Commissioner Wright’s wrong – Part 2

We take a further look at Dr Jan Wright’s report on climate change. Notwithstanding the power, privilege and wealth attached to her position as Commissioner, these descriptions of past and present climate and warnings of spectacular jeopardy do not shrink from deception.

UPDATE No.1 12 FEB 2015 9:50PM

Go to UPDATE 1.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, published a report last November, Changing climate and rising seas: Understanding the science (CCRS) (pdf, 2MB). While reading it I marked more than a hundred places where her evidence or reasoning is questionable. Part 1 discussed a first batch of questions; this post discusses another.

Power and privilege

The Commissioner for the Environment enjoys a privileged position: the Environment Act 1986 grants the Commissioner wide powers to investigate and engage staff and consultants, along with millions of dollars. The Parliamentary Vote for this financial year permits a departmental expenditure of $3,258,000, including a personal salary of $296,000. The Commissioner enjoys the same powers as a commission of inquiry, and the same immunities and privileges as a District Court Judge. For investigations the Commissioner initiates, she has “such powers as may be necessary” to see them through—extensive powers, for whatever she wants to do, she has the power to do.

The powers and privileges of public service cast a long shadow, for a high salary is attended by high performance standards. It would ill become the Commissioner to make mistakes in data collection or reasoning. It was disappointing in our first report to catalogue five major errors in her descriptions of the science. Let us look further.

The Commissioner’s Overview

In the first pages we learn our sin and the means of our absolution. First this:

A rising sea will be with us for a long time to come – one way or another we will have to adapt. But how high and how fast the water rises will be influenced by the speed at which the world – including New Zealand – reduces greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades [emphasis added].

Then this:

The IPCC’s prediction of a 30 centimetre rise in average sea level by the middle of the century is ‘locked in’ – it is expected to occur regardless of action taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [emphasis added].

Putting aside for now the attention-grabbing but fanciful forecast, these two paragraphs give the impression that sea levels only recently started rising. In fact, they haven’t stopped rising since the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. The report announces that “we will have to adapt” as though we haven’t been adapting for our entire history. The reader is told that sea level rise is determined only by our emissions of carbon dioxide, which is profoundly untrue, but it doesn’t mention the natural factors that are involved—such as a recent Ice Age.

Propaganda, not science

But this is the policy prescription—willy-nilly, we are to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, yet we’re given no evidence to support the prescription—nothing to link our emissions with sea level rise, no evidence that the solution will work and no idea of the cost.

The Cabinet Manual requires a cost-benefit analysis before approving public expenditure; for the humblest public building, Ministers of the Crown must honestly examine the benefits, the disadvantages and the costs—how much more important it is to do that when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. One would think that the Commissioner, though independent of the government, would be mindful of good practice or, just to get our agreement to fund a ‘battle’ against climate change, would want to present a clear description of the perils we face, precisely how they are caused, how the emissions reductions will ameliorate those perils and how much it will cost us.

But the report omits fundamental information and gives us propaganda instead. It is also riddled with errors.

Purpose of the report

The science of the IPCC reports draws on a range of academic disciplines and has been intensely scrutinised. Much is highly technical and not accessible to a general audience. This report has been written with the intent of making the science of climate change, and sea level rise in particular, both accessible and relevant for New Zealanders. Certainly the impacts of sea level rise will vary from place to place. But an understanding and acceptance of the basic science provides a basis for the debate on what action must be taken. – CCRS, Chp 2, p.13.

To make the conclusions of climate science available to a broader range of readers is laudable, but not at the expense of accuracy. For example, assertions that anthropogenically-warmed air significantly warm the oceans have no scientific support, and predictions of strong atmospheric warming come from computer models which cannot reproduce the past and so cannot reliably predict the future.

Climate instability

The last seven thousand years has been a time of relative climatic stability, but this is now changing. – CCRS, Chp 2, p.13.

By any measure, on any time scale, the unfolding of our earth’s chaotic climate is soaked in unpredictability and abrupt change. The Commissioner confirms this by describing the recent past as ‘relative climatic stability’ (no doubt hoping we read it as ‘stable’ though it still means ‘unstable’) and she observes that this instability is becoming changeable. There is no reason to disagree, though we wonder why she says ‘but’—it’s not as if change differs from instability.

So the Commissioner tries to deceive us, for, out of a history of instability, she conjures an image of us changing the planet—but not with evidence, just clever words which betray her reasoning, for if instability were to change, could it become anything other than stability?

Arctic sea ice – not melting

the Arctic is expected to be nearly ice free in summer by the middle of the century. – CCRS, Chp 2, p.21.

Anonymous expectations are of no account; unattributed to a knowledgeable person, they simply constitute the logical error of appeal to authority and their only intention is to inspire fear. Russell Norman told me in an email just before he resigned the ‘co-leadership’ of the Greens a couple of weeks ago:

“Do you think I will have time to grow up and get old and die before the world ends?” This is an actual question from a Green Party member’s 8-year-old child. It must be frightening growing up in a world where runaway climate change hangs like a cloud over the future.

It is frightening. But the child is not being frightened by global warming. There has not been any in his eight years—nor twice that. He is frightened by the fears his adults feed him. Only the radical, the timorous or the cruel teach their children to fear climate change for it is not occurring by our hand and the only source of the ferocious predictions of runaway climate change which the earth has never fallen into is empty-headed computers programmed by scatterbrained, misinformed anthropophobes somehow convinced that we know everything about the climate.

