Tag Archives: climate

Arctic Ice has shrunk 1.5% since ’99 and Gore’s inconvenient truth. Is this bad?

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At the 1999 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, Al Gore announced an inconvenient truth: “There is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” It was a bold prediction, part of a campaign that got Mr Gore a Nobel Prize and motivated the US to devote billions to stopping global warming. Supposedly 98% of scientists agreed with Mr. Gore and his remedies. Prince Charles and Bill Gates too. Twenty three years later there is still arctic ice, 98.5% as much as in 1999. Two questions arise: 1. Is the ice loss bad? and 2. Why were those 98% of scientists so wrong?

Arctic sea ice extent 1999-2021
Arctic sea ice extent when Al Gore spoke (1999) and since. Not much change, nor clearly for the worse

The second question is far easier than the first: the 98% number was bogus, a lie, like many other climate lies that followed. it was effective at stopping argument, and could not be checked immediately. It bullied scientists who argued that global warming wasn’t bad, or wasn’t man-made, and it gave do-gooders the ability to label their opponents “liars” and “science deniers”. The claim of 98% was used to silence scientists with long, prominent careers. Deniers lost their funding and were no longer published. Other scientists learned to keep quiet. Twenty years later, when the arctic ice wasn’t gone and antarctic ice hit a record extent, the deniers’ careers largely were gone.

Scientists are not stupid, nor independently rich, for the most part. They are dependent on government funding and their employers, the universities are too. As a group they (we) are incapable of stemming the tide of public opinion. This week Biden signed a nearly 1 trillion dollar bill to stop climate change. Every scientist with a chance to get the money will go for it. Whether or not they think a colder earth is good, they will claim it is in their proposals, and imply that their work can stop the natural chaos that is climate. They will ask for their share of the $1T to study the appropriate things: solar cells, corn-based power, and wind turbines. The proposals will not mention the huge costs in mining or land use. Scientists already know they can not get funded for nuclear power, though it works and produces no CO2, nor should can scientists benefit by criticizing China, as the largest source of CO2. That is seen as undermine the green effort at home. When we stop manufacturing at home, BTW, we end up buying the same materials manufactured in China, where they really generate lots of pollution. When asked about this, Biden’s climate chief said not to worry about it, we had to do our part, and Biden would speak to the Chinese. The result is the biggest buildup in coal-fired power plants in the world, with more coming on line.

This second question is at least as important as the first one: is less arctic ice bad? Or, asking more generally, is a warm earth bad? It’s an opinion question; it’s in no way science, impossible to answer definitively. Cold weather is bad for food production, and that’s bad for people, in general. Most people prefer to live where it’s warm, I find. Supposedly polar bears prefer it cold, but I don’t know for sure. I’m not keen to go back to the climate of the ice ages, 10,000- 100,000 years ago when ice covered Canada and you could walk from France to England. I’m not convinced that life was better when the world was 1°C colder. The sea was lower in 1900, but had been higher in the year zero. Less arctic ice means easier shipping. For all I know we may want to make a Northwest Passage. More food and a easier shipping are the convenient truths about global warming.

Robert Buxbaum, August 19, 2022. If you believe any of what I said about Gore/Biden’s green energy, you may like a movie by Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, see it here. The political greens are not saving energy or cooling the planet, and they know it. It’s a money maker.

James Croll, janitor scientist; man didn’t cause warming or ice age

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When politicians say that 98% of published scientists agree that man is the cause of global warming you may wonder who the other scientists are. It’s been known at least since the mid 1800s that the world was getting warmer; that came up talking about the president’s “Resolute” desk, and the assumption was that the cause was coal. The first scientist to present an alternate theory was James Croll, a scientist who learned algebra only at 22, and got to mix with high-level scientists as the janitor at the Anderson College in Glasgow. I think he is probably right, though he got some details wrong, in my opinion.

