapor feedback, the more the upper troposphere warms, which is stronger negative lapse rate feedback.
These are not “specified” in climate models. But they fact they tend to track together, and their sum remains fairly constant, is (in my opinion) evidence that the models’ convective parameterizations are all pretty similar. That doesn’t mean they are accurate, though.
Water vapor feedback still dominates in the models, and so the lack of a “hotspot” in the tropical upper troposphere in the observations means positive water vapor feedback is weaker than in the models.
I hope that makes sense.
I know, and I also know what the idea is based on: observation. More precisely the observed dOLR/dTs relation. So it has to be right. The problem is, what you see is not necessarilly what you believe to see, Plato’s cave allegory sends greetings.
If say the observed dOLR/dTs relation is 2.2W/m2 (with clear skies), as opposed to a Planck Feedback of 3.6W/m2, then the combination positive WV and negative LR feedback must have reduced OLR by 1.4W/m2. The question is just about the respective combination. Maybe it is 1.8 – 0.4, 2 – 0.6, or.. whatever. We know the total.
But this includes the assumption the lapse rate would behave as expected over variations of Ts by latitude, season or interannual. The assumption is wrong. Over these variations, the lapse rate is not negatively, but positively correlated to Ts. Dessler et al 2008 points that out, at least with regard to “latitude”:
“This result demonstrates the unsuitability of using variations in different regions in our present climate as a proxy for climate change.”
But it is equally true for seasonal variations and, although to a lesser degree, for interannual variations. The whole approach is nonsensical.
There is one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant negative feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this is cheating logic and physics, but a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-climate-kill-switch-why-feedbacks-are-actually-negative
pls. delete
There is one point that is crucial for climate sensitivity within climate models. They do not allow changes in the lapse rate to determine lapse rate feedback (LRF). If they did, this would generate a huge negative and dominant feedback, with ECS collapsing. Instead they do something else..
“Feedback parameters in climate models are calculated assuming that they are independent of each other, except for a well-known co-dependency between the water vapour (WV) and lapse rate (LR) feedbacks”
(AR6, p.978)
So LRF gets “coupled” with WV feedback and their sum is a hard coded ~1W/m2. I am afraid this goes against logic and physics, but is a total necessity to claim any substantial ECS.
This “report” is just another instance of the right-wing fixing facts to the policy.
Roy, you and your co-authors know that’s true. Not only did you rush to get it done with zero peer review, you know that its sole purpose is to provide “scientific” CYA for undoing the endangerment finding.
Any other claim is just pure nonsense. This “report” isn’t science, it’s a political screed.
It was reviewed by several scientists, and it is now open for public comment from anyone. We will respond to all substantive and serious comments. -Roy
Who were the “several scientists” that reviewed it? DIck and Willie?
Dr. Spencer
That was a good blog post! I have been reading the 5 person report and agree with much. I am the tiny middle you talk about. I think it is wrong to link every extreme weather event to climate change. When i look at past data i always see extreme weather events happening. I think this is the bad science when they try to link every severe weather to global warming of 1 C. I think attribution studies are voodoo science. Not a big fan. I do accept GHE as solid science and MOTRAN model (which is a good model that closely matches observations) cleary shows increasing CO2 will increase temperature (adding more insulation). The severe weather side is not sound evidence based science. It is more an emotional belief.
The reason MODTRAN “clearly shows increasing CO2 will increase temperatures” is because that’s how it’s programmed. The relevant acronym is “GIGO”.
He must have meant Motrin. MODTRAN is not raw data. Neither is UAH, but I trust its integrity.
This is a superb post. Roy, you’ve touched on nearly all things I decided are the big points since 2008 when I got deeply involved in understanding what climate change is all about.
The only two things I can think of off hand that you may have missed are James Hansen (though I don’t know what I would say about him) and the Holocene Warm Period (aka Climate Optimum) some 5,000-7,000 years ago. It was warmer then than it is now, yet we survived. That is the major thing that makes me confident we will survive the current warm period. (I’m not so sure about surviving the next glaciation.)
I’ll add a link to this from my climate WWW page. BTW, the last entry in my “Preservation” section are links to Chris Landsea’s resignation letter. Well worth saving.
Dr Spencer.
I read your post with interest.
While I may not agree with every conclusion in your report, I appreciate your willingness to challenge prevailing narratives and highlight underexamined aspects of the climate policy debate. There is indeed a wide middle ground between denial and alarmism, and we need more voices engaging there with clarity and rigor.
That said, I’m less convinced by the argument that the climate models’ variance alone invalidates their utility for policy forecasting; uncertainty does not necessarily imply unreliability, only the need for cautious interpretation.
Rgrds.
“The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign.”
