IPCC Climate Change and Land - on food waste (and diet)

Local vineyard

The most recent IPCC report, Climate Change and Land, was released last week.  The report covers a lot of ground (pardon the pun), including desertification, land degradation and food security.

I've been reading it, slowly. (It's no easier to read than any other IPCC report.) I've also seen a few articles that came out at the same time or shortly after its release.

Over time, I hope to cover more aspects of the IPCC report. Today I'll just comment on one issue that's been picked up around the traps, and that's food waste, and I'll make passing mention of diet. The food waste issue has been raised a few times since the report was released and, in my view, the articles range from fairly good to overly simplified to plain wrong. I'm not about to give easy answers or point to specific articles, just offer some food for thought (don't waste it).

Don't kill climate deadlines

I'm taking some time out from my time out to write about deadlines. Oddly, very oddly IMO, there are objections to deadlines coming from a number of quarters. Deadlines are essential for us to combat climate change. It should be obvious and it seems silly to have to argue the point. But it seems I do.

We are on a collision course with nature, a collision course of our own making. We need to change course. We've started, but we've not done nearly enough yet to prevent major damage. We need to do more and we need to keep planning how and set timelines and targets, otherwise known as deadlines. Then we have to carry out those plans.

We've missed opportunities and are suffering the consequences, with places running out of water, suffering unprecedented heat waves, drought and floods. That's with just over 1 C of warming. Urgent action is needed to avoid much greater harm.

Want to stay below 1.5 C? Then we'll need to cut emissions by 45% by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. Willing to accept an overshoot or let the world get a bit hotter? Then adjust those numbers accordingly and prepare to pay even more for disaster recovery and adaptation.

How about changing and clarifying IPCC targets for global mean temperature

The aim is to limit global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures; however, there has long been some contention and confusion around what is meant by the targets of 1.5 C and 2 C.

I don't know that anyone will ever agree on what pre-industrial means exactly, which gives a lot of room for inept leaders to wriggle out of their obligations. That's why I'm suggesting the IPCC and its member countries set and agree on targets where the meaning is clear, tangible, more precise, and to which people can relate more readily.

My idea is to change the simple message of 1.5 C or 2 C above pre-industrial to 1 C or 1.5 C above the 1951-1980 mean.

Funny peculiar: #Climate "guru" Anthony Watts' doesn't know the oceans accumulate energy

Two days ago Anthony Watts, who runs a climate conspiracy blog WUWT, posted what he called "Friday Funny – Climate Central’s scare graph excuse: ‘The oceans ate the warming’".

It is funny, as in odd, peculiar, that Anthony Watts doesn't know that more than 90% of the extra energy we've been adding is stored in the ocean. I mean, Anthony makes himself out to be an expert on climate change, more expert than the experts who research the subject. He's been blogging about climate for about ten years now. To think that he doesn't know one of the most basic facts about global warming is very strange indeed.

Leo Goldstein has an oddly paranoid poke at the IPCC

Some of articles at WUWT are indistinguishable from gibberish. In the past few months, Anthony Watts has taken to publishing articles by a very strange man. He now calls himself Leo Goldstein. When he first wrote articles for WUWT, he wrote as Ari Halperin. He's the chap who came up with the Google conspiracy, and developed a tool to combat it, made by Google :D.

Here's one bit of gobbledegook from Leo today (archived here, latest here). He wrote about equilibrium climate sensitivity and quoted the IPCC's AR5 Working Group 1 report:

The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multicentury time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.” (p. 16)

That's fine. Thing is, I don't understand what Leo's difficulty is.

Dishonest premises from Ross McKitrick at WUWT and the Cato Institute

Today at the conspiracy blog WUWT I came across another copy and paste from Anthony Watts. This time it was an article by Ross McKitrick (archived here) that he seems to have first posted at the conspiracy tank the Cato Institute.

Ross McKitrick is a climate disinformer from way back. He wants Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris Agreement so that he and his mates can continue to wreck the planet. He disgusts me.

Disinformers will happily promote the fallacy that because we probably can't reduce global surface temperatures easily by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we shouldn't even try to slow the rise, let alone stop them rising. These people are clearly genocidal. The Cato Institute, Ross McKitrick and Anthony Watts can't wait for the world to burn at 2, 3, 4 or more degrees Celsisus above pre-industrial. (They are doing what they can to get it to 12 C to kill all our descendants.)