James Croll was born in 1821 to a poor farming family in Scotland. He had an intense interest in science, but no opportunity for higher schooling. Instead he worked on the farm and at various jobs that allowed him to read, but he lacked a mathematics background and had no one to discuss science with. To learn formal algebra, he sat in the back of a class of younger students. Things would have pretty well ended there but he got a job as janitor for the Anderson College (Scotland), and had access to the library. As janitor, he could read journals, he could talk to scientists, and he came up with a theory of climate change that got a lot of novel things right. His idea was that there were  regular ice ages and warming periods that would follow in cycles. In his view these were a product of the precession of the equinox and the fact that the earth’s orbit was not round, but elliptical, with an eccentricity of 1.7%. We are 3.4% closer to the sun on January 3 than we are on July 4, but the precise dates changes slowly because of precession of the earth’s axis, otherwise known as precession of the equinox.

Currently, at the spring equinox, the sun is in “the house of Pisces“. This is to say, that a person who looks at the stars all the night of the spring equinox will be able to see all of the constellations of the zodiac except for the stars that represent Pisces (two fish). But the earth’s axes turns slowly, about 1 days worth of turn every 70 years, one rotation every 25,770 years. Some 1800 years ago, the sun would have been in the house of Ares, and 300 years from now, we will be “in the age of Aquarius.” In case you wondered what the song, “age of Aquarius” was about, it’s about the precession of the equinox.

Our current spot in the precession, according to Croll is favorable to warmth. Because we are close to the sun on January 3, our northern summers are less-warm than they would be otherwise, but longer; in the southern hemisphere summers are warmer but shorter (southern winters are short because of conservation of angular momentum). The net result, according to Croll should be a loss of ice at both poles, and slow warming of the earth. Cooling occurs, according to Croll, when the earth’s axis tilt is 90° off the major axis of the orbit ellipse, 6300 years before or after today. Similar to this, a decrease in the tilt of the earth would cause an ice age (see here for why). Earth tilt varies over a 42,000 year cycle, and it is now in the middle of a decrease. Croll’s argument is that it takes a real summer to melt the ice at the poles; if you don’t have much of a tilt, or if the tilt is at the wrong time, ice builds making the earth more reflective, and thus a little colder and iceier each year; ice extends south of Paris and Boston. Eventually precession and tilt reverses the cooling, producing alternating warm periods and ice ages. We are currently in a warm period.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

At the time Croll was coming up with this, it looked like numerology. Besides, most scientists doubted that ice ages happened in any regular pattern. We now know that ice ages do happen periodically and think that Croll must have been on to something. See figure; the earth’s temperature shows both a 42,000 year cycle and a 23,000 year cycle with ice ages coming every 100,000 years.

In the 1920s a Serbian Mathematician, geologist, astronomer, Milutin Milanković   proposed a new version of Croll’s theory that justified longer space between ice ages based on the beat frequency between a 23,000 year time for axis precession, and the 42,000 year time for axis tilt variation. Milanković used this revised precession time because the ellipse precesses, and thus the weather-related precession of the axis is 23,000 years instead of 25,770 years. The beat frequency is found as follows:

51,000 = 23,000 x 42,000 / (42000-23000).

As it happens neither Croll’s nor Milanković’s was accepted in their own lifetimes. Despite mounting evidence that there were regular ice ages, it was hard to believe that these small causes could produce such large effects. Then, in a 1976 study (Hayes, Imbrie, and Shackleton) demonstrated clear climate variations based on the mud composition from New York and Arizona. The variations followed all four of the Milankocitch cycles.

Southern hemisphere ice is growing, something that confounds CO2-centric experts

Southern hemisphere ice is growing, something that confounds CO2-centric experts

Further confirmation came from studying the antarctic ice, above. You can clearly see the 23,000 year cycle of precession, the 41,000 year cycle of tilt, the 51,000 year beat cycle, and also a 100,000 year cycle that appears to correspond to 100,000 year changes in the degree of elliptic-ness of the orbit. Our orbit goes from near circular to quite elliptic (6.8%) with a cycle time effectively of 100,000 years. It is currently 1.7% elliptic and decreasing fast. This, along with the decrease in earth tilt suggests that we are soon heading to an ice age. According to Croll, a highly eccentric orbit leads to warming because the minor access of the ellipse is reduced when the orbit is lengthened. We are now heading to a less-eccentric orbit; for more details go here; also for why the orbit changes and why there is precession.

