Global Warming Briefing

Transcript - Global Warming Briefing

June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here

BURNETT Thank you, Norman. Okay, moving right along; there will be time for questions at the end of all the rest of the speakers; we'll have 10-15 minutes for questions then.
Our next speaker is Dr. Robert C. Balling, Jr., who is director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. He holds a Master's Degree from Bowling Green State University, one of my alma maters, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He's the Director of climatology Program at ASU; he was a professor of climatology at the University of Nebraska prior to joining Arizona State University. Dr. Balling has published over 80 articles in scientific journals, has spoken in more than a dozen foreign countries concerning climate change. He serves as a senior consultant to the United Nations Environmental Program, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists that issued the report that sparked so much controversy.
One of Dr. Balling's most famous, perhaps notorious works was his book, The Heated Debate, Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality. He will be speaking today about the scientific consensus that we hear so much about. Dr. Bob Balling.

Robert Balling Thank you very much, Sterling. I'll start right off with some of the material Norm spoke about. Of course, we'll begin with this question about the numerical models of climate. There's no question about this, all around the world we've developed what are very sophisticated computer programs that simulate the laws of physics that govern the atmosphere, and in virtually every case when we've doubled carbon dioxide in the model, the planet warms up, and the sea level rises, and we have all these horrible effects that come forward in the model run. And there's a great tendency given the amount of money we spent on the models, to believe in these, and a credible argument could be constructed that given the quality of the models, and given the apocalyptic prediction, we should at least pay attention to it. And I would suggest to any of us that that's not a bad idea, until you go visit the science library and you begin to look at the actual articles which are quick to point out that the models are struggling at present to properly handle clouds, and it doesn't seem the clouds are very well represented at all in the modern day models. And if we don't get the clouds right, we don't get the rainfall right. And if we don't get the rainfall right, we don't get the soil moisture right. And if we don't get the soil moisture right, we don't get the surface energy balance right.
The next thing you know, you read that the ocean is not well represented in the model, and we don't couple well with the oceans of the world. And until we get that right, we have a lot of uncertainties about the model, and it goes on and on. You find out the atmospheric circulation has certain problems in its representation, water transports aren't what they should be, on and on. We get the message. They're far from perfect.
I have a friend who calls them sausages. He says they're pretty good until you know what's in them, and I've never forgotten that. And so we do have this prediction for the model that the world should warm up quite a bit, however, as we continue to increase the greenhouse gases.
Well, that would take us to the next phase in our science, and that is to find out if the world is, in fact, warming, and the best evidence we have is yes, the earth is warming. At first it looks like we have a done deal here. After all, we have a model predicting warming, and as you see here from thermometers throughout the world, we look in the last century and we in fact see warming. And you also look at this graph and you now look back here and you find out that more than just overall warming, we have all these record- breaking years in the most recent decade.
Of course, a great deal has been made of this that in the past 5 or 10 or 15 years we've had the warmest years on record. So it looks at first glance as if we have two pieces of evidence, one theoretical and one empirical, conspiring to tell us that the world is warming, and just maybe we have this disaster to worry about.
There are problems, however, with the data that we collect, and the way we represent the global temperature. Here you're looking at the temperature of Phoenix, Arizona, over the past 50 or so years, and what you see is this tremendous increase in temperature in Phoenix in the last 30 years. The yellow line shows us the population growth in my hometown, and of course, the population has been growing leaps and bounds. And as the population grew, Sky Harbor Airport grew where we have the thermometers, and Phoenix appears to have gotten quite a bit warmer.
The reality is if you go out of Phoenix to Casa Grande or up to Carefree or somewhere, there's been no warming at all. It's quite artificial. It's related entirely to the urban growth taking place around the Sky Harbor Airport. The same is true for cities around the world.
We also know that volcanoes are erupting, and these will tend to cool off the earth, and there are other times that volcanoes are not erupting, and the earth tends to warm up. And if we plotted the stratospheric turbidity, which is a measure of dust in the atmosphere from volcanoes and compared that to planetary temperature, you'll see this inverse but not perfect relationship. When the stratosphere is clean, the earth warms up, and when the stratosphere is dirty, the earth cools back down. And we have to control for that statistically before we could ever look for a signal that's related to the buildup of greenhouse gases. And when we do that, 30 percent of the trend disappears.
