Back in 2002 a paper in Climate Research by Pat Michaels and his colleagues seriously questioned the sensitivities assumed in the exaggerated IPCC projections for global temperature but the paper was considered heretical and its authors were castigated by the global warming orthodoxy. So Pat Michaels and his colleagues would be more than entitled to an “I told you so” and even some more derisory nose-thumbing at the IPCC.
As Michaels and Knappenberger write at Cato:
In the Diary feature of this week’s The Spectator, rational optimist Matt Ridley has a collection of rather random observations from his daily life that have him thinking about (or maybe wishing for since Old Man Winter has been slow to loose his grip in the U.K. and Western Europe, much like he has across the Eastern U.S.) anthropogenic global warming.
What has his attention is that global warming just doesn’t seem to be going according to plan. And for those who have bought into that plan, their plan-driven actions are starting to make them look foolish.
But it’s not as if we haven’t “told you so”—a fact that Ridley draws attention to in the closing segment of his article. …….
What we determined in our 2002 study was that the amount of global warming projected by the end of this century was most likely being overestimated. When we adjusted the climate model projections to take into account and better match the actual observations, our best estimate of the amount of warming we expected from 1990 to 2100 was about 1.8°C (3.2°F), which was in the lower end of the IPCC projected range, and which Ridley correctly noted, we termed as “modest.”
Further, we anticipated the slowdown in the warming rate. …..
…… Now, more than 10 years later, more and more evidence is piling in that we were right, including several recent papers that apply a technique not all that dissimilar in theory than our own (e.g. Gillett et al., 2012; Stott et al., 2013).
So even though we still are largely ostracized, at least we rest assured that we were pretty much on target—and some people are starting to take notice.
Revised 21st century temperature projections, Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Oliver W. Frauenfeld and Robert E. Davis, Climate Research, Vol. 23: 1–9, 2002
Abstract: Temperature projections for the 21st century made in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a rise of 1.4 to 5.8°C for 1990–2100. However, several independent lines of evidence suggest that the projections at the upper end of this range are not well supported. Since the publication of the TAR, several findings have appeared in the scientific literature that challenge many of the assumptions that generated the TAR temperature range. Incorporating new findings on the radiative forcing of black carbon (BC) aerosols, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity, and the strength of the climate/carbon cycle feedbacks into a simple upwelling diffusion/energy balance model similar to the one that was used in the TAR, we find that the range of projected warming for the 1990–2100 period is reduced to 1.1–2.8°C. When we adjust the TAR emissions scenarios to include an atmospheric CO2 pathway that is based upon observed CO2 increases during the past 25 yr, we find a warming range of 1.5–2.6°C prior to the adjustments for the new findings. Factoring in these findings along with the adjusted CO2 pathway reduces the range to 1.0–1.6°C. And thirdly, a simple empirical adjustment to the average of a large family of models, based upon observed changes in temperature, yields a warming range of 1.3–3.0°C, with a central value of 1.9°C. The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low and of the IPCC TAR projections.
Tags: climate change, climate sensitivities, global warming, IPCC, Patrick Michaels
The k2p blog 