We are currently near the end of a 7,000 year warm period. The one major thing that keeps maintaining this period seems to be that our precession is such that we are closest to the sun at nearly the winter solstice. In a few thousand years all the factors should point towards global cooling, and we should begin to see the glaciers advance. Already the antarctic ice is advancing year after year. We may come to appreciate the CO2 produced by cows and Chinese coal-burning as these may be all that hold off the coming ice age.

Robert Buxbaum, November 16, 2018.

if everyone agrees, something is wrong

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I thought I’d try to semi-derive, and explain a remarkable mathematical paper that was published last month in The Proceedings of the Royal Society A (see full paper here). The paper demonstrates that too much agreement about a thing is counter-indicative of the thing being true. Unless an observation is blindingly obvious, near 100% agreement suggests there is a hidden flaw or conspiracy, perhaps unknown to the observers. This paper has broad application, but I thought the presentation was too confusing for most people to make use of, even those with a background in mathematics, science, or engineering. And the popular versions press versions didn’t even try to be useful. So here’s my shot:

Figure 2 from the original paper. For a method that is 80% accurate, you get your maximum reliability at the third to fifth witness. Beyond that, more agreement suggest a flaw in the people or procedure.

Figure 2 from the original paper. For a method that is 80% accurate, you get your maximum reliability at 3-5 witnesses. More agreement suggests a flaw in the people or procedure.

I will discuss only on specific application, the second one mentioned in the paper, crime (read the paper for others). Lets say there’s been a crime with several witnesses. The police line up a half-dozen, equal (?) suspects, and show them to the first witness. Lets say the first witness points to one of the suspects, the police will not arrest on this because they know that people correctly identify suspects only about 40% of the time, and incorrectly identify perhaps 10% (the say they don’t know or can’t remember the remaining 50% of time). The original paper includes the actual factions here; they’re similar. Since the witness pointed to someone, you already know he/she isn’t among the 50% who don’t know. But you don’t know if this witness is among the 40% who identify right or the 10% who identify wrong. Our confidence that this is the criminal is thus .4/(.4 +.1) = .8, or 80%.

Now you bring in the second witness. If this person identifies the same suspect, your confidence increases; to roughly (.4)2/(.42+.12) = .941,  or 94.1%. This is enough to make an arrest, but let’s say you have ten more witnesses, and all identify this same person. You might first think that this must be the guy with a confidence of (.4)10/(.410+.110) = 99.99999%, but then you wonder how unlikely it is to find ten people who identify correctly when, as we mentioned, each person has only a 40% chance. The chance of all ten witnesses identifying a suspect right is small: (.4)10 = .000104 or 0.01%. This fraction is smaller than the likelihood of having a crooked cop or a screw up the line-up (only one suspect had the right jacket, say). If crooked cops and systemic errors show up 1% of the time, and point to the correct fellow only 15% of these, we find that the chance of being right if ten out of ten agree is (0.0015 +(.4)10)/( .01+ .410+.110) = .16%. Total agreement on guilt suggests the fellow is innocent!

The graph above, the second in the paper, presents a generalization of the math I just presented: n identical tests of 80% accuracy and three different likelihoods of systemic failure. If this systemic failure rate is 1% and the chance of the error pointing right or wrong is 50/50, the chance of being right is P = (.005+ .4n)/(.01 +.4n+.1n), and is the red curve in the graph above. The authors find you get your maximum reliability when there are two to four agreeing witness.

Confidence of guilt as related to the number of judges that agree and your confidence in the integrity of the judges.

Confidence of guilt as related to the number of judges that agree and the integrity of the judges.

