Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) Still Completely Wrong About Global Warming ‘Halt’ and Continues to Spread Falsehoods about the Science of Climate Change

by Vanessa Schipani, FactCheck.org, March 30, 2016 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) at a recent hearing claimed a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change “confirms the halt in global warming.” It doesn’t. In fact, the authors of the paper write, “We do not believe that warming has ceased.”

Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and longtime climate change skeptic, used the Nature study as ammunition against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an ongoing battle over the validity of a paper that NOAA researchers published in the journal Science last June.

While the Nature study, published online in late February, claims there was a “slowdown” in the rate of global warming in the early 21st century, the Science paper argues there was not. But the studies compared different time periods. Both studies agree that there was no complete halt in global warming and the long-term warming trend remains unabated.

At the March 16, 2016, House hearing, Smith also continued to criticize the Science paper. He said the paper was “prematurely published,” but the editor-in-chief of Science told us Smith’s claim is “baseless and without merit.” Smith also said that the NOAA researchers used “controversial methods” in their study, but the authors of the Nature paper cited by Smith said this wasn’t the case. In fact, they cite the Science paper as having “high scientific value.”

Overall, each study asked different scientific questions, the answers to which can both remain valid and correct, according to the Nature authors themselves.

Smith vs. NOAA

This is not the first time Smith, a Republican from Texas, has made false statements about climate science and the so-called “Karl study,” named after Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the Science paper’s lead author.

As we’ve written before, Smith claimed in October 2015 that “climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades” and that NOAA scientists “altered the data” to get the results they presented in the Science study.

Motivated to quell what he considers the NOAA and Obama administration’s “extreme climate change agenda,” Smith used the House science committee’s subpoena power on Oct. 13, 2015, to obtain internal communications at NOAA regarding the Karl study. NOAA has provided the committee with some documents and emails, though Smith continues to request more information.

In the battle’s latest episode, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan testified before the House science committee on March 16 on NOAA’s 2017 budget. Again, Smith brought up the Karl study, claiming it was “prematurely published” and used “controversial new methods,” among other things.

During the hearing, Sullivan countered by stating that the final timing of any publication is “at the discretion of the publication itself.” She also said Science “scrubbed this paper with extra diligence” due to the “interest in this matter.”

According to Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief at Science, Smith is wrong and Sullivan is right. In fact, McNutt told us by email, “Any suggestion that the review of this paper was ‘rushed’ is baseless and without merit.”

McNutt added that “knowing that this report’s results disputed the existence of a 21st century global warming slowdown described in previous studies, Science took extra care to assure even more rigorous review and evaluation than normal.”

When asked to provide evidence that NOAA had prematurely published the Karl study, a committee aide for Smith pointed us to a Nov. 23, 2015, Washington Post article. In that article, Thomas Peterson, an author of the Science study and retired NOAA climate scientist, describes “internal tensions” between NOAA scientists and engineers over delays related to the programs used to process the climate data. But in the same piece, Peterson is quoted as stating that the research was not rushed. “Indeed just the opposite is true,” he told the Post.

Smith made a few new claims during the March 16 budget hearing as well. He said, “A new peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Nature, confirms the halt in global warming. According to one of the study’s lead authors, it ‘essentially refutes’ NOAA’s study.” Smith also repeatedly asked Sullivan to side with either the Science or the Nature study’s findings because he claimed both can’t be “correct” or “valid.”

First off, the two papers’ disagreement was on whether the rate of warming has slowed in the first 15 years of the 21st century, not whether warming has halted, as Smith claimed.

Second, John Fyfe, lead author of the Nature paper, told us in an email that Smith took his comment during an interview with the website Climate Central out of context. “It would be incorrect to interpret [the ‘essentially refutes’] quote as indicating that Fyfe et al. refuted the Karl et al. study in its entirety.” He said, “As we said in our Commentary we view the Karl et al. study as being of ‘high scientific value.’ ”

Third, according to McNutt and the Nature authors, both papers could, in fact, remain valid and correct. For example, Gerald Meehl, an author on the Nature paper and climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, pointed us to a segment of an article with Environment & Energy Publishing, which states “both comparisons are valid … and provide answers to different questions.”

