APEC member nations will not accept greenhouse gas emission targets to fight global climate change and creating energy-efficient economies is the way forward, Australia's environment minister said Saturday. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum will focus on improving energy efficiency instead of setting specific gas emission reduction targets as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol did, Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "Most of the fast-growing industrializing economies, China being the classic case ... are not going to agree to binding targets on the basis of the Kyoto model," Turnbull said.
The comments came a day after the environmental group Greenpeace said it obtained a proposed draft declaration circulated by Australia among APEC member states ahead of September's annual meeting in Sydney. The draft, viewed by The Associated Press on Friday, said Asia-Pacific governments have been asked to improve energy efficiency and increase forest cover throughout the region to stop climate change. However, no mention was made of mandatory targets to cut the amount of heat-trapping gasses released by human activity into the atmosphere.
Greenpeace criticized the plan saying without binding limits, climate change will continue unchecked. "Business needs certainty and setting targets that mean people generally need to do better just aren't going to happen," Greenpeace energy campaigner Ben Pearson said Saturday.
Turnbull said focusing on energy efficiency - such as redesigning buildings so they are less reliant on electric lighting and air conditioning - was the way forward. "The battle against global warming occurs on many fronts," he said. "If you use 25 percent less energy to get the same amount of economic product, then you've naturally ... made a very significant decrease in the amount of CO2."
According to the draft, APEC would agree to "work toward the goal" of reducing energy intensity - the amount of energy used to create a gross domestic product - by 25 percent by 2030. It also described an "aspirational goal" of expanding forest cover across the APEC region by 20 million hectares by 2020.
Pearson described the energy efficiency plan as "business as usual," saying improved efficiency is inevitable in a growing economy...
Source. FULL DRAFT DOCUMENT here
At last: A detailed Critique of the Lockwood & Froechlich Paper
Mike Lockwood and Claus Froehlich published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society which concludes that the Sun could not be responsible for the global temperature rise over the last twenty years. The BBC published a news story on the paper dated July 10, 2007.
Cosmic rays vary over an 11 year cycle with the sunspot cycle. Dr. Svensmark developed a theory that the Sun is a significant driver of climate change through its effects on the cosmic ray flux and cloud cover. The increased solar wind and magnetic field during times of high sunspot count repels cosmic rays that otherwise would hit the Earth's atmosphere, resulting is less aerosols in the lower atmosphere and thereby reducing low cloud formation. Fewer low clouds allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface causing warming.
The BBC article presents this graphic:
The BBC article is misleading because the graph titled "Cosmic ray count" is not of cosmic rays (neutrons) count at all. It is the result of a mathematical manipulation to eliminate the 11 year cosmic ray cycle. The curve is taken from the Lockwood paper. The actual cosmic ray count from the Climax neutron monitor is shown as the blue curve below.
Note that the cosmic ray count shown above is identical to that given in the Svensmark paper shown below. The red curve shown below is the cosmic ray count variation. The blue line shows variations in global cloud cover.
The Lockwood paper is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. The paper states "Hence, all solar trends since 1987 have been in the opposite direction to those seen or inferred in the majority of the twentieth century—particularly in the first half of that century".
This is not true for cosmic rays which shows very low counts during the 1990-1991 solar maximum; lower counts than the previous three cycles. This would have caused warming during the 1990's. The paper states "The Earth’s surface air temperature does not respond to the solar cycle."
This is false; the earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies. The 11 year solar cycle is clearly shown in sediment cores obtained from Effington Inlet, Vancouver Island, B.C. by Dr. Tim Patterson, and in records of the Nile River, to name just two studies.
The paper continues with "Even a large amplitude modulation would be heavily damped in the global mean temperature record by the long thermal time constants associated with parts of the climate system, in particular the oceans (Wigley & Raper 1990)."
This is true. The oceans act as a hugh climate flywheel, which both smoothes and delays the effects of the climate forcings. Global temperatures do not react strongly to each 11 year cycle, but are smoothed out. Here is the World 1970 - 2006 land and sea-surface temperature data from HadCRUT3 database.
You can clearly see that when the cosmic ray counts are high, there is a temperature drop, 1974-77, 1986-87, 1995-97, and 2004 - 2006. The pink straight line best fit indicates 0.1880 Celsius per decade.