Norm mentioned something that's receiving a lot of attention right now in the scientific journals, and that is the very simple idea that the planetary temperature is related to the output of the sun. Judy Leane and others have produced annual estimates of what the solar irradiance has been, and if we plot that against planetary temperature, we get not a perfect fit but a very good fit, and not surprisingly, when the sun puts out a lot of energy, the earth heats up, and when the sun doesn't put out much energy, the earth cools back down. And so again we have to control for this, and as we control for this, much more of the trend disappears.
You've heard a great deal about El Nino and southern oscillation controlling the weather and the planetary temperature. There's no doubt when we have an El Nino like we have today that the earth tends to be a bit warmer, and if we have La Nina with large pools of cool water, we end up having the earth cooled down, and that would have to be controlled before I would ever say there is a link to global warming.
So like you, I do look at this chart and I'm impressed with the fact that there is warming seen over the past century. I would never concede that that warming was entirely driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases. There are many other explanations for why we've seen warming at the time scale of one century.
Norm mentioned that the other rather amazing thing that is lost in the shuffle is that you could ask yourself, when did the warming occur, and as you noticed, the big warming takes place back here, long before we see the biggest buildup of the greenhouse gases.
The widespread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather has attracted considerable public attention; so much so that frequently the question is asked is our climate changing. That's J.B. Kinzer, 1933, who was noticing that the planetary temperature was going up. I would remind all of you that climate scientists warned the world about global warming back in the '30s. When I did a Ph.D. back in the '70s, it was all global cooling was going to freeze the planet, and global cooling was front page in covers of Time and Newsweek, and today it's global warming, and I'm sure we'll be back to global cooling if this global warming issue loses its steam.
Norm had this plot as well. It shows the satellite depiction of planetary temperature over the past 20 years almost. The satellite system became operational in 1978, and on the first day of 1979 we began to see the planetary temperature measured very precisely from space. Norm mentioned that if you see a trend here, you're better with your eye than he is. Well, I do see a trend, Norm. The trend is statistically significant, and it's downward. And in fact, in the past four months we have seen some of the coolest recordings yet. And if you'll notice back here, this plot goes through March and you're up here with March. April was also very cold. This year May has seen a slight warming. We're still well below the zero line. And there are no good excuses this time. There's no volcano to point to, there's no big pool of cold water. In fact, there's an el Nino right now. It's stunning to me and to others that we're looking at this plot, expecting so much warming, and yet we see cooling.
Over the past two decades, this is exactly what we've seen. The red bar shows us what we should have observed if we're going to be consistent with the numerical models. The yellow bar is what we have observed from the thermometer network around the world.
The MSU label is for the satellite system. It, surprisingly, is seen cooling over the past two decades. So who's right. We have the thermometer record, now we have the satellite record. Never forget, we release balloons twice a day all over the earth, and the balloons go up through the atmosphere and they measure the planetary temperature as well, and the balloons and the satellite record are in perfect agreement. They both show cooling.
So we have these major systems that have been developed that are state of the art, and they do not see the warming that should be clearly in place at this time.
This graph is almost unbelievable. If you think about all the publicity about global warming, you think about the big buildup of greenhouse gases over the past decade, this shows the planetary temperature over the past decade from the three ways we monitor planetary temperature. The yellow line that is flat-lined out here is from the thermometers of the world. The thermometers over the past ten years see no warming. If we look at that bluish line labeled radio sun, those would be from the balloons of the world. Over the past decade the balloons see cooling. And if we look at that red line, the satellites are up there shouting to you that something is happening to cool down the earth. Two of the three methods we use to measure planetary temperature show cooling, one shows nothing at all, and this is the decade that we've really pushed global warming onto the public.
Norm also mentioned what now is one of my favorite stories in global warming, stories that could literally fill up books like The Heated Debate. Of course, the prediction is that maybe we'll be seeing more extreme weather. Maybe we're going to see more hurricanes, and every time there is a hurricane, somebody pops their head up and says see, I told you. This is all related to global warming.
Actually, the IPCC says this: climate models give no consistent indication whether tropical storms will increase or decrease in frequency or intensity as climate changes. Neither is there any evidence that this has occurred over the past few decades.
The IPCC is so careful in all their wording, and look at the wording. Climate models give no consistent indication, neither is there any evidence that this is occurring.
