Category: Soapbox

Advisory:  heavy reading ahead…have to fill time during current cloud drought

In an article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) in 2008, it was asserted that there was no “concensus” on global cooling in the 1970s.  Why address this now?  I was busy before now….

Overall response to this BAMS assertion:

Hogwash!  Rubbish!  Bilge!  (I’m pretty “excited” here).

In fact, perhaps the most outrageous statement I have ever seen in a peer-reviewed journal was that of the BAMS Editor, quoted below in red.  In defense of the Editor, he was only parroting the conclusions of a major article in that BAMS issue purporting this distortion.  The appearance of such an article can be seen as a failure of peer review.   Here is what the BAMS Editor wrote in summarizing that bogus claim:

“In this issue, (the authors-names omitted) show that we were indeed misled about global cooling–but not by scientists. (emphasis added by the present writer).   Rather, we are confused about the recent history of our own science.”

I wanted to gag when I read this.  I was doing decadal climate studies in the early 1970s and so I was “pretty familiar” with the literature.

First of all, what were scientists really saying about climate change back then?  I will cite two major sources from the 1970s:

Below, a quote by Wilmot N. Hess, then the Director of 11 NOAA programs,  from the preface of  Chapter F on Climatic Change in the book, Weather and Climate Modification, published by Wiley Interscience in 1974.  (The volume, a collection of essays by experts,  targeted senior-level college students in the sciences and engineering, or working scientists or engineers who don’t know much meteorology.)

“It has been suggested recently that we are near the end of an integlacial period.  Studies of climate changes are in their infancy.  We know that there have been four episodes of glaciation in the recent past covering a period of about 1,000, 000 years.  A conference at Brown University in January 1972 discussed this problem and the MAJORITY (the font can’t be big enough here!) of the participants concluded that:

‘Warm intervals like the present one have been short-lived and the natural end of our warm eposch is undoubtedly near when considered on a geological time scale.   Global cooling and related rapid changes of environment, substantially exceeding the fluctuations experienced by man in historical times must be expected within the next few millenia or even centuries.‘”

Here’s what those climate scientists were looking at over just the past 100, 000 years of the earth’s climate.   Their concern will be obvious.  Note the “present” is on the left, not right as per normal.  The numbers “4” and “5” represent “interglacial” warm periods, the first the present one, called the Holocene, and “5”, the Eemian interglacial period.  Look, too,  how the temperature was trending DOWNWARD over all that glacial time until our present interglacial.  Source:  National Academy of Sciences, 1975.

Now imagine you are a journalist at that Brown University Conference…and you also learn that the earth’s temperature has been falling for more than 25 years (not shown in the above graph).  Futhermore, the CO2 people also inform you that the recent decline in temperatures over that 25 years would even be GREATER if it wasn’t for the mitigating effect of CO2!

What are you going to tell your public?   It’s obvious.

So how did such a scientific distortion get published in BAMS in 2008 by supposedly knowledgeable authors? Were they themselves confused about the history of climate change?  Was it due to their methodology?  Or was it a propaganda piece all along, a revisionist history resembling something analogous to the type of pieces that came out of Pravda of the former Soviet Union, a piece written to correct an earlier error,  so that that we scientists look like we had it right all along?  Probably all of these, in this writer’s opinion.

Lets look at what the authors did.   The full article is here.  In support of their phony claim, the authors of the BAMS article used a “bean counting” approach, the results of which they display in a contingency table.   They tabulated articles on climate change and its likely causes in peer-reviewed journals, looked at the conclusions, and if the article concluded that CO2 was going to warm the world, it would be placed in the warming world column, if the conclusion was ambiguous they gave it a nul ranking, and if the article concluded we were headed for a cooling, it went into that column.  The authors then told us that because they were more articles about CO2 and warming than nul or cooling articles, that must be what everyone believed, a major fallacy in reasoning.

However, either out of ignorance of our science hierarchy,  or having an axe to grind, they counted prestigious reviews with the same as that assigned to a single publication by “Joe Blow”, somebody who might never have been heard from again.   So when they counted an 1975 assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, an organization that periodically reviews subjects of critical interest, employing dozens of experts and reviewing dozens of peer-0revied articles, the authors assigned that review the same weight as the other publications.   It was like assigning an elephant the weight of a flea.

Nor did the authors mention the 1968 American Meteorological Monograph, The Causes of Climatic Change; not ONE paper in that tome discusses CO2 and its possible effect on climate!

And, of course, they did not cite the Wiley-Interscience volume with its contents concerning climate,  quoted above.

But why were scientists in the 1970s concerned with global cooling and not paying so much attention to CO2?