The Royal Society article went on to a approve of a feature of Jewish capital-punishment law. In Jewish law, capital cases are tried by 23 judges. To convict a super majority (13) must find guilty, but if all 23 judges agree on guilt the court pronounces innocent (see chart, or an anecdote about Justice Antonin Scalia). My suspicion, by the way, is that more than 1% of judges and police are crooked or inept, and that the same applies to scientific analysis of mental diseases like diagnosing ADHD or autism, and predictions about stocks or climate change. (Do 98% of scientists really agree independently?). Perhaps there are so many people in US prisons, because of excessive agreement and inaccurate witnesses, e.g Ruben Carter. I suspect the agreement on climate experts is a similar sham.

Robert Buxbaum, March 11, 2016. Here are some thoughts on how to do science right. Here is some climate data: can you spot a clear pattern of man-made change?

18 year pause in global warming

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Here is an updated version of the climate change graph. It’s now 18+ years, and as was true with last year’s version, 17+ years of no climate change, I see no significant climate change. Similar to this: Global Warming takes a 15 year rest.

18 years of Global Temperature anomaly to July 2015

18+ years of Global Temperature anomaly to July 2015. The climate seems to have stopped changing.

Though the average planetary temperature has remained constant, there is local variation. It’s been warm in California for the past 2+ years, but cold in Michigan. Before that, it was warm in Michigan and California was cold. The Antarctic ice is at record high levels while the arctic ice has shrunk enough that we should make a Northwest passage.

Climate vs weather from the blog of Steven Goddard

Climate vs weather, from the blog of Steven Goddard. It’s funny because…

Theory suggests we should see global warming because of increased CO2 trapping of atmospheric heat 2 miles up or so. The problem with the theory is that it doesn’t include clouds. A few extra clouds, e.g. from Chinese industry, could have more cooling power than a lot of CO2 has heating power. It seems that the effects cancel, and temperature 2-3 miles up is about what you’d expect from entropy.

My biggest climate fear, BTW, is global cooling: a new ice age. They come every 110,000 years or so and we seem overdue.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

Global temperatures from the antarctic ice show ice ages every 110,000 years. cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

Robert Buxbaum, July 22, 2015. You may not have noticed, but there have been relatively few hurricanes — something that could change at any minute. Here’s a link to 1/2 hour lecture by a Nobel physicist, Ivar Giaever on the subject. Like me, he notices no change, and thinks warmer is better.

Can you spot the man-made climate change?

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As best I can tell, the only constant in climate is change, As an example, the record of northern temperatures for the last 10,000 years, below, shows nothing but major ups and downs following the end of the last ice age 9500 years ago. The only pattern, if you call it a pattern, is fractal chaos. Anti-change politicos like to concentrate on the near-recent 110 years from 1890 to 2000. This is the small up line at the right, but they ignore the previous 10000 or more, ignore the fact that the last 17 years show no change, and ignore the variation within the 100 years (they call it weather). I find I can not spot the part of the change that’s man-made.

10,000 years of climate change based on greenland ice cores. Ole Humlum – Professor, University of Oslo Department of Geosciences.

10,000 years of northern climate temperatures based on Greenland ice cores. Dr. Ole Humlum, Dept. of Geosciences, University of Oslo. Can you spot the part of the climate change that’s man-made?

Jon Stewart makes the case for man-made climate change.

Steven Colbert makes his case for belief: If you don’t believe it you’re stupid.

Steven Colbert makes the claim that man-made climate change is so absolutely apparent that all the experts agree, and that anyone who doubts is crazy, stupid, or politically motivated (he, of course is not). Freeman Dyson, one of the doubters, is normally not considered crazy or stupid. The approach reminds me of “the emperor’s new clothes.” Only the good, smart people see it. The same people used to call it “Global Warming” based on a model prediction of man-made warming. The name was changed to “climate change” since the planet isn’t warming. The model predicted strong warming in the upper atmosphere, but that isn’t happening either; ski areas are about as cold as ever (we’ve got good data from ski areas).

I note that the climate on Jupiter has changed too in the last 100 years. A visible sign of this is that the great red spot has nearly disappeared. But it’s hard to claim that’s man-made. There’s a joke here, somewhere.