In the following section we’ll explain the similarities and differences between the two papers’ methods and results and why both can remain valid.

 Science vs. Nature

Both the Science and the Nature papers begin by mentioning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s description of a surface warming slowdown between 1998 and 2012 in its Fifth Assessment Report. Both papers also note that researchers use “hiatus” to describe this slowdown in the scientific literature — a point Smith’s committee aide made to us. But technically the rate of global warming never completely halted during this period, as both papers state.

For this reason, the authors of the Nature paper write that it’s “unfortunate” that the 21st century warming trend has been framed as having “stalled,” “stopped,” “paused” or “entered a ‘hiatus.’ ” While “[j]ust exactly how such changes should be referred to is open to debate,” the authors suggest “reduced rate of warming,” “decadal fluctuation” and “temporary slowdown” as some possibilities.

Both papers diverge when it comes to the specific questions the researchers asked, and, accordingly, how they quantified the slowdown.

The authors of the Science paper compared the rate of warming during the period between 2000 and 2014 with that of 1951 to 1999, though they also investigated trends in warming dating back to 1880.

The Nature authors, alternatively, compared the warming rate of 2001 to 2014 with a shorter period — 1972 to 2001.

The rationale for using different time periods is tied, at least in part, to the ultimate aim of each study.

The Science study was designed to determine if the global warming trend for “the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century.” It found there was no “slowdown” in global warming compared with this 50-year period.

The Nature study, on the other hand, strove to figure out whether the rates of global warming fluctuate every few decades, so the authors compared the first 15 years of the 21st century with a shorter time period. They reported that the rate had slowed down from 1950 to 1972, then sped up from 1972 to 2001, and then slowed again from 2001 to 2014. “A warming slowdown is thus clear in observations; it is also clear that it has been a ‘slowdown,’ not a ‘stop,’ ” the study concluded.

Meehl told us by email that it was mainly the Karl study’s “interpretation of different trend lengths [discussed above] that we took issue with.”

However, Meehl said he did not find the Karl study’s methods to be “controversial.” The adjustments the NOAA scientists made to their data, which Smith has criticized, “were fairly minor,” added Meehl, and involved calibrating different sets of data to each other.

For example, data on sea surface temperatures alone can come from buoys, ship engine-intake systems and buckets dropped off the side of a ship. As the Science study states, “ship data are systematically warmer than the buoy data,” so adjustments need to be made to calibrate them to each other.

The same inconsistencies occur when data are collected from different land stations. In fact, the Nature paper describes the Karl study’s identification and correction of these data “errors and inhomogeneities” as “of high scientific value.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University and an author on the Nature paper, wrote Smith an open letter on March 3, which directly addressed the chairman’s false claims.

In his letter, which was posted on Facebook, Mann wrote: “Please don’t misrepresent our recent Nature Climate Change commentary. Our study does NOT support the notion of a ‘pause’ in global warming, only a *temporary slowdown*, which was due to natural factors, and has now ended.”

In sum, based on their different questions and correspondingly different time period comparisons, the Science and Nature studies came to different, though equally valid, conclusions about the warming rate in the early 21st century. Regardless, neither paper supported a halt in global warming, as Smith claimed.

Editor’s Note: SciCheck is made possible by a grant from the Stanton Foundation.

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/03/smith-still-wrong-about-warming-halt/

MUST SEE VIDEO! Better than anything Cameron has done!

Readers, please go to this link to see one of the best climate videos produced -- it really is an outstanding job (it is about 14 minutes long, and well worth it):

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4107264.htm

From 1975 to 1998 the world saw a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. But for the last 16 years the rate of rise has slowed dramatically leading skeptics to question predictions of catastrophe. In this episode we find out 'what happened to global warming?'

Anja Taylor, ABC (Australia), October 16, 2014

GLOBAL WARMING PAUSEI

TRANSCRIPT

download video: mp4

NARRATION
17 years ago, a warm wind was blowing across the Pacific. As it blew, it pushed sun-warmed waters westward, piling them high to the north-east of Australia. When the winds eased, the warm waters washed back across the vast ocean, releasing masses of heat to the atmosphere in what became the mother of all El Nino events.