The Lockwood paper manipulates the cosmic ray count data to eliminate the 11 year cycle by extrapolating between the nodes of the cycles. The nodes are points where the top part of the cycle has the same mean as the lower part, approximately the midpoint of each cycle. The result is the "Cosmic ray count" graph shown in the BBC article and reproduced above. Note that this reveals a 22 year cycle. But totally eliminating the 11 year cycle implies that the damping effect of the oceans is near infinite, which would also eliminate a 22 year cycle, or any other cycle length. If the oceans really had a near infinite heat capacity, it would absorb all effects of the Sun and CO2 changes and global temperatures would not change! Lockwood essentially applies a 100% damping to the 11 year cycle but 0% damping to the 22 year cycle, which is complete nonsense.
The ocean's flywheel damping effect means that the temperature today is effected by the Suns activity over the last many years. The 2006 global temperature is effected mostly by the 2006 Sun's intensity, but also by the Sun's activity in previous years. Even the Sun's activity 20 years ago has an effect on the current temperature.
Below is a graph showing a hypothetical increase followed by a decrease in the Sun's forcing, and the resulting temperature change. The graph is only for illustrative purposes to show the climate smoothing and time lag effects on temperature. The units are arbitrary. Here I assume the temperature of a given year is effected by the Sun's forcing over the previous 24 years such that each prior year has 85% of the weighting of the next year.
Note that the temperature continues to rise for several years after the Sun's forcing starts to decrease.
The Lockwood paper falsely assumes that the current Sun activity would have an immediate effect on temperature without a time lag. One should expect a time lag based on the length of the variation cycle. For example, each day the Sun's intensity peaks at noon but daily temperatures peak several hours later. Each year the Sun's intensity peaks at June 21, but July and August are the warmest months in the northern hemisphere.
The 11 year solar cycle causes about a 2 year lag in the temperature variation. The Sun's activity has been increasing though most of the twentieth century and one should expect about a decade of time lag. The graph below from here show the rising solar flux during most of the twentieth century.
Since the cosmic ray count was a minimum in 1991 (the 2001-2002 minimum count was higher) we expect the temperature to increase for about a decade to about 2001 before falling. This is exactly what has happened!
All climatologists should know the the heat capacity of the oceans cause a large time lag in temperature response. The IPCC fourth assessment report includes computer model projections that show if the CO2 concentration is held constant at year 2000 levels, the global temperature will continue to rise over the next two decades. The same effect occurs for Sun activity as CO2.
Lockwood compares the cosmic ray (with the 11 year cycle removed) to a smoothed surface temperature graph. The Sun's climate forcings should be compared to the actual temperature curves, which show no increase in global temperatures since 2002.
The surface temperatures used by Lockwood are contaminated by the heat island effects and numerous quality control issues related to the individual station measurements and spatial placements. Lockwood should use the MSU (Microwave Sounding Units) satellite data which is truly a global measure of temperatures, as it is the troposphere temperature, and is not contaminated by the heat island effect.
The theory of CO2 temperature change shows that the enhanced greenhouse effect would increase temperatures faster in the troposphere where temperatures are cold and the water vapour content is low. All the climate models show that the troposphere temperatures should increase faster than the surface temperatures, especially in the tropics. The graph below shows the temperature in the tropics.
The three curves are scaled so that the average of the first 5 years are the same. The GHCN curve is the land only surface temperature trend. It shows the highest rate of increase because it is contaminated by the heat island effect. The HadCRUT3 curve is the land and sea surface temperature trend. It is lower that the GHCN curve because the sea temperature data does not have any heat island effect. If the Sun had little effect on climate and CO2 was responsible for the twentieth century temperature rise, both of these curves should show a lower warming trend than the MSU, troposphere temperature, curve! It is illogical to believe that CO2 is the primary temperature driver and concurrently believe that the surface measurements are accurate.
The Lockwood paper only analyses the last 30 years of data which is too short of a time interval. A system that has 11 year cycles requires at least 110 years (10 cycles) of data to obtain meaningful statistical results.
The paper says in the conclusions "... there was a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century". The BBC article quote Lockwood "It [the cosmic ray effect] might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate; but you cannot apply it to what we're seeing now, because we're in a completely different ball game." The paper fails to explain what laws of physics have recently changed.
Solar activity correlates well with temperature over longer time scales. The graph below from Scafetta and West of Duke University compares solar proxies with the Northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction by Moberg et al. [2005].
Solar activity can account for at least 50% of the warming since 1900. It is likely that both the Sun/Cosmic rays and CO2 emissions are affecting climate.
In summary, the Lockwood paper is seriously flawed by:
1. It falsely says the Sun's influence peaked by 1987. The cosmic ray count in 1991 is the lowest it has ever been, causing warming.
