3G is always wanting the discussion to focus on peer reviewed papers. I thought I should oblige him.eace
Can The IPCC Do Revolutionary Science?
Posted on
August 31, 2013 by
Guest Blogger
Guest Essay by Barry Brill
The timing couldn’t be worse.
On 23-26 September, scores of representatives of the world’s Environment Ministries are scheduled to meet in Stockholm to wordsmith the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the key WG1 (physical science) portion of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC).
The draft SPM, sent to governments on 2 August, is a 22-page condensation of 14 chapters comprising 1,914 pages of material discussing scientific papers that were published between 2006 and 15 March 2013.
This SPM is (or could be) a document of world-shaking importance. As Bloomberg points out –
“it is designed to be used by ministers working to devise by 2015 a global treaty to curb climate change”.
The timetable for the global treaty was deferred at the Durban COP because developing countries (particularly China and India) felt that the 2013 SPM was an indispensable input to the negotiations. Governments need an authoritative up-to-date assessment of both the extent and the causes of the climate change threat, present and future.
But the SPM has been sidelined by momentous climate change events that occurred after its March cut-off date – and even after the date the draft was circulated.
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During August 2013, a flood of highly influential papers have appeared:
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von Storch & Zorita[SUP][1][/SUP] found that observed temperatures 1998-2012 were not consistent with 23 tested CMIP3 and CMIP5 models, even at the 2% confidence level. The inconsistency increases rapidly with trend length and a 20-year trend (ie to 2017) would lie outside the ensemble of all model-simulated trends.
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von Storch & Zorita (the same paper) concludes that ‘natural’ internal variability and/or external forcing has probably offset the anthropogenic warming during the standstill. Overestimated sensitivity may also have contributed.
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Tung & Zhou[SUP][2][/SUP] reported that the “underlying net anthropogenic warming rate has been steady since 1910 at 0.07-0.08°C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs ..”. The sharply increased CO2 concentrations of recent decades has not caused warming to accelerate, as was predicted by the models.
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Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Zie[SUP][3][/SUP] plausibly found that climate models have vastly under-estimated natural variation. La-Nina-like cooling in the Eastern Pacific throughout the 21st century (since the PDO turned negative) has conquered the projected greenhouse warming. The 0.68°C warming trend during 1975-98 (when the PDO was positive) would have been
[SUP][4][/SUP] 0.4°C natural and only 0.28°C anthropogenic.
•
Katz et al[SUP][5][/SUP] says the critical uncertainty measures used by the IPCC are “out of date by well over a decade”. Modern statistical techniques could improve assessments “dramatically”.
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Fyfe Gillett & Zwiers[SUP][6][/SUP] focused on the extraordinary gap between the temperature simulations of 37 CIMP5 models and the observed outcomes. Due to a ‘combination of errors’, the models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years and by 400% over the past 15 years.
Come the revolution…
These new papers devastate the IPCC orthodoxy that current and future global temperatures are mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, and will reach dangerous levels later this century. On the other hand, all older papers are blindsided by their apparent failure to take account of the recent data (standstill).