Not dramatic

Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic decrease in both the extent and thickness of sea ice in the Arctic. – CCRS, Chp 2, p.21.

Sea ice’s major effect on climate is not through its thickness but its albedo, which is unchanged whether the ice is one metre or four metres thick, so here I ignore ice thickness. There are claims that loss of thickness is another indication of atmospheric warming, but I disagree, because it’s clear that water is much more effective than air in melting sea ice. Ice floating in water is destined to melt, whereas air moving over ice will always be chilled.

So, beginning in 1979, the satellite record of Arctic sea ice extent displays a gentle decline which briefly reached about 20% in 2012. Both 2007 and 2012 (second and first in record minimum summer sea ice extent) represented a sharp increase (caused by strong winds) in the rate of ice loss. The sea ice swiftly recovered, and the next winter it rose to higher levels, as shown here (years of record loss highlighted):

The satellite-era record of Arctic sea ice extent. Click to enlarge.

Now here is a simplified version from the same source with monthly values and a vertical scale showing actual sea ice extent. The red circles mark the maximum winter extent at top and the minimum summer extent at bottom to show the magnitude of the gradual ice loss. Between each pair of yellow lines is the amount of the reduction: the total winter decline was 1.8 million square km (about 12%) and the summer decline was 3.3 m sq. km (about 22%).

Arctic sea ice extent showing the magnitude of the reductions (winters at top, summers at bottom). Click to enlarge.

After only 36 years of accurate observation, claims that these amounts are extreme must be somewhat premature. Even calling them high labours for evidence.

No continuing decline

Sea ice in the Arctic has continued to decline since 2007. – CCRS, Chp 2, p.21.

Since 2007 Arctic sea ice extent has presented a more complex picture than a simple decline and, amazingly, in 2013 and 2014 it regained the levels of 2005—nine years earlier.

IPCC claims Arctic sea ice is about to vanish. The truth is that it varies a lot, it’s been measured accurately for only a short time and it’s not governed solely by the air temperature. Click to enlarge. – Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

We should stress that the precipitous (but transient) ice loss in 2007 and 2012 was not caused by high air temperatures but by winds. Notwithstanding the shrill cries of alarm from warmists, there are natural climate forces at work. If you think our carbon dioxide has increased the temperature in the Arctic and caused the ice loss, just examine the Arctic temperature record shown below. There’s good reason to discard the claims of anthropogenic interference in the climate.

First, there’s little discernible difference between the Arctic air temperatures of 2007 and 2012.

This alone points to meteorological factors other than temperature causing the ice loss, but there’s an even better reason why temperature is not responsible. In all eight adjacent years, indicated by the yellow bar, maximum temperatures were higher than in the two years of record sea ice minima, yet sea ice extent was also higher. Check it out for yourself.

It wasn’t extra heat. Something else was going on. NASA said it was the wind. If you want to disagree, then you’re welcome to comment below, but show some evidence. I don’t want to have it wrong, I would rather have it correct.

Arctic temperatures this century, highlighting the record sea ice minima years to show the lack of significant increase in 2012 over 2007, which means the greater ice loss in 2012 was probably the result of meteorological elements other than anthropogenic (or any) warming. Adjacent years were all warmer than the two years of lowest sea ice, but our independent, wholly objective Commissioner for the Environment won’t tell you this. Click to enlarge. – Climate4you at http://www.climate4you.com/ (click Polar Temperature in the left sidebar, then Arctic monthly surface air temperatures north of 70N)

Significantly, the Commissioner leaves us to infer that the sea ice was lost by melting, caused by global warming. But winds forced the ice out of the Arctic—why does the Commissioner not tell us that?

NASA, in a study published in October 2007, found that the heavy loss of summer sea ice that year was caused by unusual winds blowing the ice into the North Atlantic, where it quickly melted. The report said:

Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) reported in October 2012 that the record minimum in September “probably” reflected the previous loss of some multi-year ice in the Arctic, “as well as other factors,” citing an August storm in the Arctic that “helped break up the weakened ice pack.”

A year later, NASA reported that “a big storm caused havoc on the Arctic Ocean’s icy cover” in August 2012. Neither of those scientific agencies attributed the transient reduction in Arctic sea ice to global warming. Instead, they gave credible descriptions of natural causes.

Why does the Commissioner not report this? Why does she imply that man-made global warming caused the recent temporary loss of Arctic sea ice? Why does she imply it’s continuing? Why does she say nothing about the concurrent steady increase in Antarctic sea ice, covering the entire satellite era? If loss of Arctic sea ice confirms man-made global warming, why does accretion of Antarctic sea ice not disprove it?

Why don’t we get this kind of analysis and these questions from our professional journalists?

Satellites began accurate measurements of sea ice in 1979—and sea ice has waxed and waned around the Arctic for as long as 15 million years. Thirty-six years is not enough to have discovered everything about it.

That will do for now. Let me know your thoughts. Thank you.

UPDATE 1

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has just announced at WUWT that global warming has shown no significant increase for more than 25 years. He says:

On the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for more than 26 years. None of the models predicted that, in effect, there would be no global warming for a quarter of a century.

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