The Nuts and Bolts of this Growing Program Emily Cepla Amanda Swindle.
The Great Channel 4 Swindle
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Transcript of The Great Channel 4 Swindle
April 19, 2023
The Great Channel 4 SwindleThe Great Channel 4 Swindle
Robin Hogan
Thanks to: Jonathan Gregory, Giles Harrison and Peter Stott
Return
April 19, 2023Overview
• The following claims were made in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” produced by Martin Durkin:
• “Concentrations of CO2 are too small to be important”
• “CO2 doesn’t match 20th century temperature record”
• “It can all be explained by sunspots”• “The troposphere isn’t warming”
• “Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans”
April 19, 2023“Concs of CO2 (~300ppmv) are
too small”
• But the “per-molecule” absorption cross-section of CO2 is hugely greater than N2 and O2 in the infrared
Carbon dioxide absorption in the middle of the infrared spectrum
…a daft comment anyway: 300 ppmv of HCN is lethal, so why shouldn’t 300 ppmv of CO2 be important?
April 19, 2023Whoever said only CO2
affects climate?
• Anthropogenic forcings• Carbon dioxide and other gases• Tropospheric aerosol emissions• Land use changes
• Natural forcings with an established mechanism• Stratospheric aerosol (volcanoes)• Solar irradiance changes• Changes to Earth’s orbit (Milankovic cycles) (~20 kyr)• Solar cycle effect on ozone via UV modulation (11 yr)
• Possible natural forcings lacking an established mechanism• Cosmic ray effects on clouds (11 or 22 yr?)• Solar system and galactic spiral arms (~0.5 Gyr)
• And natural variability!
April 19, 2023From The Independent
• Source of Channel 4 temperature plot• 1998 article in “Medical Sentinel” by known climate
sceptics• From NASA but “Northern hemisphere land” (<1/3 of
globe)• Ended in the early-1980s so underplayed recent warming• Martin Durkin admitted that his graphics team changed
the scale so that it extended to 2000!• Durkin quotes on the matter
• “there was fluff there”• “the original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we
wanted the simplest line we could find”
April 19, 2023
• Shape of temperature rise can be calculated by considering natural and anthropogenic forcings
• “Post-war economic boom” led to aerosol emissions, initially offsetting the CO2 forcing
Pinatubo 1991El Chichon1982
Agung1963
April 19, 2023Friis-Christensen & Lassen
(1991)
Smoothed solar-cycle
length
Un-smoothed points (end of time series as of 1991)
Corrected by Damon and Laut (2004)
When the new data became available: Lassen and Friis-Christensen 2000
April 19, 2023
• Solar cycle length clearly cannot explain the last 50 years of warming
• But discredited data still used in C4 programme!
• Note that we can predict temperature change due to CO2, but cosmic ray link is currently just a correlation: mechanism is uncertain
Damon and Laut (2004)
Upturn previously used to explain recent
warming now looks like a blip!
April 19, 2023Longer periods…
? • Problems with fitting:• Maunder minimum
“filled in” with perfectly correlated data
• Two temperature series were “spliced together” at 1870, but lowering the second by 0.1 degrees!
• The result looks less convincing when these effects are corrected
April 19, 2023But lots of temperatures to
chose from!
• Key point: no change in solar activity has been observed that could explain the warming in the last few decades
• Note that changes to the solar irradiance are important at certain times (e.g. beginning of 20th century), but these are correlated to sunspot number so we must be very careful in attribution of correlations of temperature with solar activity
April 19, 2023“Troposphere should
warm faster than surface”
• This is consistent with recent analysis of satellite Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU)
Christy and Spencer (2003) analysis indicated troposphere warming slower than surfaceMears and Wentz corrected for diurnal drift of satellite: there is now consistency with theory
April 19, 2023IPCC verdict
• IPCC 2007:• “New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite
measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR*.”
*TAR = Third Assessment Report, IPCC 2001
April 19, 2023“Volcanoes emit more CO2
than humans”
• Steady outgassing: up to 0.2 GtC/yr (Morner and Etiope 2002), but IPCC 2001 has < 0.1 (cf. anthropogenic: 6 GtC/yr)
• How much is emitted in a volcanic eruption?
Pinatubo 1991
El Chichon 1982
Agung 1963
…and Mauna Loa is itself a volcano!
April 19, 2023
Return
Useful links
• RealClimatehttp://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/
• John Houghton’s sitehttp://www.jri.org.uk
• The Independenthttp://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/
article2355956.ece• Point-by-point rebuttal
http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1843• The graphs from the programme
http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1838