Global Confusion

I love Global Warming stories. It is a lot like religious debates. There are the true believers and there are those who want to join in but aren't quite sure what is known and then there are those who just wish the debaters would spend the time to get their facts straight.

Today there are a couple of things to report on the Global Warming debate.

First, there is a report out of NASA that includes a rare bit of humility about what we really know:

The sun is relatively calm compared to other stars. "We don't know what the sun is going to do a hundred years from now," said Doug Rabin, a solar physicist at Goddard. "It could be considerably more active and therefore have more influence on Earth's climate."

Or, it could be calmer, creating a cooler climate on Earth similar to what happened in the late 17th century. Almost no sunspots were observed on the sun's surface during the period from 1650 to 1715. This extended absence of solar activity may have been partly responsible for the Little Ice Age in Europe and may reflect cyclic or irregular changes in the sun's output over hundreds of years. During this period, winters in Europe were longer and colder by about 1 C than they are today.

The other item which caught my attention from this report was the vague numbers presented:

Around 30 percent of the solar energy that strikes Earth is reflected back into space. Clouds, atmospheric aerosols, snow, ice, sand, ocean surface and even rooftops play a role in deflecting the incoming rays. The remaining 70 percent of solar energy is absorbed by land, ocean, and atmosphere.

"Greenhouse gases block about 40 percent of outgoing thermal radiation that emanates from Earth," Woods said. The resulting imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation will likely cause Earth to heat up over the next century...

This "around 30 percent" that is reflected back is handled in general circulation models via "parameters". How accurate can they be? Well, here is a bit of evidence. A BBC news story reports that global warming will hiccup for a decade because the "latest" climate models that include models for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which were left out of previous models:

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.

The fact that the UN's IPCC has been producing climate models for over 30 years and these models are just now including a large phenomenon like AMO tells me that the "predictions" of these models is less than stellar. It is a bit odd to propose major changes to industry based on models that one day predict catastrophic warming and the next day predict a decade of cooling.

Here's a book by David Orrell, a mathematician who has worked on models of complex systems.


He makes it clear that we should not blindly trust the output of computer models. Here is an excerpt from the book's website summarizing the book:

...the media is dominated by scientists, economic pundits, and more than a few charlatans claiming to have surpassed the abilities of Apollo’s mythical arrow. Allegedly, they can foresee financial trends, flu outbreaks, and even next week’s weather—though often, of course, they get it wrong. In Apollo’s Arrow, Canadian scientist David Orrell looks back at past prognosticators, from the time of the Oracle at Delphi to the rise of astrology to the advent of the nightly news, showing us how scientists, astrologers, and grifters have attempted to predict the future. Despite centuries of scientific progress and billions of dollars in research, Orrell asks if we are any better now at predicting the future than Pythagoras was centuries ago.