New IPCC report: busting myths, both scientific and economic

By Roger Jones, Victoria University

The headline statements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new Synthesis Report – unequivocal climate change, almost certainly driven largely by humans, and an urgent need to cut emissions – won’t come as any surprise to people who paid attention to the three larger reports the IPCC has released over the past 14 months.

But reading the full synthesis report, as opposed to the shorter Summary for Policymakers (SPM), shows that while the facts haven’t changed, the IPCC has subtly altered its approach to how it presents this information. Instead of dealing largely in forecasts and responses, as in previous syntheses, it now frames the climate problem squarely in terms of risk management.

Not everything of importance in the full synthesis report made it into the SPM. The language in the SPM is also weaker, particularly about the nature of irreversible risks and about threats to food security. The full report contains valuable pointers for managing climate risks and the benefits of acting, so should be preferred for decision-making purposes.

The report is also great for debunking some of the persistent myths about climate change, both scientific and economic. But, unfortunately given the urgent need for new economic policy to cut carbon, it’s stronger on the former than the latter.

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‘Wait and see’ on climate? No, the science is clear: act now

By Roger Jones, Victoria University and Roger Bodman, Victoria University

When should we act to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change: now, or later when we know more?

One person who thinks we should wait is New York University theoretical physicist, and former US Under Secretary of Energy for Science, Steven Koonin.

In an article published by the Wall Street Journal, and reproduced in The Australian, Koonin claims that climate models are still too uncertain and that everyone should hold their horses, arguing that:

… because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

That’s not to say that the issue isn’t pressing. But Koonin says we should urgently do science, rather than urgently cut emissions:

The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

Well, yes. But we’ve been doing this “urgent science” for decades.

Letter to SMH/The Age editors on McLean’s Op-ed

Readers of the Australian press over the holiday period would have seen the spray from Maurice Newman the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council in The Australian on December 31 where he claimed Australia’s climate policies were being driven by scientific delusion. That was followed by an article by David Karoly in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on January 1 correcting Newman’s take on the science. Then on January 3, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald printed a response to Karoly and Newman from John McLean. Following is a letter I have sent to the editors of both papers.

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to express my great disappointment at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s decision to publish John McLean’s opinion piece Lack of accountability clouds the climate change debate on Friday January 3. After the recent statement by SMH letters editors Julie Lewis and Marc McEvoy that (October 13, 2013) “climate change deniers or skeptics are free to express opinions and political views on our page but not to misrepresent facts”, we in the scientific community were hopeful this would be the case. Alas, it is not.

How to read an IPCC report

By Roger Jones, Victoria University and Celeste Young, Victoria University

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the accepted global authority on climate change. It produces reports that are collectively agreed assessments of the scientific literature by leading researchers. The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being delivered over 2013–2014, starting this weekend.

What an IPCC report is

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is an assessment that collects and summarises current knowledge in relation to climate change. This is done using literature from peer reviewed and unreviewed (grey) sources.

It is considered the leading review globally of climate change and is produced by a team of hundreds of scientists and specialists from a diverse range of disciplines.

Time to stop hiding behind warming trends

By Roger Jones, Victoria University

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, has reportedly acknowledged to Graham Lloyd of The Australian, that there is a “17-year pause in global temperature rises”, a fact that apparently has been suppressed in Australia. Dr Pauchauri endorses debate, saying that people had a right to question the science, whatever their motivations.

But according to Lloyd, Pachauri’s views contrast with arguments in Australia that views outside the orthodox position of approved climate scientists should be left unreported.

Am I an “approved” climate scientist? because I don’t hold that view, nor do I know any who does. What we would like, though, is for science to be reported as science and for opinion to be reported as opinion. And for all reporting to be accurate.

Lloyd makes this claim: unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgement by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.

This is the Met Office’s latest five-year forecast shown below. Skeptical Science reports the Met Office saying: the latest decadal prediction suggests that global temperatures over the next five years are likely to be a little lower than predicted from the previous prediction issued in December 2011. We’re in the midst of a period of La Niñas, which have a slight cooling effect, as do rising sulphate emissions in Asia. But look at the blue line – do my eyes deceive me? Is it level with the previous black line? It’s warmer? Perhaps Lloyd’s computer has a tilt to the right that makes increases look level.