We've looked, and many people have looked at indicators of tropical cyclone activity. Here you see one of many that's a downward trend in the intensity of wind that's been observed over the past half century in the hurricane wind systems. The Max Plank Institute probably ran the best integrated hurricane model with the global climate model; they discovered as they increased the greenhouse gases, hurricanes became less frequent and less intense, and they stated so in a number of publications that the best model run ever says the hurricane should decrease in frequency and intensity. And the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, major review piece says the authors conclude that even though the possibility of minor effects of global warming on tropical cyclone frequency and intensity cannot be excluded, they must effectively be swamped by large natural variability. In other words, not much to it.
In summary, contrary to many expectations, the Atlantic basin has in recent decades seen a significant trend of fewer intense hurricanes and weaker cyclones overall. That's from Chris Lancey on of the of best scientists studying the issue. Nonetheless, Newsweek tells us if you see a hurricane, blame global warming. That's a big part of the global warming problem, is that no matter how hard the scientists try to explain some of this to elements of our society, they don't believe it. They think that somehow they have a better story to tell far and away here.
So what's happened right now, if you were to go over and see where the trends are going in the climate research, it's trying to find out why we're not seeing all the warming. Here you see a plot of the sulphur dioxide increase that's been going on globally over the course of the century. As Norm pointed out, sulfates in the atmosphere cool the earth, and it may be, particularly in the northern hemisphere, as we continually increase the sulfates, we will see a lack of warming.
Another thing we look at is mineral aerosols, dust from disturbed surfaces and dry lands. These authors recently concluded dust from disturbed sources actually changes the sign of the mean anthropogenic forcing at the surface. The conclusion here is that if you take the greenhouse gases and sulfates and the mineral aerosol, humans have had a cooling effect over the past century. And if that's not enough, today there are many people running about saying what's really happening is allowing the warming not to show up, is that we are seeing a depletion of ozone in the high atmosphere. This has a direct negative thermoforcing, and because of that, we're not seeing the warming that should be there.
The key is simple. A few years ago what we were doing is doubling carbon dioxide, running the models, including wanted arrows on the state, and telling the world what we found, and that was the prediction for the greenhouse effect. But as you see, there are many more elements involved. Today we're talking about various things that appear on this slide that also perturb the climate system, and as time goes on, we keep finding more and more forcing mechanisms that are impacting the climate system.
So my advice to you and to others is stay tuned. The science is definitely evolving. The facts are out there, and I believe that as you explore these facts, you will find out that the global warming looks far less threatening than it may have at first glance. Thank you very much.

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Transcript - Global Warming Briefing
June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here
BURNETT	Thank you, Norman. Okay, moving right along; there will be time for questions at the end of all the rest of the speakers; we'll have 10-15 minutes for questions then. Our next speaker is Dr. Robert C. Balling, Jr., who is director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. He holds a Master's Degree from Bowling Green State University, one of my alma maters, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He's the Director of climatology Program at ASU; he was a professor of climatology at the University of Nebraska prior to joining Arizona State University. Dr. Balling has published over 80 articles in scientific journals, has spoken in more than a dozen foreign countries concerning climate change. He serves as a senior consultant to the United Nations Environmental Program, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists that issued the report that sparked so much controversy. One of Dr. Balling's most famous, perhaps notorious works was his book, The Heated Debate, Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality. He will be speaking today about the scientific consensus that we hear so much about. Dr. Bob Balling.