Jupiter's red spot has shrunk significantly. Here it is now. NASA

Jupiter’s red spot has shrunk significantly. Here it is now. NASA

As a side issue, it seems to me that some global warming could be a good thing. The periods that were warm had peace and relative plenty, while periods of cold, like the little ice age, 500 years ago were times of mass starvation and plague. Similarly, things were a lot better during the medieval warm period (1000 AD) than during the dark ages 500-900 AD. The Roman warm period (100 BC-50 AD) was again warm and (relatively) civilized. Perhaps we owe some of the good food production of today to the warming shown on the chart above. Civilization is good. Robert E. Buxbaum January 14, 2015. (Corrected January 19; I’d originally labeled Steven Colbert as Jon Stewart)

 

17+ years of no climate change

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Much of the data underlying climate change is bad, as best I can tell, and quite a lot of the animosity surrounding climate legislation comes from the failure to acknowledge this. Our (US) government likes to show the climate increasing at 4-6°C/century, or .05°C/year, but this is based on bad data of average global temperatures, truncated conveniently to 1880, and the incorrect assumption that trends always continue — a bad idea for stock investing too. We really don’t have any good world-wide temperature going back any further the 1990s, something the Canadian ice service acknowledges (see chart below) but we do not. Worse yet, we adjust our data to correct for supposed errors.

Theory vs experiment in climate change data

Theory vs experiment in climate change data; 17 years with no change.

High quality observations begin only about 10 years ago, and since then we have seen 17+ years of no significant climate change, not the .05°C per year predicted. Our models predicted an ice-free Arctic by 2013, but we had one of the coldest winters of the century. Clearly the models are wrong. Heat can’t hide, and in particular it can’t hide in the upper atmosphere where the heat is supposed to be congregating. The predictive models were not chaotic, and weather is, but instead show regular, slow temperature rises based on predictions of past experimental data.

In Canada and Australia, the climate experts are nice enough to put confidence bars on the extrapolated data before publishing it. Some researchers are also nice enough to provide data going back further, to late Roman times when the weather was really warm, or 20,000 years ago, when we had an ice age (it’s unlikely that the ice age ended because of automobile traffic).

Canada's version of Ice coverage data. The grey part is the error bar. Canada is nice enough to admit they know relatively little of what the climate was like in the 70s and 80s. We do not.

Canada’s version of Ice coverage data. The grey part is the error bar. Canada is nice enough to admit they don’t know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. We do not.

So what’s so wrong about stopping US coal use, even if it does not cause global warming. For one, it’s bad diplomatically — it weakens us and strengthens countries that hate us (like Iran), and countries like China that burn lots of coal and really pollute the air. It also diverts the US from real air pollution and land use discussions. If you want less air pollution, perhaps nuclear is the way to go. Finally, there you have to ask, even if we could adjust the earth’s temperature at will, who would get control of the thermostat? Who would decide if this summer should be warm or cold, or who should get rains, or sun. With great power comes great headaches.

Robert Buxbaum, June 21, 2014

Amazing tornado drought of 2014

At 143 days as of April 10, 2014, the span between major tornadoes (EF3s and stronger) is the 6th longest in the last 60 years, and it isn’t over yet. Even small tornadoes are becoming more scarce. Last year saw few hurricanes and tornadoes, and so far we’ve had only 100 total tornadoes (see below); in a typical year there’d be 323. The good news has gone unreported, I think, because there’s no event, no photo-opportunity; no interviews with survivors, police, and experts.

US tornadoes: typical and year to date, January 1 to April 10 2014, NOAA

US tornadoes: typical and year to date, January 1 to April 10 2014, from NOAA, storm center

Perhaps this is a bonuses from global warming, or from the very cold winter just passed, or from the chaotic, weather; it’s hard to tell weather from climate. Whatever the reason, it’s happening and good. Here’s how tornadoes lift stuff up, with video (Einstein’s explanation). Here’s an explanation of hurricanes (my explanation).

Robert E. Buxbaum, April 11, 2014. In other good news, the ozone hole is shrinking. genetically modified foods don’t seem to cause cancer, and many bad things are good for you, like sunlight. Enjoy the good.

