These items caught my eye – 12 February 2016

Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context.

Audubon Goes over the Edge (Jan/Feb 2016 issue promotes anti-science alarmism)

Meteorologist Bob Endlich has written a highly critical response, which dismantles Audobon’s latest claims about global warming:

The cover of the January-February 2016 issue of Audubon Magazine proclaims: Arctic on the Edge: As global warming opens our most critical bird habitat, the world is closing in. In reality, it is the magazine’s writers and editors who have gone over the edge with their misleading reports on the Arctic.

This magazine is so awash in misstatements of fact and plain ignorance of history, science, and culture, that they must not go unchallenged – especially since they epitomize the false and misleading claims that have characterized far too much of the U.S. and worldwide “news coverage” of “dangerous man-made climate change.” The following analysis corrects only some of the most serious errors, but should raise red flags about virtually every claim Audubon makes from the front cover to the back page.
– Click here to read the full article
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Peter Foster: The UN’s climate collector is here — and he wants us to pay up

The United Nations may be useless when it comes to dealing with despots and disease, and unable to control its own peacekeeping rapists, but the one thing at which it cannot fail is posturing about climate. That’s because the metrics of success are nothing as mundane as temperatures or weather: They are the volume of verbiage and the level of conspicuous financial commitment to forcing poor nations down the renewable cul-de-sac.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was in Ottawa on Thursday to congratulate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his “recommitment” to the UN and his “leadership” on climate. Also, perhaps to get a few more details of the $2.65 billion in green aid to which Trudeau so conspicuously committed Canada before December’s climate meeting in Paris.

In an interview with Ban on Thursday morning, the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti pressed the UN Supremo on a range of uncomfortable issues such as Syria, migration, sexual abuse and North Korea, but her first question was about the goal of Ban’s visit to Canada. He made the extraordinary suggestion that the Paris climate agreement and the UN’s sustainable development goals might address the “root causes” of conflict, as if ISIL’s main concern might be carbon footprints.
– Click here to read the full article
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Zoos use polar bears to spur action on climate change – not to save them

Media outlets have recently been having collective organisms over photos and videos of a three month old polar bear cub born at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, which has again raised the issue of why it is now acceptable for polar bears to be held and bred in captivity.

The myth being propagated by zoos and their supporters is that it’s necessary to save polar bears from extinction.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth – this is all about pressuring people to care about climate change. Polar bears are merely a marketing tool to spur action on climate change. That’s not my opinion but the plan put in place in 2012 by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and Polar Bears International.
– Click here to read the full article
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Opinion: Don’t go nuclear on climate change just yet

by Yousaf Butt

Current nuclear technology is not a sensible solution to the climate change challenge – but research on “new-nuclear” and renewables infrastructure should be aggressively pursued.

Nuclear Power is being promoted as a necessary low-carbon solution to help mitigate the risks of climate change. But current-generation nuclear reactors, entail societal risks of their own – uncertain waste storage, serious nuclear proliferation risks, cost uncertainties, as well as the more well-known risk of the occasional nuclear accident. A massive increase in such reactors would mean a lot more nuclear material circulating and being enriched worldwide, including in the turbulent middle east.

Is a heightened risk of nuclear terrorism worth the benefit of mitigating a half-centigrade of temperature increase by 2100? How many more nuclear North Koreas is one willing to tolerate to ameliorate the ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide emissions? Science alone cannot answer such questions. But science can help inform the politicians who must make these tough calls soon.
– Click here to read the full article
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Marvel et al. – Gavin Schmidt admits key error but disputes everything else

A guest article by Nicholas Lewis

Introduction

Gavin Schmidt has finally provided, at the GISS website, the iRF and ERF forcing values for a doubling of CO₂ (F2xCO₂) in GISS-E2-R, and related to this has made wholesale corrections to the results of Marvel et al. 2015 (MEA15). He has coupled this with a criticism at RealClimate of my appraisal of MEA15, writing about it “As is usual when people try too hard to delegitimise an approach or a paper, the criticisms tend to be a rag-bag of conceptual points, trivialities and, often, confused mis-readings – so it proves in this case”.

Personally, I think this fits better as a description of Gavin Schmidt’s article. It contains multiple mistakes and misconceptions, which I think it worth setting the record straight on.

Corrected values for the forcing from a doubling of CO₂ concentration (F2xCO₂)

I will start with the one fundamental problem in MEA15 that I identified in my original article about which Gavin Schmidt admits I was right. All the efficacy, TCR and ECS results in MEA15 scale with value of F2xCO₂ used. That value varies between the three measures of radiative forcing involved: instantaneous radiative forcing at the tropopause (iRF, or Fi per Hansen et al. 2005[i]); stratospherically-adjusted forcing (Fa per Hansen, RF in IPCC AR5); and effective radiative forcing (Hansen’s Fs). For results involving efficacy to be valid, they must use the same forcing measure when comparing the response to CO₂ forcing with that to other forcing agents. MEA15 did not do so. It used the RF value for F2xCO₂, 4.1 W/m2, when calculating efficacies, TCR and ECS values for non-CO₂ forcings measured in terms of iRF and ERF, the two alternative measures used in MEA15. As it was obvious to me that this was fundamentally wrong, around the turn of the year I emailed GISS asking for the iRF and ERF F2xCO₂ values. GISS have now finally revealed them, as 4.5 W/m2 for iRF and 4.35 W/m2 for ERF. Correcting the erroneous F2xCO₂ values used in the originally-published version of the paper increases all the MEA15 efficacy, TCR and ECS estimates for non-CO₂ forcings by 10% for iRF, and by 6% for ERF. Since the paper was all about the divergence of the calculated values of these estimates from those applying to CO₂, changes of 10%, and even 6%, are quite significant.

The GISS website says: “There was an error in the Early-Online version of the paper (which will be fixed in the final version) in the definition of the F2xCO₂ which was given as Fa (4.1 W/m2) instead of Fi (4.5 W/m2) and Fs (4.3 W/m2).” It will be interesting to see whether Nature Climate Change takes the same stance as Nature Geoscience did with Otto et al. (2013), where as the incorrect Supplementary Information had already been published online (as here), it has been kept available alongside the corrected version.
– Click here to read the full article
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Theory and Reality- Part 1: DTR

It was two years ago in 2013 that I last posted on the difference between climate scientists’ expectations and reality, so in this series of posts I bring these points up to date, and add a couple of related points.

What the climate scientists tell us:

Dr Karl Braganza in The Conversation on 14/06/2011 lists the “fingerprints” of climate change (my bold).

These fingerprints show the entire climate system has changed in ways that are consistent with increasing greenhouse gases and an enhanced greenhouse effect. They also show that recent, long term changes are inconsistent with a range of natural causes…..
…Patterns of temperature change that are uniquely associated with the enhanced greenhouse effect, and which have been observed in the real world include:

• greater warming in polar regions than tropical regions
• greater warming over the continents than the oceans
• greater warming of night time temperatures than daytime temperatures
• greater warming in winter compared with summer
• a pattern of cooling in the high atmosphere (stratosphere) with simultaneous warming in the lower atmosphere (tropopause).

and later

Similarly, greater global warming at night and during winter is more typical of increased greenhouse gases, rather than an increase in solar radiation.

This post will examine “greater global warming at night” and whether it can be attributed to increased greenhouse gases.
– Click here to read the full article
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