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.
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