Richard Morecroft
The Florida storms are being blamed on El Nino.

News Reporter
..wild storms and heavy rain in South America...

News Reporter
A man-made permanent drought is...

NARRATION
It was 1998 and the climate seemed set on a frightening trajectory.

News Reporter
What the world is experiencing could be part of a climate shift.

NARRATION
But the years that followed didn't live up to predictions, leading to a crisis of confidence.

Christopher Monckton
They have been deliberately exaggerating the evidence, over-stating the case, frightening people, frightening even children.

Professor Judith Curry
The globally average surface temperature hasn't increased in any significant way since 1998.

Maurice Newman
In fact, can be argued since 2003 it has cooled off somewhat.

NARRATION
It became the most important question to answer in climate science today - what happened to global warming? It's a cold and blustery day in Boulder, Colorado. It seems a fitting start to a story on what's become known as the 'global warming pause'. It's a well-established fact that people are less likely to believe the world is warming when there's cold weather about. But it was also here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that a distinguished senior scientist found himself at the centre of a climate conspiracy storm.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
This related to what was subsequently called Climategate in which a whole bunch of emails were stolen.

NARRATION
Among the Many hacked emails in the 2009 Climategate scandal was one from Dr Kevin Trenberth to a colleague. Sceptics seized on one particular sentence as written proof that climate scientists were involved in a large-scale cover-up.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
It was picked up as me saying that there was no global warming, somehow or the other, and completely misinterpreted and it just propagated all over the place - it was amazing to see.

NARRATION
Yet, the world didn't seem to be warming... at least not much. While the period from 1975 to 1998 had seen a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, in the years since, the rate of rise has slowed dramatically, leading a vocal minority to question predictions of catastrophe.

Professor Judith Curry
So we're getting this growing divergence between the observations and the climate model simulations.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
You have at least to consider the possibility that the models are not reliable for one reason or another.

Anja Taylor
On one point the sceptics were right - none of the models used in future climate projections predicted the hiatus. And while the slowdown for the first few years was written off as natural variability, lately it's become something to explain.

NARRATION
From the data he's been analysing, Dr Trenberth sees a planet heating up just as fast as ever.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We can look at the energy budget of the Earth by looking at information from satellites that are flying above the atmosphere, which can actually track the incoming solar radiation from the sun, how much is reflected and how much the Earth is radiating back to space. It's not absolutely accurate, but it does track the year-to-year variations very well.

NARRATION
His calculations show our budget is continually in surplus - more energy coming in than leaving the atmosphere.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
Given that there's an energy imbalance, where does that energy go? How much has gone into the oceans? How much has gone into melting Arctic sea ice? Warming the atmosphere, warming up the land, changing evaporation and therefore changing clouds which can also change the brightness of the planet. And when we first did this, there was some quite substantial discrepancies that in some years we can't account for where the energy has gone.

NARRATION
And that was the cause of the frustration expressed in Kevin's email. Monitoring systems simply aren't sophisticated enough to track all of the heat exchanges on the planet.

Anja Taylor
The main focus in global warming has been air temperatures, because it's the easiest to measure and it's the temperature we feel. But it's a tiny fraction of the planet's total heat content and it's also highly variable.

NARRATION
As greenhouse gas emissions have risen over the last century, the long-term trend in air temperatures is obvious. But zoom in on the chart and you'll see fluctuations. These swings are put down to natural variability. The current hiatus is no different. But this time, climate scientists have been under pressure to pin down the exact cause. There have been several.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
So the sun went into a relatively quiet phase. In addition, there have been a number of small volcanoes that put debris into the stratosphere that blocked the sun. And what about the air pollution? China has been developing enormously - what has that done?

NARRATION
In total, aerosols and solar activity are thought to account for about 20% of the pause, but the biggest contender for where the rest of the heat is going is the one that's hardest to measure. The oceans absorb a whopping 93% of the world's excess heat.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
I've been working with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and they have developed an ocean-monitoring system that synthesises all of the information - sea-level measurements, the measurements from the floats, sensors that are measuring sea-surface temperature and so on - and that we've found is that after about 1999, a lot more heat is going deeper into the ocean. And this is unprecedented. Is this just a consequence of the change in the observing system or is it real? And I think we have good reason to believe that at some of this is real.