By 1975, the earth’s temperature had been in DECLINE for about 30 years!   This was in spite of massive increases in CO2 during that 30 years.   The cause of that decline has not been ascertained even as of today.  That decline in temperatures was reversed in the late 1970s,  as has the cause of the leveling of the earth’s temperature during the past 10-12 years, also in spite of increasing CO2.  Furthermore, some authors attributed that reversal to changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which occurred in the late 1970s, not to CO2.

Against that background of a long term decline in temperature by the mid-1970s, it was known that the current “interglacial” period we are in (also known in science-speak as the “Holocene”)  would not last forever.   In fact, it had gone on about as long as the earlier one about 100, 000 years ago, called the Eemian (number “5” in the figure above), or about 10-12,000 years.  This was of concern to paleoclimatologists in the mid-1970s against the backdrop of declining temperatures.   Recall we departed from ice age conditions in fits and starts only about 18,000 years ago, and after a few thousand years reached the current Holocene “warmth.”

Here’s what the National Academy of Sciences (Understanding Climatic Change) had to say in 1975, p188:

“One may still ask the question:  When will the present interglacial end?  Few paleoclimatologists would dispute that the prominent warm periods (or interglacials) that have followed each of the terminations of the major glaciations  have had durations of 10,000 +-2,000 years.  In each case, a period of considerably colder climate has followed immediately after the interglacial interval.  Since about 10,000 years has elapsed since the onset of the present period of prominent warmth, the question naturally arises as to whether we are indeed on the brink of a period of colder climate.   Kukla and Mathews (1972) have already called attention to such a possiblity.  There seems little doubt that the present period of unusual warmth will (emphasis in the original) eventually give way to a time of colder climate, but there is no consensus with regard to either the magnitude or the rapidity of the transition.  The onset of this climatic decline could be several thousand years in the future, although there is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the earth within the next hundred years.”

So, global cooling is in our future, no doubt about it.  However, the NAS pointed out that the bad for us cooling might be offset by CO2, or, if there was a further warming, that before the eventual cooling, that CO2 would exacerbate that.  To me, what was being written by the NAS was vastly different than the mere “0” assigned to that piece by the BAMS authors.

Now, when a journalist reads a statement by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences that there is a possibility of a “climatic decline” (that’s how cooling was looked at, namely, it would be worse weather for us than we have now in the Interglacial) in just a hundred years, what is he going to write?  If he wrote about that for, say,  Time magazine, that global cooling was “in the bag” and might even happen within a 100 years,  he would have gotten it  from our highest scientific organization.

In sum, there WAS widespread concern among climatologists and scientists about global cooling, particular in the early 1970s.   It was no myth.

An early anticipation of a possible climate castastrophy

One of the great books of our time on weather modification and climate change came out in 1974:  Weather and Climate Modification by Wiley-Interscience Press. It was edited by Wilmot N. Hess, Director of the Environmental Research Labs under NOAA.   Hess oversaw 11 ERL programs.   The contributors to this book read like a who’s who of those fields back then.   The discussion of climate and climate change in this volume involves Joseph Smagorinsky on Global Atmospheric Modeling and the Numerical Simulation of Climate, Les Machta and  K. Telegadas on Inadvertent Large Scale Weather Modification, and Helmut Landsberg on Inadvertent Atmospheric Modification through Urbanization–the heat island phenomena.  The book was reviewed by numerous equally outstanding scientists of that era, some of whom are still active today.  In re-reading this volume, meant to bring a sophisticated lay audience up to date on progress in these fields in 1974, I came across this introduction to Section F on global climate, likely written by Hess,  p631-632.  Please pay particular attention to the phrase below, “..the majority of participants…” at the end of the first paragraph.

I only point this out because there has been a bit of an attempt to “re-write history” regarding what our best scientists were thinking in those days when the earth’s temperature was in decline, one that began around 1940 or so, a decline that continued into the 1970s with no explanation and counter to increases in CO2 concentrations of those days.  Much WAS published concerning CO2 and about its global warming affect, but it wasn’t being observed.  Mostly, it was just EASY to perturb the atmosphere in the crude models with something like CO2 with its well-known radiative attributes, hence, maybe get a publication.   However, not much else was known about what perturbed the exceedingly complex global climate system and caused the modest temperature meanderings, such as those shown in the third insert.

Yes, its true.   Back then (late 60s into the 70s) we were starting to think about global cooling in a visceral way based on obs.

When I say, “we”,  I am not referring to myself; I was merely a forecaster-meteorologist with in a large randomized cloud seeding experiment in those days in Durango, Colorado.  Weather and Climate Modification was important to me in the years after 1974 because of the sections on cloud seeding, not because of the climate change discussion here which I have re-discovered.  (Please excuse the highlighting, done decades ago.)

