Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 11
Sep 29, 2007 Climate: Cuttings After the hectic pace of the last few weeks, things have quieted down a bit on the climate front, but there's still plenty to cause a bit of shock and awe for those whose scientific training was in fields where "post-modern science" is less the vogue.
IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth took pot shots at Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Centre. He tells us that the Hockey Stick has been confirmed (choosing not to discuss the findings of Professor Wegman which confirmed that it was broken).
Global warming sceptics are soon to be non-persons. The Wikipedia list of those opposing the hysterical outlook on the planet's climate has been flagged for deletion. Perhaps it was getting too long?
Robert Corell, a director of Mrs John Kerry's Heinz Centre in Washington, said that melting glaciers were causing earthquakes. Jose Rial, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina said that this was scaremongering.
A group of Italian scientists compared 19 climate models used in the IPCC's 4th report. The outputs are apparently entirely inconsistent with each other, thus confirming the view that climate models are currently, and possibly inherently, unreliable.
People are still chucking rocks in the direction of NASA's bungling AGW cheerleader, James Hansen. Lubos Motl says he was involved in the 1970s global cooling scare too. Meanwhile there was a brouhaha about the fact that he appears to have been receiving money from George Soros. This follows his being showered in cash by the aforementioned Mrs John Kerry - Teresa Heinz. Why are these left-wing luminaries so generous to a public servant? The Soros story has been brought up to date by Paul Biggs writing at Jennifer Marohasy's blog.
There was lots of interest in the climate history of Wellington, New Zealand. Hansen has managed to adjust his way from a gently cooling trend to a sharply warming one. Oh, and the city seems to have disappeared altogether after 1988. Only climate scientists can make major conurbations disappear before your very eyes, it seems. Climate Skeptic's take on the affair here. Climate Audit here.
Those who follow the AGW debate know that in the ice core records, increases in temperature lead increases in CO2 by about 800 years, implying what we might call an inconvenient causality. The hysterics try to shrug it off by saying it's all to do with feedbacks. They were very excited by a new paper which claimed that the lag was less than the 800 years previously thought. Unfortunately another paper a few days later suggested a lag of 1300 years.
An online journal called Credibility Climate of the Past published a paper by prominent climate scientist (and Green party councillor) Martin Juckes, attacking McIntyre & McItrick's refutation of the hockey stick. They managed to do this despite this involving their breaching their own policies on review comments and having an editor who had a clear conflict of interest, again in breach of their stated policies. They also didn't seem to mind that the content of the paper was wrong. Cue much blustering from the bigwigs at the journal and claims that "it's very hard to find an unconflicted editor". Cue also McIntyre pointing out that almost any other member of their editorial board would not have been conflicted in the same way. Full story here. Do read the comments thread too.
One of the key reconstructions of the historical climate is that of Osborn and Briffa who say that the 20th Century was abnormally warm. Their work has been the subject of much attention from Climate Audit in recent years. Now another researcher, Gerd Berger of Berlin’s Institut für Meteorologie, has reported that Osborn & Briffa have not done their statistical tests correctly. This will not be a surprise to regular readers. Berger has gone on to recreate their work using the correct tests and says that doing this makes the 20th century temperatures look pretty normal.
Some interesting work has been published by a statistician/blogger called Jonathan Lowe. While the AGW community looks at daily max/min temperatures, JL has looked instead at temperatures throughout the day and finds that night time temperatures in Australia show no trend. It's only daytime temperatures that are rising - when the sun is out.
And that's it folks. As always, thanks to everyone who sent links, even if I didn't use them. Keep them coming.
Reader Comments (10)
DK
Are you really suggesting that a natural process like climate could be inherently unmodellable - not just complex or chaotic, or stochastic, but unmodellable? That would be a real sledgehammer - what magic separates it from other natural processes?
Lorenz has said as much:
"When our results concerning the instability of non-periodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly non-periodic, they indicate that prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise, very-long-range weather forecasting would seem to be non-existent."
LORENZ, Edward N. 1963. Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20: 130-141.
Mandelbrot has pointed out that weather and climate are the same thing:
"In summary the distinctions between macrometeorology and climatology or between climatology and Paleoclimatology are unquestionably useful in ordinary discourse. But they are not intrinsic to the underlying phenomena."
Mandelbrot and Wallis, 1969. Global dependence in geophysical records, Water Resources Research 5, 321-340.
Climate modelling of course is not interested in forecasting - whether it will rain in Bristol on 1 Oct 2020 - but in trends.
It is clutching at straws to try to argue that these two are the same in order to expand the scope of impossibility.
Did you actually read the Mandelbrot quote? Climate and weather are the same. (I'm assuming you know who Mandelbrot is).
But so what? It would not change the fact that the one is interested in trends and the other in hourly deviations from those trends. The latter being impossible long term.
We have trends and deviations from trends in the same underlying phenomena.
Lorenz is talking about weather forecasting, pointing out, as we all know, that long range forecasts are impossible because of the chaotic nature of the system. But of course you can make statistical predictions regarding the state a chaotic system will be in long in the future. Modelling the trend and not the deviations is this kind of statistical prediction.
There are trends in weather/climate which weather/climate modelling is about. And there are hourly variations which weather/climate forecasting is about and is only possible short term.
This is elementary mathematical modelling. There is signal + noise. The noise is unpredictable, and we are interested in the signal. If you really don't understand this, what value do you think you can possibly add by repeating these quote-mining exercises?
I am, frankly, astonished that the contrarian community cannot do better than this. As long as you keep producing this stuff, clearly ignorant of basic (degree level) mathematical modelling, I can be confident you have nothing to say that I should pay serious attention to. It wouldn't be that hard to be a little more rigorous, but of course it is all about playing to the gallery isn't it.
What you call "quote mining" is more usually referred to as "citing primary sources".
You seem to be trying to say that there are two systems at work - one providing a signal which can be modelled, the other providing noise. which can't. Is this right?