Robert Balling	Thank you very much, Sterling. I'll start right off with some of the material Norm spoke about. Of course, we'll begin with this question about the numerical models of climate. There's no question about this, all around the world we've developed what are very sophisticated computer programs that simulate the laws of physics that govern the atmosphere, and in virtually every case when we've doubled carbon dioxide in the model, the planet warms up, and the sea level rises, and we have all these horrible effects that come forward in the model run. And there's a great tendency given the amount of money we spent on the models, to believe in these, and a credible argument could be constructed that given the quality of the models, and given the apocalyptic prediction, we should at least pay attention to it. And I would suggest to any of us that that's not a bad idea, until you go visit the science library and you begin to look at the actual articles which are quick to point out that the models are struggling at present to properly handle clouds, and it doesn't seem the clouds are very well represented at all in the modern day models. And if we don't get the clouds right, we don't get the rainfall right. And if we don't get the rainfall right, we don't get the soil moisture right. And if we don't get the soil moisture right, we don't get the surface energy balance right. The next thing you know, you read that the ocean is not well represented in the model, and we don't couple well with the oceans of the world. And until we get that right, we have a lot of uncertainties about the model, and it goes on and on. You find out the atmospheric circulation has certain problems in its representation, water transports aren't what they should be, on and on. We get the message. They're far from perfect. I have a friend who calls them sausages. He says they're pretty good until you know what's in them, and I've never forgotten that. And so we do have this prediction for the model that the world should warm up quite a bit, however, as we continue to increase the greenhouse gases. Well, that would take us to the next phase in our science, and that is to find out if the world is, in fact, warming, and the best evidence we have is yes, the earth is warming. At first it looks like we have a done deal here. After all, we have a model predicting warming, and as you see here from thermometers throughout the world, we look in the last century and we in fact see warming. And you also look at this graph and you now look back here and you find out that more than just overall warming, we have all these record- breaking years in the most recent decade. Of course, a great deal has been made of this that in the past 5 or 10 or 15 years we've had the warmest years on record. So it looks at first glance as if we have two pieces of evidence, one theoretical and one empirical, conspiring to tell us that the world is warming, and just maybe we have this disaster to worry about. There are problems, however, with the data that we collect, and the way we represent the global temperature. Here you're looking at the temperature of Phoenix, Arizona, over the past 50 or so years, and what you see is this tremendous increase in temperature in Phoenix in the last 30 years. The yellow line shows us the population growth in my hometown, and of course, the population has been growing leaps and bounds. And as the population grew, Sky Harbor Airport grew where we have the thermometers, and Phoenix appears to have gotten quite a bit warmer. The reality is if you go out of Phoenix to Casa Grande or up to Carefree or somewhere, there's been no warming at all. It's quite artificial. It's related entirely to the urban growth taking place around the Sky Harbor Airport. The same is true for cities around the world. We also know that volcanoes are erupting, and these will tend to cool off the earth, and there are other times that volcanoes are not erupting, and the earth tends to warm up. And if we plotted the stratospheric turbidity, which is a measure of dust in the atmosphere from volcanoes and compared that to planetary temperature, you'll see this inverse but not perfect relationship. When the stratosphere is clean, the earth warms up, and when the stratosphere is dirty, the earth cools back down. And we have to control for that statistically before we could ever look for a signal that's related to the buildup of greenhouse gases. And when we do that, 30 percent of the trend disappears. Norm mentioned something that's receiving a lot of attention right now in the scientific journals, and that is the very simple idea that the planetary temperature is related to the output of the sun. Judy Leane and others have produced annual estimates of what the solar irradiance has been, and if we plot that against planetary temperature, we get not a perfect fit but a very good fit, and not surprisingly, when the sun puts out a lot of energy, the earth heats up, and when the sun doesn't put out much energy, the earth cools back down. And so again we have to control for this, and as we control for this, much more of the trend disappears. You've heard a great deal about El Nino and southern oscillation controlling the weather and the planetary temperature. There's no doubt when we have an El Nino like we have today that the earth tends to be a bit warmer, and if we have La Nina with large pools of cool water, we end up having the earth cooled down, and that would have to be controlled before I would ever say there is a link to global warming. So like you, I do look at this chart and I'm impressed with the fact that there is warming seen over the past century. I would never concede that that warming was entirely driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases. There are many other explanations for why we've seen warming at the time scale of one century. Norm mentioned that the other rather amazing thing that is lost in the shuffle is that you could ask yourself, when did the warming occur, and as you noticed, the big warming takes place back here, long before we see the biggest buildup of the greenhouse gases. The widespread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather has attracted considerable public attention; so much so that frequently the question is asked is our climate changing. That's J.B. Kinzer, 1933, who was noticing that the planetary temperature was going up. I would remind all of you that climate scientists warned the world about global warming back in the '30s. When I did a Ph.D. back in the '70s, it was all global cooling was going to freeze the planet, and global cooling was front page in covers of Time and Newsweek, and today it's global warming, and I'm sure we'll be back to global cooling if this global warming issue loses its steam. Norm had this plot as well. It shows the satellite depiction of planetary temperature