Climate change, and the metaphysical basis of humor

It’s funny because ….. it’s metaphysical, it deals with what’s real and relevant, and what’s secondary and transient– an aspect as fundamental as it is funny. We claim we understand the real, but realize (down deep) that we don’t. A classic of old-time comedy is the clever slave, the sympathetic stooges, of the brave coward, or the most common version– the stupid person who does clever things at the right moment. A typical comic structure is to establish, early on, that this person is stupid (as well as being low, and crooked); he may say some stupid, low things, so we accept it as so, or perhaps someone in authority tells us, as in “Puddin’head Wilson”. But as the story progresses, we see the person do something clever, or show loyalty and bravery. The viewer begins to laugh because he knows that reality is sort-of this way, though our minds must keep people pigeonholed. The reader already knows, perhaps from other comedies, that the slave will turn out to be the hero, the stupid one will one-up the smart and the chicken will save the day– somehow.

Ward Sullivan in the New Yorker

Ward Sullivan in the New Yorker. It’s unsettling when you don’t know if this is a new reality or a passing phase.

In life, we grab on to the patters we see because the alternative, chaos, is worse. All winters are cold, but will this winter be longer or shorter than normal; perhaps the groundhog knows, or perhaps the president of the US knows? We’ve learned to ignore the groundhog, but trust the president. Once we accept, from authority, that winters are getting warmer, we resist any effort to think we may be wrong, or that the pattern of the past may have changed; uncertainty seems worse. But we laugh at comedy, and occasionally get mad. How much evidence before one accepts that the temporary is permanent, or that ones original assessment was flawed? In comedy there’s always a stuffed-shirt character who tries to show off and gets hurt, perhaps by a pie in the face. Then it happens again, and again. The injuries and slow acceptance of the new reality create the humor. A common ending is to discover that the clever slave is a half-nobleman, perhaps the son of the stuffed-shirt, and the crowd goes home happy, with someone new we can trust.

With global warming and climate change, I see the same comedy being played out, and I expect it to reach the same, happy ending. For 20-30 years, till about 1998, there were a string warming winters; as a result we come to believe things will keep getting warmer. Then the president says we have to stop it, and laws are passed but not implemented; Al Gore gets a nobel prize for his efforts to stop global warming; the computer experts predict global disaster if we don’t change by 2005. The studies predict 4-6°C warming per century warming with massive flooding; we make new laws and point to shrinking of Himalayan glaciers, shrinking polar ice, and the lack of snow on Kilimanjaro — all justifications for the need to act fast and sacrifice for the future, and the warming stops. So far it’s been 16 years and no warming, the snow’s comes back to Kilimanjaro, and the seas have not risen. A few scientists start saying there may be a problem with the models, and the president gets mad about the headless chicken skeptics.

The US is then/now hit with the coldest temperatures since the early 1900s, with as much snow as 1904, but it’s never clear if this is a fluke or the new normal reality. Has the real pattern of warming changed, or maybe it never was. Kilimanjaro’s still snow-capped, the glaciers have returned to the Himalayas, and the antarctic ice swells to record size. The US sees a year with no major hurricanes.  We can laugh, but there’s no laughter from the President of The US, or the Prince of England or any who solemnly predicted disaster. Like the stuffed shirts in a comedy, they double down, and roar at the deniers; “They’re pawns of the lobbyists.” And I suspect the resolution will be that some climate denier will be crowned as the new expert, and we’ll go on to worry about a new disaster.

For what it’s worth, the weather seems to be chaotic (Chaos is funny); we appear to have been seeing part of a cycle that has an up-period and a down period. Something like that is shown by the 100 year plot of temperature data from Charlotte Carolina shown below.

Charlotte SC average temperatures over the last century.

Charlotte SC average temperatures over the last century. Perhaps the recent warming is part of a cycle. Is it clear there has been a change in climate. If so, where does the change start?