As you probably know, the Paris Agreement is aimed at keeping the rise in global temperature to 2 C above pre-industrial, and preferably at 1.5 C. It's not all that likely (but still worth trying for) that we'll make 2 C, let alone 1.5 C. As Ross says, Pruitt, who now runs the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA), is busy wrecking the environment, and Ross McKitrick is urging him on. What the current US government and President are doing will make it harder to stay safe. On the other hand, there is also a lot happening in the USA that is going to help, despite the efforts of the world destroyers who are currently "in charge".

Atmospheric water vapour is a feedback (not forcing) - on Watts and Eschenbach #AGU16 poster

Willis Eschenbach has a poster at AGU16, to which Anthony Watts added his name. Anthony's now written a blog article about it (archived here). Actually, Anthony put his name first although I strongly suspect he doesn't have a clue what the poster is all about.

They haven't made the poster available on the AGU16 website, or not at the time of this article. It is downloadable on Anthony's blog at WUWT, here.  He's also made available what he calls "data and code". The file is 500 MB or so, therefore I won't be downloading it till I get home in 20 hours or so.

There are a few points I'll make:

• The poster is based on a couple of blog articles by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT, including the one I wrote about here.
• Willis Eschenbach still doesn't know the difference between a forcing and a feedback (more below). Nor does Anthony Watts.
• Their poster supports what real scientists tell us, that there's more water vapour in the air because of global warming.
• Most of the data they use is ocean only, not land.
• They seem happy to rely on RSS data, while disparaging it elsewhere.
• They seem happy with lots of data carefully collected and analysed by climate scientists, despite calling it fraudulent elsewhere, and despite WUWT-ers wanting to stop all research.

Even if we stopped adding CO2 today*, we'd have to prepare for more hot!

In Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports there's a paper just out by Chris Huntingford and Lina M. Mercado about how much more warming to expect. Scientists report that even if we didn't add any more CO2 to the air *kept CO2 at current levels in the atmosphere (around 400 ppm), temperatures over a lot of land regions would eventually increase by more than 1.5°C. (*See comment by ATTP below.) There are two main reasons for this:

1. until we reach equilibrium, with as much radiation leaving the planet as comes in from the sun, the earth will continue to warm;
2. the land surface warm is a lot more quickly than the ocean surface and will continue to do so until the new equilibrium higher temperatures are reached.

Extra-tropical storms: Anthony Watts publishes more of Tim Ball's nonsense

While Anthony Watts might have said something to Tim Ball to stop him writing about his favourite conspiracy theory about the One World Government, he hasn't stopped him from making up nonsense about climate science. Today he's published an article by Tim where he wrongly claimed that the world is cooling (archived here). Tim lives on a world of his own, not this one. In your world and mine, the global mean surface temperature has had four of the last four decades the hottest ever recorded. It's also had two of the last two years the hottest ever recorded, soon to be three of three:

In this article from the greenhouse effect denier, Timothy Ball, he was writing about mid-latitude cyclones, or extra-tropical cyclones. These are different to tropical cyclones. The Bureau of Meteorology website explains:

Denier weirdness: Ari Halperin thinks the IPCC's climate change definition is too broad

The Stupid It Burns Credit: Plognark

There could be an entire field of study devoted to how the brain of a climate science denier is wired, or miswired. There is a very strange article at WUWT (archived here) that shows up the deep flaws in thinking processes of deniers. The best explanation I can come up with is that Ari Halperin doesn't understand what climate is and the people commenting at WUWT are not able to process logic.

The IPCC climate message is clear based on the evidence: The fundamental flaws of Hollin & Pearce

In June this year I wrote about a paper in Nature Climate change concerning the press conference for the release of 2013 IPCC report WG1. In the paper, G. J. S. (Gregory) Hollin and Warren Pearce from the University of Nottingham claimed that the IPCC speakers at a press conference “threatened their (own) credibility” took an “an incoherently oscillating position”, and caused “confusion within the press conference and subsequent condemnation in the media”.

Hollin and Pearce were fundamentally wrong in all of these claims, and more:

1. Clear message about different time contexts: A comment to the letter by Jacobs et al (Jacobs15) has just been published, which identifies major flaws in the paper. Not least of which is that Gregory and Warren do not understand the difference between the "hottest decade" since records began, and the recent short term slowdown in the ongoing rise in the global mean surface temperature. Jacobs15 and its supplement also identify some other flaws that should never have slipped through the review net, and which undermines their unsupported claims even further.
2. The journalists were not confused: Arguably the biggest flaw in the NCC letter was that Warren and Gregory didn't bother to check for evidence to support their case. Their entire argument rests on their claim that the IPCC confused the press. But it didn't. Not at all. An examination of the articles subsequently written by the journalists who asked a question demonstrates that the IPCC’s message was clearly received. It did not confuse the journalists, nor was the IPCC's credibility eroded in any way. If anything it was enhanced. You can download the report about the media articles or open it directly.
3. Only David Rose "condemned" (as usual): There was no general condemnation of the IPCC. The only condemnation from journalists who asked a question at the press conference, was from one single source: David Rose, who has a history of misrepresenting the IPCC and climate science. And David Rose's silly article was the entire sum total of the "evidence" that Gregory and Warren offered in support of their claim of "condemnation in the media". 
4. It was also David Rose who provided "incoherence: Gregory and Warren spattered their article with the words "incoherent" and "incoherence". This word first appeared in the "condemnation" article by David Rose - it wasn't an original thought from Gregory and Warren. This lends further credence to the notion that Warren and Gregory penned their article with David Rose in mind. (See below).
5. David Rose was not dismissed as scientifically illiterate: The authors were wrong when they said that David Rose was dismissed as being "scientifically illiterate". He wasn't. I covered this point in detail in my previous article on the subject. It's also covered, with references, in the supplement to Jacobs15. It's another case of Warren and Gregory not understanding something that most other people would understand.
6. Questions on the recent slowdown were not ignored. The authors were also wrong when they claimed that the IPCC said the "pause" (as Warren and Gregory called the slowdown) was scientifically irrelevant. They didn't. Nor did they ignore any of the questions about it, contrary to what Warren and Gregory claimed. The supplement to Jacobs15 covers this point well, with references. (You can download the supplement here.)
7. And the above doesn't even cover the many question marks around their main hypothesis, that the general public can only relate to events that are close in time to the present. What they loosely term "public meaning" and "temporal locality". 

When I wrote the first article, it seemed obvious to me that the letter from Warren and Gregory was a sop to David Rose. Since then I've done some more investigating, and so have others. It seems even more obvious to me that this was just two people seeking some payback on behalf of UK tabloid journalist David Rose for an imaginary grievance.

New IPCC Chair: Dr. Hoesung Lee of Korea

If you want to know more about the newly elected chair of the IPCC, Dr. Hoesung Lee of Korea, the Carbon Brief interviewed him not long ago.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/09/the-carbon-brief-interview-dr-hoesung-lee/

Nothing New: On natural variability and global mean surface temperature

Denier blogs are going through a hiatus so I wandered a bit and got to reading a conversation, of sorts, at Judith Curry's blog (archived here). A couple of pro-science types decided to join in to help inform lurkers, while deniers were busy flogging their dead horses.

The subject was the slowdown on global mean surface temperature over the past few years, when various influences came together in a particular way. (Eg the PDO in a cool phase, volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere etc).

At one point someone wrote how he didn't think scientists anticipated natural variability in climate. He was questioning Tamsin Edwards who he reported as writing: "That pause in warming of the atmosphere surprised the media and public, even though scientists always expected this kind of thing could happen in the short term".

"Scientifically illiterate" David Rose has his "ill-posed question" floated in Nature Climate Change

There's a new paper out in Nature Climate Change that caught the eye of Anthony Watts (archived here). I bet he's relieved to have something else to talk about, instead of the demise of global warming (which is as alive as ever, unfortunately).

