20101001_M2
Source: CITRIS
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI
Date: 01/10/2010
Event: Professor Richard Muller at i4Energy seminar, 2010: Part 2
Credit: CITRIS
Also see:
People:
- Richard Muller: Lead scientist, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project
Richard Muller: Okay and... This is global warming. These are the measurements - these are the ones made by the Hadley Group in the UK. They're the ones I use in my book, because I felt they were the most trustworthy. A couple of important things for you to know about this - these are based on thermometer measurements around the world, literally billions of thermometer measurements. Out of which they choose a very small subset, and then analyse the temperature.
You see there's a little region here, where it looked like May was cooling. 1998 was the hottest ever - going to the Hadley Group, that's still the hottest year ever. According to the IPCC - and this is something most people don't know - the warming up until 1957 cannot be attributed to humans. It's there in their report. People don't know that, because Al Gore says it is. People don't appreciate that An Inconvenient Truth is not a summary of the IPCC report. It's not a summary of the scientific consensus. It is an extreme point of view. He doesn't tell you that, because he's trying to persuade you to take action. So he says there's a consensus, and then he goes off and gives exaggerated views, things that a scientist would not go along with. You know, like the polar bears dying, and so on.
So this is global warming, from 1957 on, the IPCC says most of the warming - the warming amounts to about 0.4 Celsius - most of that, most of 0.4 Celsius is due to humans. The U.S. - most of that, one quarter of that, so 0.1 Celsius, due to humans. Our automobiles are a quarter of that, so 0.025 due to humans, that's one fortieth of one degree Celsius due to automobiles. And the students at Berkeley cheer me for owning a Prius?
I mean, our automobiles, in the next 50 years, will probably contribute another fortieth, maybe two fortieths, maybe a twentieth of a degree Celsius. No matter what we do with our automobiles, it won't make any difference whatsoever. I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here. The only thing it'll do is set an example. If China starts buying Priuses, then maybe it will have an effect. But right now, most of the emissions from China are not coming from automobiles.
Let's look at the last 13 years. Okay, so that's that part there. And here are the plots. Last 13 years, there are four different groups. The one now that I trust the most is NOAA. U.S., and that's in black. And they're showing no warming for 13 years. The Met Centre in the UK does this analysis, and they're showing no warming for the last 13 years. Jim Hansen at NASA GISS a year and a half ago predicted - a year ago, predicted - that 2010 would be the warmest year ever. He predicted that when the new data came in, that's what his analysis would show. In fact, that's what his analysis shows. His is the green curve, and he verifies his own prediction by analysing the data in a different way from the other two groups.
At the climate meeting I was at this morning, his was the only data that anybody quoted. They didn't even mention the other two groups that disagreed with him. This is what I call cherry-picking. If you want to excite the audience, find someone who predicts - who says "Global warming is still happening". You know, it is still happening. The fact that you have 13 years without warming doesn't mean that there's not a trend. But it doesn't generate headlines.
So - I'm very uncomfortable with Hansen, because he's telling us what the data are going to show, before he does it. And in my realm of science, you aren't supposed to do that. Quite frankly, I have started a new temperature analysis group, here at Berkeley. We're going to be the fourth group - it's going to be the Berkeley Report. And it's going to be the fourth group, and it's going to be different from the others. Because instead of using 10% of the data, we're going to use close to 100% of the data. Instead of having the data in a format which no reasonable person could download, we going to have it in an easily downloadable form, so anybody who wants to reproduce what we do can do. All of our code will be online and will be transparent. Anybody who disputes our analysis - we're going to be using statistical methods that even the statisticians approve of. [Laughter.] Which none of the other groups do.
So we're doing this. We hope to put the data online by the end of this year, and to have our initial analysis out by about the same time. So we're going to be a fourth group, because it's too important. These data are the most important by far. You may hear all these anecdotes about global warming. You may hear the fact that wildfires have been increasing. I'll show you those anecdotes in a moment.
Okay, by the way, this is global warming in the United States. Sorry it's in black, but that's the way the chart came. And the second warmest year on record in the United States was 1933. You don't hear that said, either. We're talking about *global warming, not U.S. warming. So people who think they've experienced global warming - "Hey, it was really hot, last week" - they're confusing weather or micro-climate with global warming. 0.4 Celsius - averaged. But in the South-east United States, according to the records - I don't have it here - it hasn't warmed at all. Zero. A little bit cooling. South-west United States. Just look at [?] the records.
So there are all sorts of people in the South-west United States believe they've sensed global warming - that increase in hurricanes, all sorts of things. Okay. Is Alaska melting? You know, Alaska is melting, because in 1979 and '80 it warmed up. Hasn't warmed since then. And these are the data that shows that the average temperature in the last year is the same as the average for the past 20 years. Alaska is warmer than it was 30 years ago, but it hasn't warmed since 30 years. That's an undisputed fact. But maybe, if you draw a diagonal line through this, what you're seeing is warming with a little downward glitch, a little upward glitch, but it's warming. That may be. Data aren't really good enough.