Robert E. Buxbaum, March 9, 2014. Surrealism is funny because it taps into the ridiculousness of life. Metaphysics humor is behind a statistics joke, an architecture cartoon, and my zen joke.  Physics is funny too.

Patterns in climate; change is the only constant

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There is a general problem when looking for climate trends: you have to look at weather data. That’s a problem because weather data goes back thousands of years, and it’s always changing. As a result it’s never clear what start year to use for the trend. If you start too early or too late the trend disappears. If you start your trend line in a hot year, like in the late roman period, the trend will show global cooling. If you start in a cold year, like the early 1970s, or the small ice age (1500 -1800) you’ll find global warming: perhaps too much. Begin 10-15 years ago, and you’ll find no change in global temperatures.

Ice coverage data shows the same problem: take the Canadian Arctic Ice maximums, shown below. If you start your regression in 1980-83, the record ice year (green) you’ll see ice loss. If you start in 1971, the year of minimum ice (red), you’ll see ice gain. It might also be nice to incorporate physics thought a computer model of the weather, but this method doesn’t seem to help. Perhaps that’s because the physics models generally have to be fed coefficients calculated from the trend line. Using the best computers and a trend line showing ice loss, the US Navy predicted, in January 2006, that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013. It didn’t happen; a new prediction is 2016 — something I suspect is equally unlikely. Five years ago the National Academy of Sciences predicted global warming would resume in the next year or two — it didn’t either. Garbage in -garbage out, as they say.

Arctic Ice in Northern Canada waters, 1970-2014 from icecanada.ca 2014 is not totally in yet. What year do you start when looking for a trend?

Arctic Ice in Northern Canada waters, 1971-2014 from the Canadian ice service 2014 is not totally in yet , but is likely to exceed 2013. If you are looking for trends, in what year do you start?

The same trend problem appears with predicting sea temperatures and el Niño, a Christmastime warming current in the Pacific ocean. This year, 2013-14, was predicted to be a super El Niño, an exceptionally hot, stormy year with exceptionally strong sea currents. Instead, there was no el Niño, and many cities saw record cold — Detroit by 9 degrees. The Antarctic ice hit record levels, stranding a ship of anti warming activists. There were record few hurricanes.  As I look at the Pacific sea temperature from 1950 to the present, below, I see change, but no pattern or direction: El Nada (the nothing). If one did a regression analysis, the slope might be slightly positive or negative, but r squared, the significance, would be near zero. There is no real directionality, just noise if 1950 is the start date.

El Niño and La Niña since 1950. There is no sign that they are coming more often, or stronger. Nor is there evidence even that the ocean is warming.

El Niño and La Niña since 1950. There is no sign that they are coming more often, or stronger. Nor is clear evidence that the ocean is warming.

This appears to be as much a fundamental problem in applied math as in climate science: when looking for a trend, where do you start, how do you handle data confidence, and how do you prevent bias? A thought I’ve had is to try to weight a regression in terms of the confidence in the data. The Canadian ice data shows that the Canadian Ice Service is less confident about their older data than the new; this is shown by the grey lines. It would be nice if some form of this confidence could be incorporated into the regression trend analysis, but I’m not sure how to do this right.

It’s not so much that I doubt global warming, but I’d like a better explanation of the calculation. Weather changes: how do you know when you’re looking at climate, not weather? The president of the US claimed that the science is established, and Prince Charles of England claimed climate skeptics were headless chickens, but it’s certainly not predictive, and that’s the normal standard of knowledge. Neither country has any statement of how one would back up their statements. If this is global warming, I’d expect it to be warm.

Robert Buxbaum, Feb 5, 2014. Here’s a post I’ve written on the scientific method, and on dealing with abnormal statistics. I’ve also written about an important recent statistical fraud against genetically modified corn. As far as energy policy, I’m inclined to prefer hydrogen over batteries, and nuclear over wind and solar. The president has promoted the opposite policy — for unexplained, “scientific” reasons.