Update: There's now a published comment to the Hollin and Pearce paper, which is discussed here: The IPCC climate message is clear based on the evidence: The fundamental flaws of Hollin & Pearce

Sou 24 October 2015

The paper is both timely and out of date. Timely because it relates to "seepage" - which was the subject of a recent paper discussed here a short while ago. Timely also because it's all about the so-called "hiatus", with the authors even claiming (in their press release blog article) that there was a "short-term decrease in temperature" (which there wasn't). Out of date for the same reason.

The paper is by one of the UK "deniophiles" called Warren Pearce, together with a post-doc at his university called G. J. S. (Gregory) Hollin, who looks to be studying autism (updated dead link Oct 15). This unlikely pair somehow got their unlikely paper accepted and published in Nature Climate Change. I don't know what the editors were thinking.

Jo Nova's Solar Force be With You - if you're a wacko science denier

...solar and volcanic forcings, the two dominant natural contributors of climate change since the pre-industrial time.

I was pointed to Jo Nova's wacky blog today. Jo Nova is the screen name of a born again science denier from Western Australia, who comes up with some of the more outlandish "theories" you'll see about global warming (ie crazy, unscientific nonsense of the wackadoodle variety).

She was waxing sarcastic about the influence of the sun on climate (archived here). Jo was trying to tell her readers that climate scientists ignore the impact of the sun on the earth. So I thought that while WUWT is deep in conspiracy theory land, I'd hit Jo's silliness on the head.

WUWT strawman: Week 13 of 52 - not much extreme weather? So sez Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, or one of his surrogates, has made a brief appearance at WUWT to write a headline and an opening salvo. Here is what he wrote (archived here):

So far, 2015 seems to be a bad year for the ‘severe weather caused by climate change” meme

Anthony Watts / 21 mins ago March 22, 2015

Looks like another “divergence problem” as tornadoes don’t follow the climatology

That's it. The rest was a copy and paste of an article from NOAA (archived here). The NOAA article was about how there have been no tornadoes reported in the USA this March, so far. This is a record - since 1970 at any rate.

Anthony Watts talked about a "meme", but what he wrote is a logical fallacy known as a strawman, as you'll see below.

Tim Ball recycling Medieval Warming conspiracies at WUWT

At WUWT, Tim Ball is pining for the good old days - twenty five years ago. He's written (again) about the medieval warm anomaly and wishing it was global (archived here). I don't know why he harps on about it so. I think it's an excuse to name drop - he says he once met up with Hubert Lamb and he tells everyone so at every opportunity. He likes to pretend they were bosom buddies, though I doubt Hubert Lamb would have remembered Tim Ball, even had he met him.

I've written about the medieval warm anomaly on previous occasions - here and here and in some detail here, for example. There's really not that much more to be said, so I'll just repeat what I've written on another occasion when Tim moaned about the MWP:

IPCC staying on course, with some variation

In case you missed it. I meant to write about this a couple of days ago when I first read of it (thanks to the IPCC vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Leo Hickman).

At it's recent meeting the IPCC made five noteworthy decisions, as reported by Roz Pidcock at the Carbon Brief. They are:

1. Major comprehensive reports will continue to be produced every five to seven years.
In between there may be more special reports. For example, there has been a request for a report on oceans.

2. There may be a bit more time allowed between the reports from different working groups
However, the time span between the release of WG1 to WGIII won't be any longer than 18 months.

3. Science writers and graphic designers will contribute to the Summary for Policy Makers.
This is excellent news. I've said before that science communicators ought to be used to translate the science. Scientists will have the overall say and will sign off on reports (as will governments when it comes to the SPM, as always).

4. The IPCC will put more effort into communication activities
Again, excellent news. There is talk of an offer from the Norwegian government, to hold a workshop for scientists to discuss such things. The IPCC hasn't yet made a decision on whether to take up this offer.

5. More participation from developing countries
Again, this is a great move. Developing countries will be hit hardest by climate change. The IPCC is expanding the size of the bureau by two, to include more representatives from Africa and Asia. It's also "exploring the possibility" of holding more meetings in developing countries.

You can read more detail about this at the Carbon Brief.

You might also be interested in an article by Marianne Lavelle at The Daily Climate, which includes a discussion of how to better incorporate social and political sciences and economics into the IPCC reports. This I believe, relates in part to this memo from Carlo Carraro, Charles Kolstad, and Robert Stavins. You may recall Robert Stavins wrote a blog article in April last year, that got a bit of attention.

