Munich Climate Conference 2019

 

Antifa thugs outside Munich Conference Center.

Thanks to Andreas Müller for writing at his blog hintermbusch on four key presentations at the EIKE Climate Conference on Nov. 23, 2019. As many have read, eco-terrorists forced the sessions out of the scheduled venue, but the gatherings went on elsewhere.  So much for dialogue in search of scientific truth. Here are some excerpts in italics with my bolds to encourage readers to read his informative report. (link in red above).

In this blog post, I summarize these lectures and add links to the video clips for you to follow the lectures on your own and in full detail (Only the first talk was in German and is not easily accessible for most of the international public).

Christian Schlüchter, Switzerland

Prof. em. Christian Schlüchter is a geologist and has studied the glaciers of the Alps in great detail. He reports the findings of very old timber in and below glaciers and what those trees taught him about the glacial epochs of the Alps.

One of the most intuitive finds of Schlüchter’s is this huge tree trunk, found at a glacier tongue (see the most beautiful glacier snout behind!).

This place nowadays is clearly above the limit of vegetation and still there is this tree which attracted Schlüchter’s curiosity and fuelled his research: How old is it? Where and under what conditions has it grown and why is it here.

The key message from his slides is that all of these records were left in times when the alpine glacier extent was smaller than in 2005.

Warm periods: more life

The timberline was at least 300 meters higher which indicates a minimum of 1.8° C higher temperatures. An example of this gives Hannibal, who managed to cross the Alps with elephants because the higher regions were much less covered by ice than in recent centuries.

Warm periods: more civilization

As his summary, Schlüchter gave the following facts:

• More than 50% of the last 11000 years alpine glaciers were smaller than 2005
• This fact he baptized, “dominance of the Hannibalistic world”
• Alpine glaciers have shown huge dynamics
• Events of glacier growth were fast and short
• The little ice age (from the end of the medieval warm period to about 1850) was the longest glacier extension since the last ice age 12000 years ago
• Every warming followed an accelerated glacier growth

Nicola Scafetta, Italy

Nicola Scafetta is an italian physicist und climate modeller who works at Naples university. He is well-known for his criticism of IPCC climate models and, of course not uncontested for creating his own climate models and comparing them to IPCC results. His talk in Munich again took aim at the weaknesses und faults of IPCC climate models.

He notes that the models tend to reproduce the notorious “hockeystick” shape and therefore fail at the medial warming bump! (This is an echo of a very old climate change controversy, documented here).

He also shows similar failures for longer periods and demonstrates that the ulimate reason for this is that the models are not capable of reproducing climate variations which follow periodic solar activity.

Therefore, ten years ago, he contrasted his own model forecasts, which take those into account, (black line) to those of the IPCC (dashed blue line), which leads to the climax of the talk Below is an upadated graph of his 2010 projections (cyan color) compared to observations and to IPCC models (green).

Nir Shaviv, Israel

Nir Shaviv is a well-known but moderate climate skeptic. Besides the lecture on alpine glaciers by Christian Schlüchter, he was my main reason to choose this half day from the conference program.  Shaviv continued where Scafetta had ended and discussed the IPCC world and its errors.

For a start, he presented its lines of thinking:

Next, he discussed the validity of each building block, marked the errors und deconstructed the standard picture. He emphasized that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is a priori unknown and largely overestimated by the IPCC.  He judged it a severe shortcoming that other forcings than green house gases are ruled out by the IPCC: the sun!

He pointed out that the IPCC overestimates climate sensitivity of CO2 at the expense of solar influences. While IPCC modelers managed to hide this for 20th century data, it will lead to a serious overestimate of temperatures in the 21st when solar influences will be cooling. He therefore expects a much lower temperature rise than predicted by the IPCC, a modest (and manageable) one:

Using physical arguments Shaviv manages to set an upper limit for the climate sensitivity of CO2. This should convince the audience to accept additional forcings behind the 20th century temperature rise. Like Scafetta he points at a solar driven forcing.

Henrik Svensmark, Denmark

Henrik Svensmark is a Danish physicist und climate researcher. As other speakers he reports that he finds it more and more difficult to raise funds for his research because its results contradict the IPCC position:

By experiments and also by correlation measurements Svensmark has investigated this mechanism of cloud creation by cosmic rays.  This is interesting because IPCC researchers cite reduction of cloud creation by global warming as a possible positive feedback mechanism which could escalate global warming to catastrophic levels. Svensmark assumes that it provides a way how solar activity, via its solar winds, has a climate impact on the earth which adds to the direct impact of solar irradiation to the earth.

Scientific summary

As a physicist I found all 4 talks interesting. They demonstrate that real and sophisticated science on climate was presented at that conference. Nothing suggests that this is less serious or valid science than anything I experienced during my time as a master and Ph.D student in physics. The presented results make it seem rather improbable that the climate models of the IPCC are complete, beyond any doubt or worth a 97% consensus.

Footnote:

For more on Scaffeta Theory see 2019 Update Scafetta vs. IPCC: Dueling Climate Theories

For more on Svensmark Theory see The cosmoclimatology theory

Regarding solar influence on climate due to orbital mechanics see this short informative video by Bill Sellers: