Lots happening on the global warming front recently.

Earth shaking testimony on the hill this Tuesday by one Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA and now the Principal research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. I say earthshaking - that’s what it would be if the media gave a crap about objectivity as opposed to ideology. Googling Roy Spencer and July 22 reveals no links to major media outlets. Compare that to googling Obama and July 22. I guess the messiah’s trek through the holy land is that much more important than the debunking of the entire anthropogenic global warming hoax in front of congress.

As I will outline in this lengthy post, there is a growing consensus - and I use the term flippantly - that human activity is NOT to blame for most of the climate change over the last 100 years. Spencer’s presentation can be found here. Some of the salient points:

Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC). Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. (Feedback parameters larger than 3.3 Watts per square meter per degree Kelvin (Wm-2K-1) indicate negative feedback, while feedback parameters smaller than 3.3 indicate positive feedback.) If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end — if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.

Like he says, good news for us, there is no crisis. But just like victory in Iraq, this isn’t good news for leftists looking to turn it into a power grab.

The support for my claim of low climate sensitivity (net negative feedback) for our climate system is two-fold. First, we have a new research article1 in-press in the Journal of Climate which uses a simple climate model to show that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system from satellite data were biased toward the high side by the neglect of natural cloud variability. It turns out that the failure to account for natural, chaotic cloud variability generated internal to the climate system will always lead to the illusion of a climate system which appears more sensitive than it really is. Significantly, prior to its acceptance for publication, this paper was reviewed by two leading IPCC climate model experts - Piers Forster and Isaac Held– both of whom agreed that we have raised a legitimate issue. Piers Forster, an IPCC report lead author and a leading expert on the estimation of climate sensitivity, even admitted in his review of our paper that other climate modelers need to be made aware of this important issue.

He then goes on to outline the observational evidence which confirms his theory. I bet Barbara Boxer had a sort of dizzy feeling through the entire testimony.

Remember top NASA scientist James Hansen’s absurd claims that the Bush Administration tried to silence him on global warming before it turned out that he gave tons of speeches and made tremendous amounts of money speaking to manmade global warming? It turns out that the White House actually did try to silence dissenting voices on climate change. Except it was the Clinton White house.

On the subject of the Administration’s involvement in policy-relevant scientific work performed by government employees in the EPA, NASA, and other agencies, I can provide some perspective based upon my previous experiences as a NASA employee. For example, during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject. This did not particularly bother me, though, since I knew that as an employee of an Executive Branch agency my ultimate boss resided in the White House. To the extent that my work had policy relevance, it seemed entirely appropriate to me that the privilege of working for NASA included a responsibility to abide by direction given by my superiors.

Yet another bit of information you will never hear about on the evening news.

More under the fold.

Another denier speaks out. His point is a familiar one, that the contribution from warming of CO2 has been exaggerated. Less familiar to readers may be the absence of the “greenhouse signature”.

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”…

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

This is what the global warming signature should look like according to various climate models. The most warming should happen in the middle atmosphere above the equator.

This is what it actually looks like. No hot spot. Or, to use an enduring leftist phrase, no smoking gun. Perhaps the intelligence was flawed. In Al Gore’s case, flawed is putting it mildly. The only question that’s left is do all those who’ve staked their political future on this hoax have an exit strategy?

More deniers speak out. This time, it’s the Ruskies.

Russian critics of the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for cuts in CO₂ emissions, say that the theory underlying the pact lacks scientific basis. Under the Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, it is human-generated greenhouse gases, and mainly CO₂, that cause climate change. “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse,” says renowned Russian geographer Andrei Kapitsa. “It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round.”

Russian researchers made this discovery while studying ice cores recovered from the depth of 3.5 kilometres in Antarctica. Analysis of ancient ice and air bubbles trapped inside revealed the composition of the atmosphere and air temperature going back as far as 400,000 years.

“We found that the level of CO₂ had fluctuated greatly over the period but at any given time increases in air temperature preceded higher concentrations of CO₂,” says academician Kapitsa, who worked in Antarctica for many years. Russian studies showed that throughout history, CO₂ levels in the air rose 500 to 600 years after the climate warmed up. Therefore, higher concentrations of greenhouse gases registered today are the result, not the cause, of global warming.

Critics of the CO₂ role in climate change point out that water vapours are a far more potent factor in creating the greenhouse effect as their concentration in the atmosphere is five to 10 times higher than that of CO₂. “Even if all CO₂ were removed from the earth atmosphere, global climate would not become any cooler,” says solar physicist Vladimir Bashkirtsev.

The hypothesis of anthropogenic greenhouse gases was born out of computer modelling of climate changes. Russian scientists say climate models are inaccurate since scientific understanding of many natural climate factors is still poor and cannot be properly modelled. Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ocean Studies, and many other Russian scientists maintain that global climate depends predominantly on natural factors, such as solar activity, precession (wobbling) of the Earth’s axis, changes in ocean currents, fluctuations in saltiness of ocean surface water, and some other factors, whereas industrial emissions do not play any significant role. Moreover, greater concentrations of CO₂ are good for life on Earth, Dr. Sorokhtin argues, as they make for higher crop yields and faster regeneration of forests.

“There were periods in the history of the Earth when CO₂ levels were a million times higher than today, and life continued to evolve quite successfully,” agrees Vladimir Arutyunov of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Chemical Physics.

Noticing a trend here?

In case you haven’t heard, the American Physical Society has altered its stance and signaled that there is sizable skeptecism of man-made climate change among its ranks. In a submission to their online forum, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, writes a non-peer reviewed paper suggesting, once again, that the sensativity of the climate has been grossly exaggerated by the IPCC in shaping their policy decisions.

LOBALLY-AVERAGED land and sea surface absolute temperature T_S has not risen since 1998 (Hadley Center; US National Climatic Data Center; University of Alabama at Huntsville; etc.). For almost seven years, T_S may even have fallen (Figure 1). There may be no new peak until 2015 (Keenlysideet al., 2008).

The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in “global warming”; nor (until trained ex post facto) the fall in T_S from 1940-1975; nor 50 years’ cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al., 2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005); nor the absence of ocean warming since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski&Koltermann, 2007); nor the onset, duration, or intensity of the Madden-Julian intraseasonal oscillation, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical stratosphere, El Nino/La Nina oscillations, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that has recently transited from its warming to its cooling phase (oceanic oscillations which, on their own, may account for all of the observed warmings and coolings over the past half-century: Tsoniset al., 2007); nor the magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age; nor the cessation since 2000 of the previously-observed growth in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC, 2007); nor the active 2004 hurricane season; nor the inactive subsequent seasons; nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously); nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solankiet al., 2005); nor the consequent surface “global warming” on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and even distant Pluto; nor the eerily- continuing 2006 solar minimum; nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in T_S from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of the observed warming of the 20^th century.

And the next time some lefty dares you to produce one, just one! peer reviewed paper critical of the claims of anthropogenic global warming, feel free to offer them 50. And add to that list Roy Spencer’s new paper in the Journal of Climate which supports his claims above.

I think it’s clear that nature has won out over man as the true cause of global warming. And cooling. And everything in between. And the church of Al Gore has been burned to ashes.

BUT…

Despite all the scientific evidence leaking through the filters that anthropogenic effects on global climate are, as we’ve insisted for years insignificant, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decree in Mass. v. EPA, the EPA is getting ready to shackle every human activity with restrictions to combat climate change.

Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that “our very way of life” is imperiled if the U.S. doesn’t end “the carbon age” within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.

In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA’s nanomanagement. Thankfully none of it has the force of law — yet. However, the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore’s, and previewing what Democrats have in mind for next year.

So even if the science disproves the claims of dramatic anthropogenic global warming, it may be a pyrrhic victory for reason and logic since the leftists are already in the beginning stages of instituting their totalitarian agenda. Not based upon a vote in congress, but upon a decree by the unelected supreme court to be instituted by unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. And it seems that both political parties and both candidates for president are on the same side of the issue - the wrong one.

Either way, we lose.

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