Below (third insert) is the northern and southern hemisphere’s mean temperature record as deduced by NOAA’s J. Murray Mitchell in those days; these charts appear on  p719 of this volume, and were well known at the time.  Its easy to see from these graphs why there was so much concern about global cooling in those days when you look at the decline in both hemispheric temperatures after 1940.

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Another bit of interest today is the essay by Machta and Telegadas (Chapter 19, p687) in this book.  Their essay concludes with a summary by H. H. Lamb  (a well-known East Anglia University climate researcher) that contains predictions of NATURAL (emphasized by the present writer)  climatic changes and a brief evaluation of those predictions.

What was particularly remarkable was the evaluation, apparently by Lamb, in the section, “Actual Forecasts“.   In this section, seven attempts to forecast the future climate from periodicities deduced in past data are briefly evaluated.   In today’s lingo, some of these efforts might be called early detections of pressure “oscillations”, that is,  shifts in modes of circulation patterns, where high and low pressures like to reside (footnote).  These “actual forecasts”, ones that appeared in the journal literature, were based on such parameters as changes in circulation patterns deduced over decades, patterns in oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios in ice cores that were then subject to Fourier analysis,  climate forecasts based on projected sunspot activity, another on particle radiation from expected solar flares, patterns of “meridionality” or, north and south components in the wind, and “local” circulation patterns over Europe, and that latter in a paper published in 1939!  And, of course, the old standby,  tree ring patterns, again looking for harmonics or cycles in those data.   Most of this kind work, deducing cycles in past data in the way that it was done in these papers would be taken with a grain of salt, or not taken seriously at all.

SO, WHY even mention these studies?

Lamb finds most of the predictions were CORRECT in anticipating the colder weather ahead over coming decades after these studies were published!  Its really stupefying to read this section today and see an assessment of “correct” assigned to these forecasts based on no real underlying physical mechanism, such as why did the wind, the pressure pattern change, or on sunspots?  (It was interesting to note that the sunspot based forecast was deemed “correct” for weather, but totally wrong on sunspot activity!)

Well, it does make one wonder how these forecasts could have been correct.  Were a few researchers on to something that we have missed, or have also “re-discovered”, framing our findings today in more sophisticated terms such as “oscillations” instead of “cycles”?

Or were these forecasts “correct” because they were the only ones of hundreds of such forecasts (in which it would be expected that a few would be “correct” just by chance)?   The authors of this Chapter 19 do not divulge how many forecasts were examined.

However, those early forecasts based on circulation pattern changes over decades, should grab the attention of today’s “oscillators” if they haven’t already.

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Footnote:  It sometimes seems as though almost every climate researcher today has his own personal “oscillation”, from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, Southern Oscillation, on and on.  More will be reported.  (Maybe I should have one!)  ((Actually, I do have my own climate oscillation, but its not been published, probably never will be.))

Some brutal storms over the past year or so, such as the recent one that dropped 1-2 feet of snow from Tulsa to Chicago and beyond with sometimes hurricane force winds, have been labeled with all sorts of monikers, “Frankenstorm”, “snowmageddon”, etc.,  to emphasize how bad, and perhaps, how unique they were.  Some incautious observers have assigned such events to signs of global warming.  Moreover,  there have been seemingly oxymoronic,  perhaps ad hoc statements due to recent record cold spells that purport that it will be getting colder as it gets warmer (that is, we’ll have more severe cold winters as global warming progresses).

The impact of global warming to date is “relatively” slight, and no one can discern that a particular flood, typhoon, tornado, drought, that cloud over there, etc.,  was due to global warming.

We meteorologists know that “what goes around comes around”; that the “50 year”, the “100 year” floods will recur.  Namely, we know that extreme events will occur without the need to implicate global warming.

Furthermore, proxy climate records, such as tree rings that are rather good at delineating past droughty and wet periods–they are problematic in reconstructing temperature–but,  you can get quite a good handle on the precipitation regimes of the past few hundred years.  These, too, can tell us about the extremes of past climate over hundreds of years, and therefore, what to expect in the future sans global warming effects.

Perhaps one of the most important papers published in this proxy climate domain in this writer’s opinion was in 1994.  It was a study of rainfall epochs deduced from tree rings in central California by Haston and Michaelsen, published in J. Climate.  It is fortunate that this study was published before the global warming “media blitz” in which otherwise reasonable people/media assign all kinds of anomalous weather events to signs of global warming.

What was the main conclusion of that J. Climate paper regarding rainfall regimes over the past 600 years in California???

