The Crisis Report - 09 : Heat doesn't "just happen" - Part Four.
We know from the Earthshine Project, and the NASA CERES observations, that the Earth's Albedo has dimmed. The question is, "why"?
Is this about clouds?
When you think about “Climate Science”, you always need to remind yourself that the field is only 60 years old. It’s easy to forget how little we knew back in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. You shouldn’t though, because we all need to remember that “SCIENCE” is a social process and narratives change over time.
In this short 60 year period we have had two “Climate Paradigms”. The first, in the 70’s, was that another “ice age” was about to start.
One of the geophysical projects that was kicked off in 1959 was the collection of ice cores from glaciers all over the world. As these cores were analyzed the graph shown above came into view.
What they saw was a pattern in the periodicity of the Ice Ages. It looks like Ice Ages happen roughly every 100,000 years.
This finding was seized on as proof of a theory put forth in the 1920’s by Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth’s surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth’s climatic patterns. -wikipedia
The first analysis of the Greenland Ice Cores popularized the theory that the Climate System was driven by cycles in the Earth’s orbit, “Milankovitch Cycles”.
A lot of people believed that it meant another Ice Age was about to start. In the 70’s this view was common. A lot of smart people thought this narrative made sense given the information they had at the time. You still run into people who believe this.
In the 80’s a new paradigm, promoted by the Fossil Fuel Industry, emerged. In this paradigm the Climate System was viewed as stable and heavily self-correcting.
By the mid-80’s it was obvious that the planet was not cooling down. The Earth was measurably getting hotter. In the face of reality, the “Milankovitch Cycle Paradigm” rapidly fell out of favor.
By the late 80’s climate scientists knew that the Earth wasn’t cooling down. It seemed to be rapidly warming up. How much hotter was it going to get?
This is a really important question. From the Greenland Ice Cores they could see that for hundreds of thousands of years the temperature had fluctuated within a range of only about +/-6C.
Yet we knew that the Earth had to have been much hotter in the past. We were finding fossils of alligators and palm trees above the Arctic Circle. In Antarctica they were finding fossils of aspen forests.
Paleontologists and geologists were also finding evidence of periods of massive volcanic activity in the deep past. Most of it coinciding with events known as “mass extinctions” when significant amounts of the biosphere appeared to have died off.
Plus, the government sponsored models were all indicating that increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would cause the planet to warm up. The term “Global Warming” started to be heard.
Climate Scientists, in the 25 year old field, really wanted to get a handle on how hot it was going to get and how fast this warming was going to happen. But, they still didn’t have a lot of solid observational data to base forecasts on.
So, they made some assumptions.
The first assumption was that the “Immediate Thermal Response” and the “Equilibrium Thermal Response” would take a long time to attain unity.
This sounds complex so lets break it down.
They started with the assumption that the Immediate Thermal Response was equal to the observable warming. CO2 levels had increased from 280ppm in 1850, the baseline year in the climate models, to about 350ppm. An increase of about 70ppm.
Global Temperatures had only increased about 0.6C.
Did they think this was going to be ALL of the warming?
No, they knew even then that there would be feedback’s and knock on effects. That there would be additional warming.
Their second assumption was that it would take a long time for this warming to take place.
Just look at how long it took for the planet to warm up at the end of the last Ice Age.
What they saw was this.
CO2 levels had increased about 70ppm over the 1850 baseline and temperatures had only gone up 0.6C in immediate response to that. They knew there would be additional warming but the temperature record in the ice cores indicated that it would happen slowly. Over hundreds or thousands of years.
So, in 1988 how much more CO2 could we safely dump in the atmosphere. What would the “red line” be?
The easiest way to look at it is to simply say 70ppm raised the temperature 0.6C. So, “worst case” another 70ppm should raise the temperature another 0.6C. Surprisingly this is working right now. CO2 levels have gone up another 70ppm and the level of observable warming is about 1.2C over the 1880 baseline we are now using.
