Synopsis of This Weblog: An examination of even the most fundamental of climate metrics show that recent trends are inconsistent with the 2007 IPCC claims regarding global warming. This includes a lack of warming in the global average lower tropospheric temperature and upper ocean, the muted at best moistening of the troposphere, and evidence of a negative radiative feedback. The lack of agreement with these climate metrics indicate that the IPCC report should be interpreted as a collection of papers on a hypothesis rather than a summary of established scientific understanding of how humans are altering the climate system.
John Tierney of the New York Times has asked a really important question in his web posting Are There Are Any Good Weather Omens?. He wrote
“In my Findings column, I argue that “availability entrepreneurs”? have been exploiting short-term weather in order to awaken the public to what could be a real long-term danger, global warming. Hurricanes, blizzards, floods, droughts, exceptionally hot years — all these have been linked to global warming. Sometimes they’re described as “evidence”? or as “wake-up calls”? or as “examples”? of what’s in store. The more careful entrepreneurs like to say these events are “consistent”? with the theory that the climate is dangerously warming.
But if all these things are consistent with the theory, are there any sorts of weather trends or events that would be inconsistent? Or, as Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado put the question on the Prometheus blog:
‘What behavior of the climate system could hypothetically be observed over the next 1, 5, 10 years that would be inconsistent with the current consensus on climate change? My focus is on extreme events like floods and hurricanes, so please consider those, but consider any other climate metric or phenomena you think important as well for answering this question. Ideally, a response would focus on more than just sea level rise and global average temperature, but if these are the only metrics that are relevant here that too would be very interesting to know’.
Any answers? “
Climate Science has weblogged on inconsistencies in the concept of global warming (and more generally, on climate change) as presented by the 2007 IPCC report, and several of these inconsistencies are summarized below. I invite guest weblogs on Climate Science from IPCC authors and contributors to refute these conclusions (please contact me by e-mail and we will arrange to post promptly).
Inconsistencies In IPCC Presentation of Global Warming
IPCC Claim: “Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming in response to increasing greenhouse gases.” (page 600)
and
“…models are unanimous in their prediction prediction of substantial climate warming under greenhouse gas increases, and this warming is of a magnitude consistent with independent estimates derived from other sources, such as from observed climate changes and past climate reconstructions.”(page 601)
Reality: Global warming has not occurred for the last several years
For example, lower tropospheric warming has not occurred since about 2003 (from http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html)
Figure caption: Variations of lower tropospheric temperature as diagnosed by RSS MSU measurements [from Figure 7 in http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html].
See also, Out On A Limb - The 2007 Bali Climate Declaration By Scientists
In coming weeks, further evidence on the lack of recent upper ocean heating will be presented on Climate Science.
IPCC Claim: “New observational and modelling evidence strongly supports a combined water vapour-lapse rate feedback of a strength comparable to that found in General Circulation Models (approximately 1 W m–2 °C–1, corresponding to around a 50% amplification of global mean warming).” (page 591) and
“Water vapour feedback is the most important feedback enhancing climate sensitivity.” (page 593)
Reality: The increase of water vapor content of the atmosphere has been near zero, or muted at most, over the last few years; see
Evidence For A Lack Of Water Vapor Feedback On The Regional Scale
Figure caption: (a) The North American Regional Reanalysis domain-averaged de-seasoned precipitable water vapor - PWAV (blue), total precipitable water content -PWAT (brown), and lower-tropospheric temperature (red), monthly anomaly time series; (b) The North American domain-averaged PWAV, PWAT, and Tcol yearly time series by season. The dashed lines represent a linear fit, and the magnitudes of the trends are also shown. The black dashed lines indicate PWAV trends for a fixed relative humidity scenario. Note the much lower (and statistically insignificant trend in PWAV and PWAT despite a significant trend in Tcol [ from Wang, J.-W., K. Wang, R.A. Pielke, J.C. Lin, and T. Matsui, 2007: Does an atmospheric warming trend lead to a moistening trend over North America? Geophys. Res. Letts., submitted].
IPCC Claim: The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m–2 (see Figure SPM.2). (page 3)
and
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level (see Figure SPM.3).” (page 5)
Reality: Using the IPCC estimate of global radiative forcing and the diagnosis of the radiative imbalance from ocean heat content changes, the global radiative feedbacks are negative.
This is clear from the relationship between current radiative forcing (RF), current radiative imbalance (RI), and current radiative feedback (RFB), where
RI = RF + RFB.
If RI is less than RF, the radiative feedback, RFB, is negative. Jim Hansen, as reported on Climate Science (see) estimates RI in the 1990s as 0.85 Watts per meter squared. This is a high estimate but it still illustrates that the current radiaitve forcing must be less than 0.85 Watts per meter squared for the radiative feedbacks to be positive! If the value of the current Radiative imbalance, RI, is smaller, than the current radiative forcing, RF, must be even smaller in order to have a positive radiative imbalance. The net conclusion is that either the 2007 IPCC estimates of the net radiative forcing is too positive and/or their estimates of the radiative feedbacks in the models are in error. A combination of both of these effects is likely.
For further discussion see
and
Why We Need Estimates Of The Current Global Average Radiative Forcing
These failures of the projections (predictions) of the 2007 IPCC report, by themselves, should result in the rejection of the IPCC report as representing settled climate science