NARRATION
Multiple lines of evidence converge here in the Pacific, the largest and deepest ocean in the world.

Professor Matthew England
If you rotate the globe around, that's all you see for part of this hemisphere is just a big fat piece of ocean. The Pacific Ocean is a huge influence on climate.

NARRATION
Professor Matthew England has been key to nailing down how the Pacific has been dragging down world average temperatures.

Professor Matthew England
We had to look for something about the climate system post-2000 that was dramatically different to the climate system in the '80s and '90s, and one of the most dramatic things you see in the system is this flip in the Pacific Ocean. If ever you travel to the tropics in the Pacific Ocean, there's a prevailing wind from the east towards the west, and these easterly winds push a lot of the surface water across the West Pacific Ocean. If they remain for long enough, this water starts to get subducted into the ocean interior. During the '80s and '90s the winds were quite weak, not a lot of heat was getting subducted into the Pacific Ocean during that time and a lot of heat was remaining in the atmosphere.

NARRATION
Then came the massive El Nino event 17 years ago.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
In 1997-1998 there was a tremendous amount of heat that came out of the ocean, and we can measure it, and so the ocean actually cooled quite substantially. And so, we think that this may have then kicked the whole behaviour of the Pacific Ocean into a different mode.

NARRATION
The ocean once more began to build up heat. The change in the way the ocean either releases or draws in heat is part of a regular long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Each phase lasts around 15 to 30 years. When Dr Gerry Meehl from Boulder studied climate models with hiatuses, he discovered they linked closely with the negative phase of this pattern.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And sure enough the extra heat was going into the deeper ocean. So that was kind of the first tie we had, a tangible link to where the heat was going during these hiatus periods. And this connected then to stronger trade winds.

NARRATION
It was Matthew England who found these winds were unprecedented in strength this century.

Professor Matthew England
The winds are that much stronger than we'd ever seen before in the observations.

NARRATION
The winds are, in fact, being turbo-charged by abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic, as air races from high pressure to low, the winds push the warm surface waters west.

Professor Matthew England
So, over the last 20 or so years, the sea level over the West Pacific has risen quite dramatically above the global average sea-level rise, whilst in the East Pacific it's declined.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
And in this case, it's been piled up to such an extent that there's been a 20cm-rise in sea level compared with the Eastern Pacific. And that, to me, seems like a very large number.

Professor Matthew England
It's sort of reaches a breaking point perhaps where that heat then sloshes back to the East Pacific.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And that then adds to the warming from the increasing greenhouse gasses and you get real sudden increases of temperatures globally. Last time that happened was in the mid-1970s. Global temperatures warmed almost a half a degree Centigrade, which is almost half of the warming we got in the whole 20th century.

NARRATION
What that means is we're currently in the phase before the next global temperature jump.

Professor Matthew England
There will be warming out of this hiatus at some point in time - whether it's this or in five years' time, there's gonna be warming - and unfortunately, what we're seeing in the models is that the warming out of the hiatus is gonna be rapid, regardless of when that hiatus ends.

NARRATION
But a small minority of scientists disagree.

Professor Judith Curry
That's where I break with my colleagues. I just think there's a lot more uncertainty. We're now in the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and I think that is the major thing that's causing the pause. And my understanding of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is that we could stay in the cool phase for another two decades. So where does that leave us in terms of thinking that this sensitivity that we've deduced, largely based on this warming in the last quarter of the 20th century, during that period we were in the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
And this is a thought which is, for about 30 years people have tried to ignore because it takes away from the thought that most of the rise in temperature is due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Professor Matthew England
Look, I agree that the warming in the '80s and '90s certainly would've had a component of Pacific natural variability to it. But it was beyond just that. So, if you think about the natural system without greenhouse gasses, it would see cooling of the atmosphere globally then warming in the positive phase, and we'd be flatlining over 100 years. We don't see that - we're seeing hiatus decades.

