Climate cuttings 18

Interesting developments this week with the two sides of the debate finally engaging in some constructive dialogue. So without further ado....

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate published the temperature record corrected for the ENSO index (A measure of El Niño/La Niña), in an attempt to rebut Lucia's falsification of the IPCC forecasts (although amusingly, he refuses to mention her by name or link to her work). Lucia reran her verification procedures and said that the IPCC forecasts of 2001 were still falsified to a high degree of confidence. She also wonders why Gavin chooses to use 1998 as his start point when she's using 2001, where his error bars are, and whether he thinks his corrected figures match the IPCC forecasts or not. Finally a little light is shed when Gavin starts posting comments at Lucia's. The upshot appears to be this:

• Gavin is saying that the models define a range of temperatures for the future. The actual observed temperatures fall within this range, giving us confidence in the ensemble of models.
• Lucia is saying that if you had models which gave both very high and very low projections, almost any observed temperatures would fall within the range of models. The question she is asking is "Does the actual observed temperature match the central trend of the range of models?", and the answer she gets is "No".
• Because of this we can probably reject many of the higher estimates of future temperature. 

"Earth begins to kill people for changing its climate" proclaimed Pravda. "Nonsense" was the general thrust of the response from economist Indur Goklany, who presented WHO figures showing a precipitous decline in deaths from extreme weather events. This didn't stop publication of another mathematical model saying that warming was going to cause more extreme weather events.

Click to enlargeArctic Sea ice continued to hold the attention of climate bloggers, with McIntyre reporting daily on the seasonal melt (at time of writing 2008 is more than half a million quare kilometers behind 2007). The Alfred Wegener Institute reckons the 2007 record minimum is unlikely to be beaten, which is odd because we were told that there was lots of first year ice (which should melt more easily) this year.

Of course, it's traditional for the MSM not to mention the very high levels of Antarctic Sea Ice. They prefer only to talk about the West Antarctic Peninsula where, unlike the rest of the continent, there has been a little warming. Another ice sheet there is in danger of breaking up. From this we are supposed to conclude that the Southern Hemisphere is warming, when in fact it's getting colder.

Gerbrand Komen, retired director of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, pointed out that the stated uncertainties in model predictions of future climate are subjective guesses rather than objective calculations. He wondered if everyone realises this.

After the hockey stick fiasco, nobody believes the results of paleoclimatologists any more. Because of this, a bunch of its chief practitioners are launching a "Paleoclimate reconstruction challenge" where teams will be given proxy data and calibrated instrumental data and they have to try to reconstuct the climate from them.  The idea is to justify the whole science of paleoclimatology rather than to find the best technique.

The world is still cold - rare snowstorms have hit New Zealand's North Island.

Photo credits under CC licence: Tornado - OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms

Comments

[Frederick Davies]

If you keep doing this I will have to make your webpage my home page; well done.

[David Duff]

"The world is still cold" - and likely to get colder according to this report:

http://www.houstonenergyanalyst.com/Global_Warming.html

I have urged my reader to go long on long johns!

[Bishop Hill]

Very wise, David. We've hardly seen the sun here this year.