Observed (black, from Hadley Centre, GISS and NCDC) and predicted global average annual surface temperature difference relative to 1971-2000. Retrospective predictions starting from June 1960, 1965, …, 2005 are shown as white curves, with red shading representing their probable range, such that the observations are expected to lie within the shading 90% of the time. The most recent forecast (thick blue curve with thin blue curves showing range) starts from November 2012. All data are rolling annual mean values. The gap between the black and blue curves arises because the last observed value represents the period November 2011 to October 2012 whereas the first forecast period is November 2012 to October 2013. UK Met Office

The Met Office predicts record global mean temperature over the next five years – now that’s news.

News Corporation sells roughly 70% of the newspapers in metropolitan Australia, and its readers are subject to this kind of fudging on a regular basis. It’s no wonder some “approved” scientists are frustrated.

But that’s not the only thing that frustrates me. It is also time to challenge what Lloyd calls the orthodox position of climate science.

Climatology needs to stop hiding behind long-term trends and explain what is in plain sight, and why variations in the rate of warming might be important. I’m working with colleagues at the moment on a National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility project called Valuing Adaptation to Rapid Change and we’re looking at the economics of rapid change. Non-linear behaviour in climate driving extreme events has the potential to really hurt us.

The first thing to bear in mind is that a trend line is a model. A warming trend is not a theory of how climate changes. If a complex, non-linear system fails to follow a trend, look at the model to see whether it represents the theory sufficiently well.

In a nutshell, the theory says greenhouse gases act like a blanket, trapping heat near the surface. This creates a radiation imbalance at the top of the atmosphere. The earth system warms to return this balance by increasing the heat escaping from the top of the atmosphere so that energy out equals energy in. This is a slow process, taking centuries, because the ocean has to warm sufficiently to support a hotter atmosphere. The scientific confidence in this aspect of climatology is extremely high. A simple trend line is sufficient to measure this process.

But on decadal time scales, the trend-line model fails. Most of the heat trapped in the earth system goes into the oceans. The top 700m of ocean increased in heat content from 3 x 10²² Joules in 1997 to 10 x 10²² Joules in 2010, in a highly non-linear manner, due to mixing rates between the surface and deep ocean. The atmosphere holds as much heat as the top 3m of ocean, about 0.4% of the heat content above. Why on earth then, with highly non-linear processes in the ocean, would we expect a gradual warming trend in the atmosphere?

A paper I published last year shows that most of Australia’s warming occurred in two episodes, one in the late 1960s to early 1970s, when south west WA rainfall also decreased, and the other in 1997-98. The other finding was that most of this warming was anthropogenic. On decadal timescales, step and trend is a much better model for explaining warming than simple trends.

To me, the graph above makes perfect sense: mild trends separated by an instantaneous rise of about 0.3°C. By ignoring non-linearity and projecting future climate change as simple trends, orthodox science is doing us a great disservice. We have not yet woken up to the recent non-linear increases in heatwaves and fire danger in Australia let alone planning for more such changes in the future. The same goes for floods.

Observed and projected percentage area experiencing an exceptionally hot year: Queensland as an example. Note the recent rapid increase (source: K. Braganza, Bureau of Meteorology)

Days above high fire danger, average of 9 Victorian sites, showing statistically significant rapid increase (site data from Bureau of Meteorology)

It’s time to stop defending orthodox science by hiding behind simple trends and come to grips with the fundamental non-linearity of climate change. That’s the risk we need to mitigate, adapting to changes that can’t be avoided.

Roger Jones receives funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. He is affiliated with Climate Scientists Australia and the IPCC.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Spooner’s war on climate policy

John Spooner, cartoonist for The Age has fired his latest salvo in his war on climate policy in yesterday’s (7-7-2012) paper. It mentions me so I feel obliged to provide a response. J’accuse Spooner of being a propagandist.