Professor Judith Curry
And there is one other possibility - that there is no missing heat. Changes in ocean circulation have changed the pattern of the clouds, which is reflecting more solar radiation and so the Earth isn't heating as much. So, unfortunately, the observations aren't quite good enough to distinguish between those two ideas.

Professor Matthew England
There's no evidence that clouds can account for this hiatus. Many things have occurred over the last 15 years that should've given us one of the coolest decades over the last 100 years. It's actually the warmest on record.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We've seen that in Australia, we've seen that in the United States, all kinds of thousands of temperature records were broken.

Dr Gerald Meehl
A lot of the continental regions have continued to warm up. and we've seen an increase in, for example, heat extremes over a lot of continental areas, all the while that the global average temperatures haven't been doing much.

Professor Matthew England
Arctic Sea ice has declined dramatically, way beyond the projections. Sea level is rising faster than we projected even just five or ten years ago.

NARRATION
All things considered, there's been global warming pause.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
The whole of the climate system is really warming - it's just that the warming can be manifested in different ways.

Professor Matthew England
For some people, it's very easy for them to get this, but there are other people who are just absolutely obsessed with derailing the basic physics of climate change, and for them this poses a great little story that global warming's paused. I wish they were right but unfortunately they're wrong.

Justin Gillis, NYT: U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions

STOCKHOLM — The world’s top climate scientists on Friday formally embraced an upper limit on greenhouse gases for the first time, establishing a target level at which humanity must stop spewing them into the atmosphere or face irreversible and potentially catastrophic climatic changes. They warned that the target is likely to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps are taken soon to reduce emissions.

Related

Temperature Rising

Articles in this series focus on the central arguments in the climate debate and examine the evidence for global warming and its consequences.

• DOCUMENT: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report Summary

Readers’ Comments

Share your thoughts.

• Read All Comments (379) »

Unveiling the latest United Nations assessment of climate science, the experts cited a litany of changes that are already under way, warned that they are likely to accelerate and expressed virtual certainty that human activity is the main cause.

“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” said Thomas F. Stocker, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored group of scientists that produced the report. “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.”

The panel, in issuing its most definitive assessment yet of the risks of human-caused warming, hoped to give impetus to international negotiations toward a new climate treaty, which have languished in recent years in a swamp of technical and political disputes. The group made clear that time is not on the planet’s side if emissions continue unchecked.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” the report said. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” [In fact, research suggests that all of the warming since 1950 is due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.]

Despite the urgency of the panel’s findings, the course of future international negotiations remains unclear and heated opposition both to established climate science and to strong actions to reduce emissions is certain to continue.

Going well beyond its four previous analyses of the emissions problem, the panel endorsed a “carbon budget” for humanity — a limit on the amount of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that can be produced by industrial activities and the clearing of forests.

To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, the panel found, no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.

Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released somewhere around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than three trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.

To keep using fossil fuels beyond the trillionth ton of emissions, companies would have to develop potentially expensive technology to capture and store carbon dioxide from emissions sources like power plants. Such efforts have been lagging badly; only last week, Norway scaled back one of the most ambitious such projects because of soaring costs.

But a considerable body of research suggests that in principle it could be done, and in the United States, the Obama administration is moving toward rules that would essentially require utilities to develop the technology if they want to keep burning coal to produce electricity. In response, the president’s Republican opponents have accused him of waging a “war on coal.”

The report is a 30-page synopsis of a larger, 900-page report that is to be released next week on the physical science of climate change. That will be followed by additional reports in 2014 on the likely impacts and on possible steps to limit the damage.

The group has now issued five major reports since 1990, each of them finding greater certainty that the world is warming and greater likelihood that human activity is the chief cause. The new report finds a 95-100% probability that most of the warming of recent decades is human-caused, up from the 90-100% probability cited in the last report, in 2007.

But the new document also acknowledges that climate science still contains huge uncertainties [no, not on the basic problem, where certainty is 100%], including the likely magnitude of the warming for a given level of emissions, the rate at which the ocean will rise, and the likelihood that plants and animals will be driven to extinction. The scientists emphasized, however, that those uncertainties cut in both directions and the only way to limit the risk is to limit emissions.

