Global warming and causality.

The 'hard' sciences are grounded in the concept of causality. Changes which we observe in the natural world have been found to have causes. The game played by scientists is to determine, measure and quantify causes and their effects.

We hear and read from time to time that the earth has a record of global warmings and coolings in its history. This is written in the geologic record and accepted as being true. To say, though, that the present global warming is part of a cycle is not science. It becomes science, as opposed to conjecture, when the cause(s) of the cycle have been ascertained and when it can be shown that the same force(s) are creating the present global warming.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

[Disclaimer. I am a retired scientist.]

 

The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) paradigm has dominated climate science in recent decades, certainly since about 1995. See Bernie Lewin, Searching for the Catastrophe Signal. In a nutshell, the AGW paradigm holds that greenhouse gases are the vastly predominant driver of climate change in our time. The paradigm has however failed its test, as we shall see. I recently re-read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, within which the following passage is found (p.144, University of Chicago Press, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition):

"In so far as he is engaged in normal science, the research worker is a solver of puzzles, not a tester of paradigms. . . . Therefore, paradigm-testing occurs only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis. And even then it occurs only after the sense of crisis has evoked an alternate candidate for paradigm."

The noteworthy puzzle is the specification of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and the failure to solve it presents the crisis of the AGW paradigm. Professor Nir Shaviv put it well.

Climate debate at the Cambridge Union - a 10 minute summary of the main problems with the standard alarmist polemic

"The most important question in climate science is climate sensitivity, by how much will the average global temperature increase if you say double the amount of CO2. Oddly enough, the range quoted by the IPCC, which is 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling was set, are you ready for this, in a federal committee in 1979! (Google the Charney report). All the IPCC scientific reports from 1990 to 2013 state that the range is the same. The only exception is the penultimate report which stated it is 2 to 4.5. The reason they returned to the 1.5 to 4.5 range is because there was virtually no global warming since 2000 (the so called “hiatus”), which is embarrassingly inconsistent with a large climate sensitivity. What’s more embarrassing is that over almost 4 decades of research and billions of dollars (and pounds) invested in climate research we don’t know the answer to the most important question any better? This is simply amazing I think."

Meanwhile, research to specify ECS has pushed the likely range lower.

Recent CO2 Climate Sensitivity Estimates Continue Trending Towards Zero

By Kenneth Richard on 16. October 2017
Updated: The Shrinking CO2 Climate Sensitivity A recently highlighted paper published by atmospheric scientists Scafetta et al., (2017) featured a graph (above) documenting post-2000 trends in the published estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations (from 280 parts per million to 560 ppm). The trajectory for the published estimates of transient climate response […]

 

As Kuhn requires, has an "alternate candidate for paradigm" been presented? Yes. Professor Shaviv:

My experience at the German Bundestag's Environment Committee in a pre-COP24 discussion


"This is the contribution to the radiative forcing from different components, as summarized in the IPCC AR5. As you can see, it is claimed that the solar contribution is minute (tiny gray bar). In reality, we can use the oceans to quantify the solar forcing, and see that it was probably larger than the CO2 contribution (large light brown bar). Any attempt to explain the 20th century warming should therefore include this large forcing. When doing so, one finds that the sun contributed more than half of the warming, and climate has to be relatively insensitive. How much? Only 1 to 1.5°C per CO2 doubling, as opposed to the IPCC range of 1.5 to 4.5. This implies that without doing anything special, future warming will be around another 1 degree over the 21st century, meeting the Copenhagen and Paris goals.The fact that the temperature over the past 20 years has risen significantly less than IPCC models, should raise a red flag that something is wrong with the standard picture. . . .

Having said that, it is possible to actually model the climate system while including the heat capacity, namely diffusion of heat into and out of the oceans, and include the solar and anthropogenic forcings and find out that by introducing the the solar forcing, one can get a much better fit to the 20th century warming, in which the climate sensitivity is much smaller. (Typically 1°C per CO2 doubling compared with the IPCC's canonical range of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling). You can read about it here: Ziskin, S. & Shaviv, N. J., Quantifying the role of solar radiative forcing over the 20th century, Advances in Space Research 50 (2012) 762–776. The low climate sensitivity one obtains this way is actually consistent with other empirical determinations, for example, the lack of any correlation between CO2 variations over the past half billion years and temperature variations."

 

????? Certainly, more science than your assertion that the present global warming is NOT a part of a cycle. The cycles show us that we should expect the earth to continue to warm, bringing the current ice age to an end, completely melting the polar ice caps and flooding the coastlines.

 

Significantly less when using surface temperature readings to determine current global temperature and greatly less when using satellite based temperature readings of the globe. I suspect we dont even have the ability to accurately measure the temperature of the earth from the surface to even make determinations within a few degrees regarding global temperatures.. Then you have them altering surface temperature records from 90 years ago in the present to match their theories in the present.

 

Below from 1988 by Stephen Schneider. They had already decided the actual science wasn't as important as the public's perception.


“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

 

Hi, Dixon76710.

Great. The assertion that the present global warming is part of a repeating cycle assumes that there is a cause to these cycles. What is that cause?

