Skillful (so far) Thirty year Climate Forecast

We have now had an eleven year cooling trend during which CO2 has continued to rise steadily – about 19 ppm in total.
 

The unprecedentedly high neutron count (GCR and solar activity proxy) as the Solar Cycle 24 maximum is approached compared with earlier cycles and the unprecedented count peak  durimg the 23/24 minimum in late 2009  are the  main indicators suggesting  the continuation and possible deepening of the cooling trend in the coming decades.In addition the Livingston and Penn solar data point in the direction of the possible approach of a Maunder Minimum.

2.How Not to Do and How to Do  Climate Science.
During the last twelve months I have laid out,  in a series of posts, a review of the basic climate data and of methods used in climate prediction and from these have developed a simple transparent forecast of future cooling. For details see the pertinent posts listed below:

7/19/12    30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year Update
10/30/12   Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling
11/18/12  Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting
1/22/13    Global Cooling Timing and Amount
2/18/13    Its the Sun Stupid – the Minor Significance of CO2
4/2/13      Global Cooling Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions.
5/14/13    Climate Forecasting for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.The most important points are summarised below.

 

a) Total Collapse of the IPCC – Met Office Modelling Approach – How Not To Do Climate Science.
The inadequacy, not to say inanity, of the climate models can be seen by simple inspection of the following Figure 2-20 from the AR4 WG1 report.

The only natural forcing is TSI and everything else is classed as anthropogenic. The glaring deficiency of this model structure is immediately obvious. Under natural should come such things as e.g. Milankovitch Orbital Cycles, Lunar related tidal effects on ocean currents,Earths geomagnetic field strength and all the Solar Activity data time series – eg Solar Magnetic Sield strength, TSI ,SSNs ,GCRs, (effect on aerosols,clouds and albedo) CHs, MCEs, EUV variations, and associated ozone variations and Forbush events. Unless the range and causes of natural variation are known within reasonably narrow limits it is simply not possible to calculate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate.

The results of this gross error of scientific judgement, not to say lack of simple common sense, is seen in the growing discrepancy between global temperature trends and the model projections  – see  this example from Spencer.

This disconnect has been acknowledged by the establishment science community which is now busy suggesting various epicycle like theories as to where the “missing” heat went.Some say its in the oceans (Trenberth) some say its due to Chinese aerosols (Hansen) but the all main actors still persist in the view that it will appear Lazarus like at some unspecified future time. This is like the Jehovah’s witnesses recalculating the end of the world each time a specified doomsday passes.

In Britain, the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 “experts” to try to figure out where they went wrong. The answer is simple.

 

Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First, that CO2 is the main climate driver; second, that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and; third, that the GHE of water vapour is always positive. As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently. The whole CAGW – GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause. As a simple (not exact) analogy controlling CO2 levels to control temperature is like trying to lower the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering the steam coming off the top.

 

A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on energy inputs are already i.e. the extent of the natural variability.

Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact.

 

Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections. It concludes:

“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”

What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability i.e. we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the “plausible” models to be tested anyway. 

 

How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate? When, about ten years ago, I began to look into the CAGW – CO2 based scare, some simple observations immediately presented themselves. These seem to have escaped the notice of the Climate Establishment. ( See my website Post 5/14/13 Climate Forecasting for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.)

a) Night is colder than day;

b) Winter is colder than summer;

c) It is cooler in the shade and  under clouds than in the sun;

d) Temperatures vary more widely in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days – humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor. We use Sun Screen against UV rays – can this be a clue?

e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovitch cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages;

f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some modest knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum;

g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.

I concluded, as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations,  that solar activity and our orbital relations to the sun were the main climate drivers.

 

More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine,the amount of cloud cover, the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday and at Midsummer. It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to postulated anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.

 

 

The IPCC  and Met Office “team” realised correctly that in order to predict the future they needed a good record of past temperatures – certainly over at least the last 2000 years or so and as much further back as proxy data would allow. Also in order to scare the public and drive policy it was necessary to show that current warm temperatures were out of the range of previous measurements. First they had to do away with Lamb’s (and the real world’s) Medieval Warming Period which appeared in the first IPCC report. In 1998 and 1999 Dr Michael Mann produced the infamous” Hockey Stick” graph so beloved and exploited by Al Gore.

 

The establishment modelling community, most politicians and  MSM implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph, although he himself has moved on to a limited extent.

 

A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years. Links to some of the most relevant papers are provided at:
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/01/global-cooling-timing-and-amountnh.html

 

One method of investigationg climate change  is to perfom spectral and wavelet analysis on the  temperature and any possibly useful driver associated time series to find any quasi-cyclic quasi-repetitive patterns which can be projected forwards – but it is not even that difficult. 

For decadal scale variations an approximate 60-year cycle, which seems to correlate temperatures and the PDO is well established in the temperature data and in the record of the PDO.

 

Easterbrook says:

“The recent shift from PDO warm mode to cool mode is similar to the shift that occurred in the mid-1940′s and resulted in 30 years of global cooling (Fig. 4). The global warming from ~1915 to ~1945 was also brought on by a mode shift in the PDO (Fig. 4). Every indication points to continuation of the PDO patterns of the past century and global cooling for the next 30 years (Fig. 4). Thus, the global warming the Earth has experienced since 1977 appears to be over.”

 

For multidecadal and centennial predictions we need to know where we are relative to the appriximately millenial cycle seen in the ice core and proxy temperature reconstructions.

 

The millenial spacing of the temperature peaks over the last 2000 years is clearly seen in the Gisp2 ice core data Fig 6. Incidentally, the CAGW fraternity might note that this Figure also indicates the total disconnect between the general trends of CO2 and Temperature over the last 8000 years.

For forecasting purposes it is perfectly reasonable to assume from Figures 5, 6 and 7 as a conservative working hypothesis that the temperature peak at about 2003 was a peak in both the 60 year and the Millennial cycles and estimate the future cooling trend on that basis.

If the millennial trend is about to repeat, a view of what is ahead is provided by looking at the  temperature trend over the past thousand years. A review of candidate proxy data reconstructions and the written record of climate during that time suggests that at this time the most useful  reconstruction is that of Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 (Fig 5)
http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf

 Fig 7

The simplest assumption for temperature trends to be expected following the current peak is that the downslope to about 2650 AD may well look like the general downslope from 1000 to1650. Naturally, predictions beyond the 30 years which coincides with a PDO declining temperature trend would be increasingly more speculative.

Using the HADSST 3 Global data as a more detaled mirror image template for the coming centuury   (Fig 8) produces the following estimates.