For completeness here’s a link to the journal editor’s letter of resignation:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258547322_Taking_Responsibility_on_Publishing_the_Controversial_Paper_On_the_Misdiagnosis_of_Surface_Temperature_Feedbacks_from_Variations_in_Earth's_Radiant_Energy_Balance”_by_Spencer_and_Braswell_Remote_Sens
The key takeaway is, “the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents.”
“I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere.”
False memory syndrome. Science publications were 6:1 warming cooling.
Peterson, T. C., W. M. Connolley, and J. Fleck, 2008: THE MYTH OF THE 1970s GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 1325–1338, https://doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1.
From Peter Gwynne who wrote the seminal Newsweek story.
https://www.aip.org/inside-science/my-1975-cooling-world-story-doesnt-make-todays-climate-scientists-wrong
Jack,
I must suffer from the same false memory syndrome, except I didn’t read the Newsweek article then and I don’t trust _anything_ written by William Connolley.
My favorite article then was Science News’ “Chilling Possibilities,” https://www.sciencenews.org/archive/climate-change-chilling-possibilities – it may have been the first place I read about the meridional jet stream flow that is so tied to extreme weather, both recently and in my all-time favorite blizzard in 1978.
I see Peterson et al references the SN article and actually say some nice things about it. Perhaps the ratio of warming:cooling articles was 6:1, but I suspect more people read the SN article and others than any of the journal articles they reference. Which ones do you recommend we read?
Two things alleviated my concerns. First, I flew out to the west coast on a business trip and saw Ponderosa pine trees sticking above the snow. Perhaps the tundra wouldn’t lose snow cover some summer (a suggestion was that might trigger the new glaciation), but tree covered mountains certainly would capture enough heat to melt most of their snow.
The other was David Keeling Sr’s first paper with Mauna Loa data, released in 1976. My sister was working on her Marine biology PhD at MBL on at Woods Hole MA. That graph wound up getting included in just about every students’ papers that season! (Sigh – I finally found the image, but still haven’t gotten it online.) Still, the Blizzard of ’78 was truly awesome. (Oh – that was the New England blizzard, apparently the midwest blizzard was equally awesome, but it brought us rain that washed away a lot of the record snow from our storm before the blizzard. It was quite a year!
Finally, can you go into more about my false memory syndrome? It does turn out that a lot of people in New England completely forgot about the midwest blizzard – including some of the TV Mets! You can readily find my web pages on the storms. I spent some time with old Boston Globe and NY Times articles and I think I got things straightened out.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Roy and Everyone
RE: CO2 Has Caused No Warming Of Air Since 1920.
Please go to the late John Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “NA”, then page down to U.S.A.-Pacific. Finally, scroll down and click on “Death Valley”
The chart shows plots of temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station in Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca. 303 ppmv (0.59 g CO2/cu. m.) and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (0.73 g CO2/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature at this remote desert. The reason there was no increase in temperature at this arid desert is due to saturation of absorption of the out-going long wavelength IR light by the CO2 band at 667 wavenumbers. In 1920 the concentration of CO2 was 300 ppmv.
John Daly found over 200 weather stations located around the world that had no warming up to 2002. The many charts of temperature from weather stations falsify the hypothesis that the increasing concentration of CO2 in air causes an increase in air temperature and hence “global warming”. How is it that the climate scientist community did not know of John Daly’s website?
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently 439 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has mass of 1.29 kg and contains 0.86 g of CO2 at STP. There is too little CO2 in air to have any effect on weather and climate.
RE: The Saturation of the Absorption of IR Light by CO2.
After a search on this topic, I found this paper:
“The Saturation of Infrared Absorption by Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere” by Dieter Schildknecht. He shows that the absorption of IR light CO2 becomes saturated when the concentration of CO2 in air reaches 300 ppmv. This means that an increase in the concentration of CO2 in air above 300 ppmv will not result in an increase in air temperature and there is no need to control or reduce the emission of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.
URL: https://arixiv.org/pdf/2004.00708v1 or
URL: https://arixiv.org/abs/2004.00708
Roy, you should send copies of my comment to the other members of the committee.
As much as I appreciate the effort of these five, I would have liked to have seen some physicists included. But, even with physicists you have to be careful. You might end up with someone like Pierrehumbert, who has claimed Sun could heat Earth to 800,000K! Like all of the climate science industry, he doesn’t understand radiative physics or thermodynamics.
So when I say physicists, I mean REAL physicists.
Steve Koonin is a physicist. Except for Ross McKitrick (economist and statistician), the rest of us were trained in the physics that matter to the atmosphere and climate: thermodynamics, radiative transfer, etc.
REAL physicists.
I agree.
Not ones who do not understand the WDL.
Ask a cosmonaut who observes the Earth from space if he is surprised how thin the troposphere is with its clouds, where all weather phenomena occur. In contrast, the pressure of the stratosphere and its influence on circulation is underestimated in winter.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_int/