How Wondering Willis Eschenbach's religious background prevents him from understanding a scientific framework

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has been getting annoyed at science lately. I suppose it's because it's not showing what he wants to believe.

In his latest missive he loses the plot once again (archived here). He has read, but not understood the half of, a new paper just published in the early edition of science.

The Planetary Boundaries Framework

The new paper is discussing a framework, a planetary boundaries framework, by which society can be guided about what are biophysical safe limits, beyond which we should not go. That is, we should take care if we want civilisation and humans to flourish and try to stay within the safe limits.

Yes, it is a human-centric framework, devised to help decision-makers. Yet it is not a social framework. It's not about intergovernmental relations or human indices of well-being. It's a physical sciences framework. The framework is described in terms of the biophysical boundaries that are safe. Boundaries that we humans, through our actions, are pushing up against and in some cases have well and truly crossed.

The boundaries framework builds on the one proposed in a 2009 paper on the same topic. It updates the numbers and adds some discussion of regional boundaries, among other things. The planetary boundaries are illustrated in Figure 3 of the paper:

Figure 3: The current status of the control variables for seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Green zone is the safe operating space (below the boundary), yellow represents the zone of uncertainty (increasing risk), and red is the high-risk zone. The planetary boundary itself lies at the inner heavy circle. The control variables have been normalized for the zone of uncertainty (between the two heavy circles); the center of the figure therefore does not represent values of 0 for the control variables. The control variable shown for climate change is atmospheric CO2 concentration. Processes for which global-level boundaries cannot yet be quantified are represented by gray wedges; these are atmospheric aerosol loading, novel entities and the functional role of biosphere integrity. Modified from (1). Source: Steffen15

WUWT wants your best paranoid conspiracy theory about the IPCC

WUWT has had three articles in the past 24 hours, protesting the latest reports from the IPCC. These IPCC reports are not new material. What they are is a Synthesis Report, combining the reports of the three working groups. And a Summary for Policymakers of that Synthesis Report.

You can download the reports from the IPCC website.

As well as a summary from the media reports (archived here), Anthony Watts has got utter nutters from the piddly and incestuous "climate science coalitions". He has a "press release" quoting Tom Harris (who gets his climate science from the Bible) and Bob Carter (who warns about an ice age comething) apparently claiming that the IPCC reports are "unscientific and immoral" (archived here).  Is that the best they can do? Seriously? I can't imagine the "press release" will be used anywhere except denier blogs that only pander to deniers and don't care how weird they look to the rest of the world.

Anthony Watts has also got "Bob Tisdale" calling for WUWT readers to post their best conspiracy theory about the IPCC (archived here).

About the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). This was when conservative parties were in government. Ronald Reagan was US President and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister in the UK. Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister of Australia, but I doubt he would have had much say in this matter compared to the United States and Britain.

The IPCC itself employs only a very small staff. It's reports are prepared through a collaboration of thousands of scientists throughout the world, who volunteer their time to do so. Mostly this is unpaid out-of-hours work, because most of them would have to continue in their main job at the same time. The authors of the IPCC reports are experts in their respective fields. They review the latest scientific research and report on it. They judge the relevance, importance and accuracy of the research that has been published in scientific journals. There are also authors who write about policies, technology and actions taken to adapt to and mitigate global warming. This is based on information from a variety of sources, including industry peak bodies, government agencies and other reputable sources from around the world. Everything in the IPCC reports is heavily referenced so readers can verify the information.

IPCC reports are arguably the most comprehensive reports of any produced in the world today - by a long way. And the most scrutinised.

The IPCC has a well-defined structure. It also has a small secretariat to assist in coordinating its activities.  It is subject to the members of the UN and WMO, which span the spectrum of government structures, ideologies and political persuasions. The WMO currently has 185 member states and 6 territories. The UN currently has 193 member states. If the majority of governments wanted to do so, they could disband the IPCC. They don't.

What deniers think the IPCC is...

WUWT does odd things from time to time as if it wants to show how nutty its readers are. You may recall the "Denialism Saved Me" thread from last year, which was featured at HotWhopper here and here and here.