It was astonishing.

The authors concluded that the California water retention and flood control infrastructure had been built based on an unusually low degree of climate variability during the instrumental record, largely confined to the period after 1900.  The longer tree ring record, however,  CLEARLY indicated that much LARGER fluctuations in the rainfall regimes of California had occurred prior to the instrumental record.   These findings led the authors to suggest that California was not likely to be well prepared for the floods and droughts of the future since it can be assumed that larger variability in rainfall found in the past will occur in the future.

The record rains of the 1997-98 El Nino and 2004-2005 rainfall seasons accompanied by an almost unheard of water flows into the basins of Death Valley in 2005,and  the “unprecedented” drought of the 2001-2002 rainfall season in which some coastal southern California sites received less than 2 inches (!) were largely foretold by those 1994 findings.   Moreover, due to the “teleconnection” aspect, the larger climate variance found in central California prior to record keeping can be expected to have repercussions in the adjacent states.

What “goes around”, has already begun to come around.

But in today’s world, these anomalous weatther events will not be seen as just,  “what goes around comes around”, but rather will be labeled en toto as evidence of the pernicious effects of global warming.

That’s just plain wrong, and most meteorologists understand this.

The extreme events of late, if you are onboard the GW bandwagon, could reasonably have been said to have been “tweaked” by GW at best.  Perhaps without GW, that snowstorm in Chicago would have dropped “only” 18.3 inches instead of 20  associated with overall slightly higher temperatures and the attendant enhanced moisture content.

The late Prof. Joanne Simpson, former president of the American Meteorological Society, warned, in the early days of global warming claims in 1989,  claims that many scientists were dubious of at that time, about the dangers of exaggeration.  She recounted her experiences with the exaggerated claims promulgated in the cloud seeding domain in which she worked.   In her talk at the Conference on Statistics and Probabilty in the Atmosphere, Monterrey, 1989, and as President-elect of the American Meteorological Society, Dr. Simpson warned:

“Lacking that lesson, our community has once again stumbled into the weather modification paradox concerning global warming-where again we may be damaging our credibility again for the same basic reason.

“What is the weather modification paradox?  It is the tendency to exaggerate man-made alterations to the atmosphere owing to the great difficulty in distinguishing definitively between natural variability in the system and anthropogenic effects-whether the perceived man-made change is small-scale rain produced produced by intentional cloud seeding or whether in it long-range global warming as a by-product of industry and agriculture.”

and, near the end of her talk that day, she re-emphasized this point:

“While it is not entirely clear what the decision makers of the world can and should do, I hope at least that we meteorologists have learned some hard lessons.  I hope that we have learned enough from the harm that we and our colleagues have caused over the years by exaggerated claims and exaggerated scare stories.  I hope that we will be more cautious in how we express ourselves, especially to the media–that is a difficult challenge to say the least.”

Joanne Simpson was not too skeptical about a global warming future, but she was concerned about how we spoke to the public about it.

Amen.

PS:  Prof. Simpson’s full address, which she provided to me soon after it was delivered, can be found here:  all of Joanne Simpson’s banquet talk wx mod and GW_1989.

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BTW, and unexpectedly, global temperatures have stabilized over the past 10 years or so in spite of continuing increases in CO2, as many of you knowWhat happened to GW_Sci_Oct 2, 2009.  One explanation posited for this is a drying of the stratosphere, something that would allow more of the earth’s heat to escape into space–Solomon et al. 2010,  Science). Another explanation for at least part of this “stabilization” arises from an climate model using recent ocean current data.  The output from this model predicted that cooling of the northern hemisphere continents was due to a recent slowing of Atlantic Ocean currents, and furthermore, that this slowing and continental cool spell was likely to last 10-20 more years (Keenleyside et al. 2008 in the journal Nature, summarized by Richard Kerr in Science).  Finally, we have an aerosol “wild card” out there. Aerosols are thought to have the net effect of lowering global temperatures, but the models used by the IPCC4 were only able to crudely parameterize those effects.  One down-sized climate model (20-25 km grid spacing instead of 200-250 km), in preliminary runs has suggested a larger role for aerosols in cooling the planet, a kind of inadvertent “geoengineering.” (These latter results have not been published that I know of, and so this comment can only be considered little more than gossip at this time, but it was from a good “insider” source.)

However, imagine how pathetic such a smoggier world would be, with smog everywhere, views of the Grand Canyon mucked up, even thin, smog-laden stratocu looking dark and ugly on the bottom as as more light was reflected back into space from their tops due to smaller drops, etc.   Getting upset here even thinking about how awful that smoggier, less warm, world would be!  Don’t “geoengineer” in this way!!!