2. It falsely says the Earth's temperature does not respond to solar cycles.
3. It eliminates the 11 year solar cycle from the cosmic ray data, but does not smooth any other cycle.
4. It fails to account for the large time lag between the Sun forcings and temperature changes.
5. It uses smoothed surface temperatures rather than actual global satellite temperature data.
6. It analyses too short a time interval
7. It fails to explain why the cosmic ray influence apparently stopped twenty years ago.
This paper is so flawed that it is remarkable that it was published. My conclusion is that the recent Sun and cosmic ray data is entirely consistent with the position that the Sun is the primary driver of climate change.
Source. For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here
Newsweek on climate change: Plus ca change
Post below lifted from Tigerhawk
The Extreme Mortman and Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby remind us why so many of us non-experts -- even those of us unaccountably not on the payroll of Big Oil -- do not believe the most hysterical claims made by journalists who in the case of the global climate change have turned into advocates. Jacoby:
Introducing Newsweek's Aug. 13 cover story on global warming "denial," editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine's past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that "those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be." But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham dismisses it.
"On global cooling," he writes, "there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases."
Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were "almost unanimous" in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Moreover, it said, "the evidence in support of these predictions" -- everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover -- had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as "alarmist" and "discredited." Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek's climate-change anxieties rest "on the safest of scientific ground." (bold emphasis added)
The ExMort helpfully provides a copy of the original Newsweek piece from 32 years ago, and it is extraordinary. Read it below. My all-too-obvious commentary follows.
Commentary
In many ways, nothing has changed but the direction of the problem. You have the same claims of scientific consensus:
Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
Well, we now know that meteorologists do not know jack about the foundations of agricultural productivity, which soared during the rest of the 20th century. If they were "almost unanimous" in 1975, then they were almost unanimously wrong.
But wait, there's more. Back in 1975, Newsweek cited random severe weather factoids in support of its argument:
Last April, in the most devestating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states.
How similar is this to the claims post-Katrina that we were going to be blown away by an unprecedented surge in hurricanes, only to see the supposedly worse 2006 season fizzle into pacific calm?
There are the same references to historical climate data, which remind us that today's graphs that show global warming since the late 19th century reflect temperature increases over a very cold baseline:
Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 -- years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
And, of course, there is the same fretting that politicians will not take the extreme steps necessary to avert inevitable catastrophe:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Now, Newsweek's stupendous wrongness in 1975 is hardly evidence that it is wrong today. Newsweek, after all, is just a magazine with reporters and editors who write the stuff that scientists say in as engaging a style as possible. However, a couple of implications do flow from this. First, everybody over the age of roughly 45-50 has heard all of these predictions of climate-induced disaster before, and none of them have come true. That has made those of us with memories understandably, well, skeptical. The skepticism that Newsweek ascribes to the perfidy of oil companies in fact derives from the misguided alarmism of the last generation of journalists, including particularly Newsweek. Newsweek essentially pre-impeached the argument it made in its cover story last week.
Second, Newsweek's cover story attributing global warming skepticism to subversive propaganda was not even useful to the climate change activists. Any lefty blogger could have done that much. The problem that the boosters of climate change theory have is that the boy has cried wolf before. As a practical matter, the alarmism of 30 years ago has made the burden of proof higher than it otherwise would be. Those of us worried about climate change -- and I am in that group -- need the professional journalists to write the substantive arguments in favor of and against the climate change theory clearly and in laymen's terms. We do not need them to level hysterical accusations that the skeptics are wrong because ExxonMobil gave some money to a few right-wing think tanks.
Third, we should figure out who all those "near unanimous" meteorologists were back in 1975. How many of those previously wrong climate scientists are still around and now taking the other side of the argument? They, at least, have a credibility problem, or at least some explaining to do. It seems to me that Newsweek is in a unique position to do an investigative story about climate scientists that previously warned of catastrophic global cooling. Indeed, in light of the various accusations it has leveled in the current debate, it would seem that Newsweek is virtually honor-bound to write such a story. If, that is, there is a shred of intellectual honesty left at that magazine, which is doubtful in light of Jon Meacham's misleading claims about the scientific consensus 32 years ago and today.
Washington Post distorts NASA climbdown
Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links
On Tuesday, we noted that the media has been largely silent on the revisions to NASA's widely reported temperature data. On Wednesday, the Washington Post broke the news blackout giving NASA's James Hansen an exclusive platform to cast the changes in the most favorable light possible.
Rather than report on the substance of the actual changes to the data and the reasons they were compelled to make them, the Post used a not-so-clever trick, ascribing the controversy to, "Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh [who] used reports of the revisions to argue that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists with liberal agendas."
