Interview met William Happer (Princeton): klimaatsceptische consensus. Deel III

 Dit is het derde deel van mijn ‘posting’ over het interview met William Happer op de website ‘TheBestSchools’, waarin Happer zijn opvatting over de klimaat’problematiek’ ontvouwt. De eerste twee delen zijn hier en hier te vinden.

Happer’s visie komt dicht bij wat als consensus onder de klimaatsceptici kan worden beschouwd. Inmiddels is hij bij Donald Trump in diens ‘Tower’ op bezoek geweest. Het is derhalve aannemelijk dat zijn klimaatvisie als inspiratiebron, zo niet als leidraad voor het klimaat- cum energiebeleid door de nieuwe Amerikaanse regering zal worden overgenomen. Reden te meer om er uitvoerig aandacht aan te schenken.

Gevraagd naar de betrouwbaarheid van klimaatmodellen antwoordt Happer:

Both weather models and climate models are based on approximate solutions of the celebrated Navier-Stokes equation for fluid motion on a rotating planet. This equation, and related thermodynamic and radiative transport equations, describe the complicated interplay of gravitation, buoyancy, Coriolis forces, heat release from condensing water vapor, thermal radiation, and other phenomena. Clouds, other aerosols, and the very complicated way the atmospheric opacity depends on the frequency of solar and thermal radiation must all be taken into account, as well.

Some of the empirical input data for climate models are very well known — for example, the chemical composition of the air, the heats of condensation of water, the line spectra of greenhouse gases, the geography of the earth, etc. But many possibly important details are not well understood — for example, the far-wing spectral line shape of greenhouse gases, the extent to which continuum absorption and line structure contribute to the opacity, the role of solar activity, how cosmic rays influence cloud nucleation, how much contribution to radiation forcing comes from sulfate, black carbon and other aerosols, etc. …

I think the main problem with climate models is not the empirical input data. The main problem is that the fundamental equations for the earth’s atmosphere and oceans are too hard to solve with the necessary detail, even for the most advanced computers. Approximate solutions must be devised. These approximate solutions involve many parameterizations that involve human judgment — AKA educated guesses.

Spatial and temporal grid sizes for numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation are an example of such parameters. The compounding effect of many educated guesses, even if each individual guess is physically reasonable, has probably led to the striking exaggeration of warming by climate models.

Vervolgens wijst de interviewer op de angstaanjagende grafiek van het temperatuurverloop vanaf 1880, die op niet-deskundigen toch een overtuigende indruk maakt.

William Happer:

I’m not sure where your Figure 2 comes from originally, but so let us use a similar figure from a known source: namely, the recent paper, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface temperature warming hiatus,” by Thomas R. Karl et al. (Science, June 2015, 348: 1469–1472), co-authored by employees of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and therefore with the imprimatur of the US federal government.

NOAA heeft eerdere temperatuurgrafieken die een duidelijke opwarmings’pauze’ of hiatus toonden van de website gehaald. Dat doet denken aan de geschiedvervalsing die vroeger in de Sovjet-Unie plaatsvond, waar medewerkers die bij Stalin in ongenade waren gevallen van foto’s werden weggeretoucheerd. Dat was een heel gedoe in een tijd dat er nog geen photoshop bestond. Vaak werden de betrokkenen ook geliquideerd. Maar dat terzijde.

Maar op de grafieken die Climate4you publiceert, is de hiatus nog duidelijk te zien. Aldus Happer.

Happer:

This brings to mind George Orwell’s famous 1949 novel, 1984, where the hero, Winston Smith, is employed by the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history to conform to the current party line. ….

Many people have pointed out that models of global warming from more CO2 have predicted much more warming than has been observed over the past decade or two.

Almost all climate models predict that the warming of the lower troposphere should be faster than that of the surface, since a warming surface, especially over the 70 percent of the earth that is oceans, will vaporize more water. The condensation of this excess water vapor into clouds releases latent heat (“steam heat”) that causes more warming of the air in the lower troposphere than at the surface. So, from very basic physics, the troposphere should have warmed more (by a factor of about 1.2) than the surface, not less. …

Rather than find out what is wrong with the models and correct them, whoever constructed Fig. 2 simply changed the data of Fig. 3, presumably guided by Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald H. Coase’s comment, “If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.”

Interviewer:

You have frequently claimed that the computer models predicting global warming have been falsified as a matter of empirical fact. We take it that you are referring to the so-called “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming over the past 18 years or so, which was not predicted by the models. Is that correct?

If so, what would you say in light of the recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) purporting to show that the pause never existed to begin with?

William Happer:

We have already discussed how the “hiatus” disappeared last year, like one of the leaders of the Soviet secret-police, Nikolai Yezhov, from group photos with Joseph Stalin. Yezhov supervised the arrest and execution of approximately 1,000,000 Soviet citizens in the “Great Terror” of 1937. Many others were sent to concentration camps. This was a bit much for even the committed leftists of that time. So, to polish his image as benevolent Uncle Joe, Stalin laid all the blame on Yezhov, who was executed in his turn. Here is an example of the “before” and “after” pictures:

For the global warming establishment, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the temperature hiatus of the last decade or two were like Yezhov — a serious embarrassment to the party line, that climate is controlled solely by CO2. The solution was the same as Stalin’s or the Argentine military junta’s: make the embarrassments disappear.

Aldus William Happer.

Lees verder hier.

Wordt vervolgd.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.