What bothers me is that nobody in the climate science business will show you the evidence that makes their statements look a little bit suspicious. In the science that I grew up in - in particle physics, in astrophysics - you're expected to say "Here's my data, here's the effect, here's the data that disagrees with it. I think you'll agree that my data's more convincing than the data that disagrees with it." But in climate science nobody ever shows the data that disagree. They fear that the public is too stupid to recognise that because it disagrees, doesn't mean it's right.
And so, I was just at a talk, down at the Berkeley [inaudible], in which one of the speakers was talking about the fact that this whole subject is confused by people who are attacking the analysis. And it does a real lot of harm because it slows us up our action, and this is the danger, it becomes a religion.
Okay, so isn't global warming clear and incontrovertible? You know, I showed you this. The IPCC has three sets of data that they consider important. Only three. You know, there are lots of anecdotes. Those anecdotes are only suggestive. And there's so much cherry-picking, as I'll show.
So, the other thing is the sea-level rise, which you see is going up, here? And some people now say that the sea-level rise is accelerating. Not [inaudible] satellite measurements. But the most [?] has been only 8 inches - 20 centimetres - of which 4 inches is due to humans. At most - 4 inches, due to humans. How much will this go up in the next hundred years? Probably, maybe two feet. It's not the flooding of New York City, or even of Florida, that you see in the movies. This is the IPCC. Oh, there are some people who think it will be worse. And that's what the politicians tell you about.
Melting of the Arctic? That's the third bit of evidence. What they don't say, though - and this bothers me, and here is where I disagree with the IPCC - the IPPC thinks that the melting of the Arctic is one of the three main bits of evidence. The surface temperatures, the sea-level rise and the melting of the Arctic. Why don't they include the melting of the Antarctic? The reason is, they predicted very clearly - in the year 2001, based on nine climate models - that the increased solar warming of the oceans would cause more evaporation, and the Antarctic would still be below freezing, with a couple of degrees of warming, and therefore there would be more ice on Antarctica. This was a clear prediction they made of global warming. The ice in Antarctica is reducing. It's exactly opposite to what they clearly predicted.
As a scientist, that's evidence against their use of the models. So what'll they say? Well, I'll tell you what the President's Science Adviser John Holdren says. He says "Well, those models were really wrong, but now we've changed the models. And now, if we run them again, they show that the ice will actually decrease. And therefore this is evidence in favour of global warming."
Increase in hurricanes. 2005, for the first year we ran out of letters of the alphabet for hurricanes. If I pick hurricanes that hit the United States, you can look them up online. What you find is: hurricanes in white are actually decreasing a little bit. Severe hurricanes in blue - categories, I guess, 3 and 4 - are actually going down a little bit. Category 5 - going down a little bit. So why does everybody say that hurricanes are increasing? Actually, they don't. Because at the Hurricane Center, they say that the rate of hurricanes has been going down.
So why do prominent politicians say the number of hurricanes is going up? Well, the reason is: we ran out of letters in 2005. Why did we do that? Let's look at 2005. Here are all the zillions of hurricanes out at sea in 2005. Compare that to 1933 when there were none out there. None! Why were there none out there? Well, we detect hurricanes by satellites, and there were no satellites in 1933. We detect them by remote sensing buoys. And there were no buoys out there. And, finally, we detect them by ships. And ships avoided this area because of the hurricanes. [Laughter.] So there were no reported hurricanes in that area.
But if you take an unbiased subsample, then you find that the hurricanes are not increasing. Does that violate global warming? No. Because global warming doesn't predict the number of hurricanes will go up. If you look at it, they say that storms might go up. They also might go down. Why would they go down? Because in global warming, more heating occurs at the Poles than at the Equator. That decreases the temperature gradient. It's these temperature differences that drive the storms. That's why, at the end of the summer, when the Equator is so hot and the Poles are still cold, you get the maximum differences, you drive the hurricanes that are part of the instability you get from the temperature differential. So no, the hurricanes are not going up.
Okay, what about tornadoes? Al Gore says they're going up. This is reported every year, till the last year, by the U.S. government, by NOAA, and it says the number of violent tornadoes is going down. How does he say they're going up? I have tried to contact him in several ways. He hasn't gotten back to me. He believes - I mean, he says publicly - he's not interested in the scientific debate, because the science is settled. So no more scientific debate - instead, we have to just talk about what we're going to do about it. So that's consistent with his policy, in not discussing the science. I believe what happened is he was including modern radar measurements that detect tornadoes even that don't touch the ground.
He says wildfires are going up. In fact the area of wildfires has increased a little bit. It's hard to tell by looking at the data, but you notice the trend lines show it's going up, after it went down after 1960 - it's now going back up. This is the area of wildfires. The number of wildfires, which is what he actually states, is actually going down. Uh... Lots of stories, about that. One of the things that he said when he said the number of wildfires was going up he wasn't talking about U.S. data - he doesn't mention that - but he was talking about North America, and he was only talking about wildfires that do damage to buildings. So he had more of a construction, more buildings, there will be more wildfires that do buildings [sic] and that's the data he was using.
But this is - I call it cherry-picking. If you look around at data, you find something that's bad and you attribute it to global warming.