The group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore, the former vice president, for highlighting the climate problem. But it came under attack in recent years by climate-skeptic organizations [i.e., right-wing faux think tanks who are financed by the fossil fuel industry], who assailed the new report as alarmist even before it was published.

The Heartland Institute [it is just unbelievable that Gillis was compelled to mention this criminal organization, an essential component of the Climate Denial Machine], a Chicago organization that once compared climate scientists to the Unabomber, issued a document last week saying that any additional global warming would likely be limited to a few tenths of a degree and this “would not represent a climate crisis.”  [This document was written by people paid by the fossil fuel industry and did not undergo any sort of peer-review process -- in short, it is junk science. One must wonder if Gillis was forced to mention this notorious group.]

The new IPCC report did not take direct aim at such climate doubters [i.e., paid deniers], but it did curtly dismiss some of their favorite theories, like the notion that cosmic rays are warming the planet.

On an issue much cited by the climate doubters [i.e., paid deniers], a slowdown in global warming that has occurred over the past 15 years, the report acknowledged that it was not fully understood, but said such pauses had occurred in the past and the natural variability of climate was a likely explanation.

“People think that global warming means every year is going to be warmer than the year before,” said Gerald A. Meehl, an American scientist who helped write the report. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a stair-step kind of thing.”

Climate scientists not involved in writing the new report said that the authors had made a series of cautious choices in their assessment of the scientific evidence.

Regarding sea level rise, for instance, they gave the first firm estimates ever contained in an intergovernmental panel report, declaring that if emissions continue at a rapid pace, the rise by the end of the 21st century could be as much as three feet. They threw out a string of published papers suggesting a worst-case rise closer to five feet. [James Hansen's estimate is far higher, perhaps 2 meters or 6.5 feet.]

Similarly, the authors went out of their way to include a recent batch of papers suggesting the earth might be somewhat less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, even though serious questions have been raised about the validity of those estimates.

The new report lowered the bottom end of the range of potential warming that could be expected to occur over the long term if the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere were to double, reversing a decision the panel made in the last report and restoring a scientific consensus that had prevailed from 1979 to 2007. Six years ago, that range was reported as 3.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit; the new range is 2.7 to 8.1 degrees.

In Washington, the White House praised the new report. President Obama’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, cited increased scientific confidence “that the kinds of harm already being experienced from climate change will continue to worsen unless and until comprehensive and vigorous action to reduce emissions is undertaken worldwide.”

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, spoke to delegates at the meeting Friday by video link, declaring his intention to call a meeting of heads of state in 2014, in a risky attempt to push such a treaty forward. The last such high-level meeting, in Copenhagen in 2009, ended in disarray.

“The heat is on,” Mr. Ban declared. “Now we must act.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/science/global-climate-change-report.html

MUST SEE, Peter Sinclair: No Slowdown in Global Warming

by Peter Sinclair, Yale Climate Forum, September 5, 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=047vmL6Q_4g

Dana Nuccitelli: The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle

Evidence continues to mount that the slowed warming of global surface temperatures is mainly due to changes in the oceans

by Dana Nuccitelli, Climate Consensus - The 97%, The Guardian, September 3, 2013

A new study published in the journal Nature incorporates temperature changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean into an advanced climate model, and finds that the model can reproduce observed global surface temperature changes remarkably well.

 

This graph shows the good match between temperatures in the Nature paper model (in red) and measured temperatures (in black). Just accounting for human and solar climate influences doesn't reproduce the recent surface warming slowdown (in purple). 

  Importantly, as authors Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography explain, accounting for the changes in the Pacific Ocean allows the model to reproduce the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years. It also accurately reproduces the regional and seasonal changes in surface temperatures, which adds confidence that their results are meaningful.

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to La-Niña-like decadal cooling … For the recent decade, the decrease in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature has lowered the global temperature by about 0.15 degrees Celsius compared to the 1990s.

Despite only covering 8.2% of the Earth's surface, these results suggest that the tropical Pacific Ocean plays a major role in short-term changes in the average global surface temperature. And over the past 15 years, it's offset most of the global surface warming from the increased greenhouse effect.