Extending this logic means that going to a CO2 level of 500ppm should result in warming of around 1.8C by 2100. This is the basic premise of the “Climate Action Resistors” (CARs). That, while warming is happening, it’s being “over-hyped” and overstated.
This roughly matches the low end of what the current Climate Models indicate. Which shows you how much the “neutral” models still reflect the assumptions of the prevailing paradigm.
When the first Climate Models were being built in the 60s/70's. They tried to reduce the scope of the problem of “estimating global warming”, by limiting it to the question of “how much will the Earth warm if the CO2 level doubles from the 1850 level of 280ppm?”
Here’s the best answer from the models, as of September 2020.
2.6C–3.9C — 66%
2.3C–4.5C — 95%
2.0C–5.7C — 05%
An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence
What this is saying, is that “there is a 95% chance at CO2 levels of 560ppm that the GMT will increase at least 2.3C and possibly as much as 4.5C. There is a 66% chance that the GMT increase will be between 2.6C and 3.9C”.
There is a 05% chance that the GMT could increase as much as 5.7C. About the same amount the paleoclimate record indicates.
The difference between the “outlier” model and the “mainstream” models results mostly from how they deal with clouds in a warming world. It's very possible that the mainstream models are “off”.
In any case, after 60 years of effort, this estimate of a 95% chance warming will be between 2.3C and 4.5C tells us that the models are weak. That range is too large. The models clearly have hidden assumptions embedded in them that are throwing them off.
Our models for Climate Sensitivity are not matching the reality we are observing or the paleoclimate record.
Here’s another thing that crept into the discussion of global warming starting in the late 80’s.
We stopped discussing the “Total Amount of Warming” our emissions could cause and only started talking about the warming we would feel by 2100.
When we talk about warming by 2100, that's not the end of the warming. That’s just how hot we expect it to be THEN, at a certain level of atmospheric CO2.
This was done with the tacit agreement of both sides of the debate. The Climate Alarmists accepted it because people just didn’t care about warming we “might” be causing “in the far future, hundreds of years from now”.
The Climate Moderates liked it, because it was much less alarming to people if you said “we could cause 1.5C of warming by 2100”. Instead of saying “this amount of CO2 could warm the planet up 5C, by 2500”.
Because of this, most people today assume that the “Amount of Warming by 2100” estimates, are the estimates for the total amount of warming. This is a deliberately encouraged misunderstanding by the Climate Deniers and the Fossil Fuel disinformation campaign because it minimizes the dangers of what we are doing in people’s minds.
It is a particularly insidious narrative because it encourages a false view of the Climate System as a “linear” one.
What it does, is create the mindset that there is a “dial” on the burner. A dial that gradually increases the Earth’s temperature as we gradually increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
A dial that might increase the GMT to about 2.0C of observable warming as we approach a CO2 level of roughly 500ppm. A level that no one in the 80’s expected us to ever reach.
This outlook became the prevailing paradigm in the 80’s.
Everyone remembers Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate in 1988. What almost no one understands is that he was an outlier. He was not one of the Climate Moderates who dominated Climate Science at that time.
He was speaking out against their paradigm. Warning people that it might be fatally flawed.
Thirty five years later, we now know that Hansen, like Frank Press in 1976 was right. The paradigm of the Climate Moderates is fatally flawed. It has blinded us to seeing the reality of how the Climate System actually works and the terrible peril we are in.
The Clouds are changing and warming is accelerating.
This is what I see.
This is my analysis.
This is my “Crisis Report”.
-rc
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This has been true since the dawn of time. Experts get paid for their expertise because “being informed” about a topic comes at a cost. It takes time, a lot of it, to know what you are talking about.
If you haven’t been staying current on the Climate Crisis a LOT is happening right now. What’s happening right now, and in the next few year’s will shape how the rest of your life plays out.
We are in the final days of the 20th Century Climate Optimum. What’s coming is MUCH WORSE than you think. Our understanding of the Climate System has gotten dramatically better in the last ten years. We have been monumentally stupid.
If you want to understand the “Climate Crisis” this is analysis you are not going to get anywhere else.