over the past 20 years almost. The satellite system became operational in 1978, and on the first day of 1979 we began to see the planetary temperature measured very precisely from space. Norm mentioned that if you see a trend here, you're better with your eye than he is. Well, I do see a trend, Norm. The trend is statistically significant, and it's downward. And in fact, in the past four months we have seen some of the coolest recordings yet. And if you'll notice back here, this plot goes through March and you're up here with March. April was also very cold. This year May has seen a slight warming. We're still well below the zero line. And there are no good excuses this time. There's no volcano to point to, there's no big pool of cold water. In fact, there's an el Nino right now. It's stunning to me and to others that we're looking at this plot, expecting so much warming, and yet we see cooling. Over the past two decades, this is exactly what we've seen. The red bar shows us what we should have observed if we're going to be consistent with the numerical models. The yellow bar is what we have observed from the thermometer network around the world. The MSU label is for the satellite system. It, surprisingly, is seen cooling over the past two decades. So who's right. We have the thermometer record, now we have the satellite record. Never forget, we release balloons twice a day all over the earth, and the balloons go up through the atmosphere and they measure the planetary temperature as well, and the balloons and the satellite record are in perfect agreement. They both show cooling. So we have these major systems that have been developed that are state of the art, and they do not see the warming that should be clearly in place at this time. This graph is almost unbelievable. If you think about all the publicity about global warming, you think about the big buildup of greenhouse gases over the past decade, this shows the planetary temperature over the past decade from the three ways we monitor planetary temperature. The yellow line that is flat-lined out here is from the thermometers of the world. The thermometers over the past ten years see no warming. If we look at that bluish line labeled radio sun, those would be from the balloons of the world. Over the past decade the balloons see cooling. And if we look at that red line, the satellites are up there shouting to you that something is happening to cool down the earth. Two of the three methods we use to measure planetary temperature show cooling, one shows nothing at all, and this is the decade that we've really pushed global warming onto the public. Norm also mentioned what now is one of my favorite stories in global warming, stories that could literally fill up books like The Heated Debate. Of course, the prediction is that maybe we'll be seeing more extreme weather. Maybe we're going to see more hurricanes, and every time there is a hurricane, somebody pops their head up and says see, I told you. This is all related to global warming. Actually, the IPCC says this: climate models give no consistent indication whether tropical storms will increase or decrease in frequency or intensity as climate changes. Neither is there any evidence that this has occurred over the past few decades. The IPCC is so careful in all their wording, and look at the wording. Climate models give no consistent indication, neither is there any evidence that this is occurring. We've looked, and many people have looked at indicators of tropical cyclone activity. Here you see one of many that's a downward trend in the intensity of wind that's been observed over the past half century in the hurricane wind systems. The Max Plank Institute probably ran the best integrated hurricane model with the global climate model; they discovered as they increased the greenhouse gases, hurricanes became less frequent and less intense, and they stated so in a number of publications that the best model run ever says the hurricane should decrease in frequency and intensity. And the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, major review piece says the authors conclude that even though the possibility of minor effects of global warming on tropical cyclone frequency and intensity cannot be excluded, they must effectively be swamped by large natural variability. In other words, not much to it. In summary, contrary to many expectations, the Atlantic basin has in recent decades seen a significant trend of fewer intense hurricanes and weaker cyclones overall. That's from Chris Lancey on of the of best scientists studying the issue. Nonetheless, Newsweek tells us if you see a hurricane, blame global warming. That's a big part of the global warming problem, is that no matter how hard the scientists try to explain some of this to elements of our society, they don't believe it. They think that somehow they have a better story to tell far and away here. So what's happened right now, if you were to go over and see where the trends are going in the climate research, it's trying to find out why we're not seeing all the warming. Here you see a plot of the sulphur dioxide increase that's been going on globally over the course of the century. As Norm pointed out, sulfates in the atmosphere cool the earth, and it may be, particularly in the northern hemisphere, as we continually increase the sulfates, we will see a lack of warming. Another thing we look at is mineral aerosols, dust from disturbed surfaces and dry lands. These authors recently concluded dust from disturbed sources actually changes the sign of the mean anthropogenic forcing at the surface. The conclusion here is that if you take the greenhouse gases and sulfates and the mineral aerosol, humans have had a cooling effect over the past century. And if that's not enough, today there are many people running about saying what's really happening is allowing the warming not to show up, is that we are seeing a depletion of ozone in the high atmosphere. This has a direct negative thermoforcing, and because of that, we're not seeing the warming that should be there. The key is simple. A few years ago what we were doing is doubling carbon dioxide, running the models, including wanted arrows on the state, and telling the world what we found, and that was the prediction for the greenhouse effect. But as you see, there are many more elements involved. Today we're talking about various things that appear on this slide that also perturb the climate system, and as time goes on, we keep finding more and more forcing mechanisms that are impacting the climate system. So my advice to you and to others is stay tuned. The science is definitely evolving. The facts are out there, and I believe that as you explore these facts, you will find out that the global warming looks far less threatening than it may have at first glance. Thank you very much. Next page...