These results are broadly consistent with several other important recent papers investigating the role of the oceans in global warming. For example, the model used in this study finds that the overall heating of the planet has not slowed when the warming of the oceans are taken into account, as studies led by John Abraham, myself, and several others have also concluded.
Research led by Gerald Meehl has similarly focused on the importance of the Pacific Ocean in short-term global surface temperature changes. His climate model predicts that there will be decades when surface temperature changes are relatively flat because more heat is transferred to the deep oceans, precisely as we have observed over the past decade. Meehl discussed the Kosaka & Xie study with Carbon Brief,

This paper basically confirms, with a novel methodology, what we originally documented in our Nature Climate Change paper in 2011 and followed up with in our Journal of Climate paper ... We went beyond [the new paper] to show that when the tropical Pacific was cool for a decade ... more heat is mixed into the deeper ocean, something the new paper doesn't address.

Kevin Trenberth, who co-authored several of these important ocean studies, has likewise pointed to the important role of the Pacific Ocean in transferring more heat to the deep oceans.

The cause of the shift is a particular change in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing ocean currents and providing a mechanism for heat to be carried down into the ocean. This is associated with weather patterns in the Pacific, which are in turn related to the La Niña phase of the El Niño phenomenon.

Research by Masahiro Watanabe of the Japanese Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute has also suggested that the transfer of heat to the deep oceans and corresponding slowed global surface warming is related to changes in the Pacific.
Thus the scientific picture is becoming increasingly clear that the Pacific Ocean has played a large role in the slowed surface warming in recent years, but the warming of the oceans and planet as a whole have continued unabated. Thus the slowed surface warming is very likely to be a temporary effect, similar to the flat global surface temperatures between 1940 and 1970 when the Pacific Ocean was in another cool cycle.

Although it may be a natural reaction to hope that the recent slowed surface warming suggests that climate change isn't an imminent threat, the scientific evidence simply does not support such optimism. Climate scientist Judith Curry, who I recently criticized for failing to grasp the concept of climate risk management, recently articulated this rosy view on her blog. By focusing at the model simulation data specifically from 1975 to 1998, Curry incorrectly argued that the study supports the position that global warming is mostly natural.

There are a few major problems with this argument. Between 1975 and 1998 when the Pacific Ocean was in a warm phase of its cycle, it accounted for some of the observed global surface warming (though less than Curry asserts; about 30%). But the thing about cycles – they're cyclical. Focusing on the warm cycles while ignoring the cool cycles is an example of classic cherry picking.

If we look at the full record, for both 1950–2012 and 1970–2012 (the Pacific Ocean temperature data are most reliable since 1970), according to the model used in this study, the Pacific Ocean has actually had a slight overall cooling effect on global surface temperatures. It's also important to note that this cycle is just moving heat around between oceans and air – the overall warming of the planet has remained steady and rapid.

Thus the body of scientific research consistently shows that global warming continues unabated, and is predominantly human-caused. The Pacific Ocean has likely played a significant role in the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years by transferring more heat to the deep oceans, but that change appears to be a temporary one. When the Pacific Ocean enters its next warm cycle, we're likely to see a rapid warming of global surface temperatures. If we continue to use the temporary slowed surface warming as an excuse to delay climate action, we'll regret that decision when the surface warming kicks in with a vengeance.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/sep/03/global-warming-pacific-ocean-puzzle-piece

Seth Borenstein: This is what global warming looks like

This summer is what global warming looks like


by Seth Borenstein, AP, Washington, July 3, 2012
   A tree sitting atop a vehicle offers free firewood in Falls Church, VA, Monday, July, 2, 2012, as cleanup continued after Friday's storm, Around 2 million utility customers are without electricity across a swath of states along the East Coast and as far west as Illinois as the area recovers from a round of summer storms that has also caused at least 17 deaths. (AP Photo/Matthew Barakat)

Is it just freakish weather or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."

"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."

Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — a large, powerful and long-lasting straight-line wind storm — blew from Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Fueled by the record high heat, this was among the strongest of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect "non-tornadic wind events" like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.

Such patterns haven't happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.

Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.

"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.

The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."

But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme weather: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

U.S. weather records: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48054547/ns/us_news-environment/t/summer-what-global-warming-looks/