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

 

The causes are not fully understood but known to have occurred long before man was even present on the planet. Whats your evidence that the cycles have discontinued and that instead the current warming is caused by man?

 

The Phanerozoic climate
Shaviv, N. J., Svensmark, H. & Veizer, J., 2022, In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review

Abstract
We review the long-term climate variations during the last 540 million years (Phanerozoic Eon). We begin with a short summary of the relevant geological and geochemical datasets available for the reconstruction of long-term climate variations. We then explore the main drivers of climate that appear to explain a large fraction of these climatic oscillations. The first is the long-term trend in atmospheric CO2 due to geological processes, while the second is the atmospheric ionization due to the changing galactic environment. Other drivers, such as albedo and geographic effects, are of secondary importance. In this review, we pay particular attention to problems that may affect the measurements of temperature obtained from oxygen isotopes, such as the long-term changes in the concentration of δ18O seawater.

 

Solar Update September, 2021
2021 › 09 › 22 › solar-update-september-2021
by solar hemisphere 1985 – 2021 ... Breaking down solar activity by hemisphere shows that solar activity ... relative length of the solar cycles. ... Figure 6: F10.7 flux for solar cycles 19 to 25 aligned
modulates the solar signal on the decadal scale, but that the QBO is itself modulated by the solar variability


Our planet’s temperature peaked in 2016 and has been in a disciplined decline since. It is in a channel 0.5°C wide with a slope of -0.03°C per annum. The atmosphere had been warming at 0.013°C per annum according to Dr Roy Spencer’s work. If the established cooling trend continues it will only take another decade to get back to the temperatures of the early 1980s. With the cooling trend firmly established, the question is: Can the proximate cause be found in the solar record?


. . . .

 

The AGW narrative is nearing its end.
UAH – What is Foretold
Guest Blogger
What is apparent is that the detrended temperature anomaly distribution is nearly symmetrical. . . .

". . . The uptrend channel 0.8°C wide to 2015 is well defined with the orange upper and lower boundaries absolutely parallel and rising at 0.011°C per annum. Since the 2016 El Nino the trend is now down in a tighter, steeper trend channel that is 0.5°C wide and falling three times as fast at 0.036°C per annum.

From this downtrend, can we say that the Modern Warm Period is over, that global warming is definitely over, dead and buried, when the current downtrend regime takes us below the lower bound of the previous uptrend channel?

That could happen as soon as 2025 if the temperature anomaly stayed within its new downtrend channel. Sooner than that would be better for the world (since global warming is a bad thing, the corollary is also true – the faster it gets colder, the better). But it would be scientifically gratifying if the temperature trend stayed non-random in achieving what we want.

Either way, blessed release is coming."

 

Be careful with David Archibald's forecasts as he has been too optimistic with them:

A comment in the thread,

bdgwx

David Archibald said: “From this downtrend, can we say that the Modern Warm Period is over”

I’ve heard that before.

In 2006 you predicted a 1.5 C decline in global temperature through 2020.

In 2007 you predicted a 1-2 C decline in global temperature through solar cycle 24.

In 2009 you predicted a 2.2 C decline in mid-latitude temperature through solar cycle 24.

LINK

===

Each prediction is linked to a source David published.

 

Thanks. The proof will be in the pudding.

 

So many factors not in these models they want us to follow as science. Solar radiation, man made particulate matter, water vapor etc. They claim to adjust the ground based temperature readings to account for the urbanization occurring around these temperature stations over the years, but with the disparity between ground based temperature readings showing higher temperatures than the satellite data, I would say they underestimate the effect. All of these inaccuracies while they are making pronouncements regarding global temperature changes of fractions of a degree.

 

I keep saying that climate, like underpants does not change by itself and I hope that both those notions are not new to those denying the anthropogenic cause of this cycle of climate change

 

Sorry but are you honestly suggesting that scientists are stupid enough to forget to factor in something as glaringly obvious as the sun? Really?

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/

 

Shakes head

I keep pointing out that the UAH data is only one measurement, it is lower troposphere and fraught with errors

 

Sorry but how can you claim this? It is not magic green fairy dust causing it you know

 

???? What evidence do you have that the natural cycle of climate change from one ice age to the next has stopped?

 

???? Its likely dozens of factors. The Milankovitch orbital cycles for one.

The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age. Wikipedia

 

Aaaaaaaand you think this has NOT been factored into the scientific reports?

 

That is not the question - the question is - what is causing THIS change

 

Lower troposphere starts at the surface, and the only people who think UAH is "fraught with errors" are those who find it politically inconvenient.

 

Cant find the article I read weeks ago but it was about indigenous Andes mountain people who had a traditional yearly celebration of the spirit within the local glacier with a ceremonial trek to the glacier to carve off a chunk and hike it back down to the village. People have been convinced that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels in the rest of the world, has melted their glacier where they relatively have no fossil fuels. They believe the glacier spirit is sick so they dont want to harm it by carving off more ice and have discontinued the tradition.

And yet, the melting glacier is exposing ancient vegetation amazingly well preserved dating to 1600 years old, where previously 100ft of ice sat. Just perhaps, the same natural causes that melted the glaciers more than 1600 years ago, are melting them now.

 

And it is still one measurement conducted by contrarians using known problematic data