Global warming takes a 15 year rest

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I have long thought that global climate change was chaotic, rather than steadily warming. Global temperatures show self-similar (fractal) variation with time and long-term cycles; they also show strange attractors generally states including ice ages and El Niño events. These are sudden rests of the global temperature pattern, classic symptoms of chaos. The standard models of global warming is does not predict El Niño and other chaotic events, and thus are fundamentally wrong. The models assume that a steady amount of sun heat reaches the earth, while a decreasing amount leaves, held in by increasing amounts of man-produced CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere. These models are “tweaked” to match the observed temperature to the CO2 content of the atmosphere from 1930 to about 2004. In the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore uses these models to predict massive arctic melting leading to a 20 foot rise in sea levels by 2100. To the embarrassment of Al Gore, and the relief of everyone else, though CO2 concentrations continue to rise, global warming took a 15 year break starting shortly before the movie came out, and the sea level is, more-or-less where it was except for temporary changes during periodic El Niño cycles.

Global temperature variation Fifteen years and four El Niño cycles, with little obvious change. Most models predict .25°C/decade.

Fifteen years of global temperature variation to June 2013; 4 El Niños but no sign of a long-term change.

Hans von Storch, a German expert on global warming, told the German newspaper, der Spiegel: “We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. [Further], according to the models, the Mediterranean region will grow drier all year round. At the moment, however, there is actually more rain there in the fall months than there used to be. We will need to observe further developments closely in the coming years.”

Aside from the lack of warming for the last 15 years, von Storch mentions that there has been no increase in severe weather. You might find that surprising given the news reports; still it’s so. Storms are caused by temperature and humidity differences, and these have not changed. (Click here to see why tornadoes lift stuff up).

At this point, I should mention that the majority of global warming experts do not see a problem with the 15 year pause. Global temperatures have been rising unsteadily since 1900, and even von Storch expects this trend to continue — sooner or later. I do see a problem, though, highlighted by the various chaotic changes that are left out of the models. A source of the chaos, and a fundamental problem with the models could be with how they treat the effects of water vapor. When uncondensed, water vapor acts as a very strong thermal blanket; it allows the sun’s light in, but prevents the heat energy from radiating out. CO2 behaves the same way, but weaker (there’s less of it).

More water vapor enters the air as the planet warms, and this should amplify the CO2 -caused run-away heating except for one thing. Every now and again, the water vapor condenses into clouds, and then (sometimes) falls as rain or show. Clouds and snow reflect the incoming sunlight, and this leads to global cooling. Rain and snow drive water vapor from the air, and this leads to accelerated global cooling. To the extent that clouds are chaotic, and out of man’s control, the global climate should be chaotic too. So far, no one has a very good global model for cloud formation, or for rain and snowfall, but it’s well accepted that these phenomena are chaotic and self-similar (each part of a cloud looks like the whole). Clouds may also admit “the butterfly effect” where a butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in New Jersey if it flaps at the right time.

For those wishing to examine the longer-range view, here’s a thermal history of central England since 1659, Oliver Cromwell’s time. At this scale, each peak is an El Niño. There is a lot of chaotic noise, but you can also notice either a 280 year periodicity (lat peak around 1720), or a 100 year temperature rise beginning about 1900.

Global warming; Central England Since 1659; From http://www.climate4you.com

It is not clear that the cycle is human-caused,but my hope is that it is. My sense is that the last 100 years of global warming has been a good thing; for agriculture and trade it’s far better than an ice age. If we caused it with our  CO2, we could continue to use CO2 to just balance the natural tendency toward another ice age. If it’s chaotic, as I suspect, such optimism is probably misplaced. It is very hard to get a chaotic system out of its behavior. The evidence that we’ve never moved an El Niño out of its normal period of every 3 to 7 years (expect another this year or next). If so, we should expect another ice age within the next few centuries.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing 4 Ice ages.

Just as clouds cool the earth, you can cool your building too by painting the roof white. If you are interested in more weather-related posts, here’s why the sky is blue on earth, and why the sky on Mars is yellow.

Robert E. Buxbaum July 27, 2013 (mostly my business makes hydrogen generators and I consult on hydrogen).