Yep, that’s me down by the *. Quoted as measuring Australia’s policy impact as being 0.0038°C in 2100. Which would happen if Australia was to reduce its emissions by 5% from 2000 by 2020 and maintain that until 2100. But is this cartoon an accurate and amusing reflection of the conversation Gillard would have with her imaginary friend? Well yes, until the fourth panel. Then it falls away — and that’s worth a bit of scrutiny. And he gets IPCC wrong. What is the IPPC?

LaRaspberry in Oz

Got a call from Rob Gell because he’s co-host in the conversation hour on the Jon Faine morning show on ABC774 Melbourne radio, today July 6 at 11 am EAST. The conversation hour usually has two guests – the guest in question? Donna Laframboise, denialista and author of  the book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. It is the real story behind the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Apparently the selection of a few lead authors who are not hoary old farts who have gone emeritus, disqualifies the IPCC from saying anything useful.

Preferred IPCC author by those who deny the IPCC is of any use – no young scientists here, thankyou!

Full IPCC SREX Report Released

The full IPCC Special Report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) has been released. The download of the entire report (44 Mb) is here, the Summary for Policymakers is here, the press release is here and slide presentation (pdf) here. Also on the site are individual chapters for download, review comments, process information, graphics and the grey literature library.

As I posted late last year with the release of the SPM, the great benefit of this special report is the coming together of the climate change and disaster management expert communities. A marriage, which I’m told, got a bit rocky at times. The report emphasises the need to address both biophysical and social-economic aspects of changing climate extremes and the systems exposed to those changes.

Climategate V2 emails: exchange on the extremes Table 3-10 in the IPCC TAR

The second tranche of emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit’s servers has been released by a group who are trying a Wikileaks take on how climate science is done. Last time, given their origin, I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Now it is claimed there are some 200,000 emails in the database, so their likelihood of eventually being made public is pretty high. The latest 5,000 were selected on specific keywords but beyond that are random. Given that likelihood, the way that science is being challenged on “free” speech grounds by opponents of specific scientific findings, and the need to acquaint the wider public with how science is put together, it seems worth illustrating some of those exchanges in full. This is also to counter the egregious quote mining, out-of-context selection and revivification of already investigated claims going on in the blogosphere. Even the quotes taken from the README.txt file accompanying the leaked emails, which is the only part that most journalists will have read, are wildly out of context.

The following exchange is about an early version of Table 3-10 from Chapter 3, Working Group II Developing and Applying Scenarios in the Third Assessment Report. The table was a lot more complex than the final version, having stars denoting confidence and a wide range of extremes. After government review, the response was that the table was too complex and that the most important information to impart were the extremes known with relatively high confidence and their likely impacts. The final version shown to the right reflects those reviews.

IPCC SREX released

The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the IPCC Special Report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) was released late last night our time. The final plenary was held in Kampala Uganda, finishing on the 17th before the release yesterday. As usual, it is gone through line by line by IPCC country member representatives and the co-ordinating lead authors to craft a document that contains key policy messages while retaining true to the science in the report.

The SPM is complex and has already been given a number of interpretations in the press. The ABC news says extreme weather to worsen with climate change. The Australian focuses on the uncertainty Climate change effects unknown: IPCC report. A quick survey of Google news suggests that most outlets are focusing on extremes to worsen, or the qualified some extremes to worsen.

The Australian is different. Its header says:

GREAT uncertainty remains about how much of an impact climate change will have on future extreme weather events, the world’s leading climate scientists have found.

While there has been an increase in warm days and a decrease in cold nights, the likely impact on future weather events would not be evident for decades because of natural variability, the scientists say in a key review prepared for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This completely ignores the thrust of the report, which is to address the risks of extreme climate-related events and disasters and manage changing risk through adaptation. The great value of the report is not so much in its headline findings, which are complex but are in bringing the climate, adaptation and disaster communities together. These two communities had a hard time of it in the writing of the report bringing together different language, concepts, views of risk and methods of assessing vulnerability and adaptation.