Describing the changes as "slight" the Post uncritically accepts Hansen's bland explanation, "...the change is insignificant in terms of global warming and altered the overall global mean temperatures by one-one-thousandth of a degree."
One one-thousandth of degree overall? Prove it! Critics often argue that the global mean temperature is akin to taking the average of all the phone numbers in the phone book. In other words, it's meaningless.
Reporter Marc Kaufman allows Hansen to peddle one whopper after another. Hansen trots out well worn cliches he's used in the past like, "critics are making a mountain out of a molehill" and they're using this to "muddy the debate." Can't NASA's public information people come up with better lines than this? Unprompted, Hansen bamboozles Kaufman with this ridiculous non-excuse why NASA hides their data, "NASA generally does not release or discuss national weather statistics because it is more concerned with global patterns. The agency that pays more attention to American temperature trends is the American temperature trends is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration" And so why won't NASA release the data?
To obfuscate matters further, Kaufman concludes his story with an erroneous reference to the UN IPCC report. He writes that the report says, "global warming is definitely occurring and that greenhouse gases created by humans are the most likely cause."
Let's be precise here, the word "definite" is nowhere to be found in the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers and this document is written with much more certainty than the actual Technical Report or any of the sub-disciplinary segments. The entire report is filled with caveats and uncertainty. Words like, "may correlate" and "data suggests" preface nearly every assertion and conclusion.
The Washington Post has been carrying water for James Hansen and NASA GISS for several years now. This story fails to even address the most basic questions concerning the error. Instead they add to the confusion with more misinformation and spin. Why is the Washington Post shilling for James Hansen and the global warming special interest lobby?
We have no reason for faith in NASA's data and methods, since the agency has played such a cagey hand in fessing up to their errors and their significance. Until whole operation opens up for serious outside scrutiny, we'll have to rely on sleuths like Steve McIntyre to get to the truth.
The word about the NASA backdown is getting out in Australia
Australian columnist Michael Duffy, writing in the mass-circulation Sydney Morning Herald, reports on the recent NASA correction of their global warming figures. Duffy goes on in the excerpt below to note the really big emerging issue in the matter -- the dubious accuracy of the basic data. So Australians at least have the latest available info in their papers. Mainstream papers in Britain and the USA have now reported the NASA backdown but accompanied it with heavy spin about the changes being unimportant. They did not however mention the matters Duffy mentions below, as far as I saw
Strange as it might seem in a scientific field that spends some $6.4 billion a year on often abstruse research and computer modelling, the integrity of the basic temperature data is emerging as a serious problem. The Goddard Institute claims to correct data from poorly sited stations, but McIntyre says it refused to tell him how it does this in sufficient detail for him to check its results. When he obtained some of the raw data from specific sites and compared it with the processed temperatures created by the institute, he found problems. In one case data from a good site, at the Grand Canyon, had been changed to make the 1930s colder than they were.
Across the Atlantic, the British mathematician Douglas Keenan has claimed that two important academic papers on the reliability of Chinese weather stations are wrong. This is a major issue because one of the papers is cited by the IPCC to support its position that measurement errors owing to urbanisation and the "heat island effect" - which makes cities warmer than their surroundings - are insignificant. Keenan claims to have discovered that some of the Chinese stations have been moved a lot. One, for example, had five different locations from 1954 to 1983, over a distance of 41 kilometres. This makes the data largely useless.
It took several years to gain access to the information needed to reveal this fault with the papers, because the academics involved refused to release it. Keenan finally obtained it by the creative means of using Britain's Freedom of Information Act, on the grounds that an academic who had the information was a public servant.
The climate change establishment is represented by the website realclimate.org. Its response to McIntyre's success in getting the Goddard Institute to reduce US temperature figures for the period since 2000 has been to say that the implication for global averages is imperceptible, since the US is only a very small fraction of the global area. Strictly speaking this is correct, although America's figures are more important than its land area might indicate because they go back so far in an unbroken line, which is fairly unusual.
Since the break-up of the USSR, the number of weather stations in the world has declined by half. Many of them used to be in cold areas. The scientists who compile global averages presumably try to take this into account - although in light of some of the above stories you have to wonder just how well they succeed.
Whatever the scientific implications of McIntyre's revelation, the rhetorical one is huge. America is the centre of the global debate on climate change. No longer will Americans or anyone else be able to say the hottest year on record in their great nation was 1998. Looking at the new top 10, it's hard to see any signs of global warming. The ranking, starting from the hottest year, goes: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939. It's a sad thought, but maybe we and our weather are not as unusual as some want to believe.
Source
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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