Bishop Hill Schiermeier on climate uncertainties
Jan 20, 2010 Climate: Statistics Journals Quirin Schiermeier has an article in Nature on the uncertainties in climate science, which will interest many readers. It tends to reiterate lines of argument that are familiar to anyone who has followed the pronouncements of the Hockey Team in recent years. This is hardly surprising when one looks at who he chose to interview - Gavin Schmidt, Jonathan Overpeck, Gabriele Hegerl, Susan Solomon, Hans von Storch, and an economist called Leonard Smith.
Not a sceptic among them and four of them being Hockey Team members.
There are many points of interest. For example, Schiermeier claims that the divergence problem is restricted to "a few northern hemisphere sites", directly contradicting Keith Briffa who has referred to it as "a widespread problem" in the NH. Schiermeier also tries to defend the Nature "trick", although perhaps without quite the certainty that Jones' defenders have had in the past. "It could have been done better", seems to be the current preferred line for those who would try to justify hiding things from politicians.
Reader Comments (11)
Along the lines of this topic you just have to listen to todays Media show on Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dv9hq
James Dellingpole, of the Telegraph, discussing coverage of ClimateGate with two "Executives" giving the BBC unbiased side of the coverage. If your'e not laughing by the end of it you will be shouting at the screen.
Schiermeier writes "research on climate change has some fundamental gaps...".
This is like saying that a 14th century map of the world has a few ... gaps.
I listened to the media show, the BBC came off as ill informed I don't think they could tell the difference any more between science and political activism.
Quirin Schiermeier, in his article in Nature states, "Such holes do not undermine the fundamental conclusion that humans are warming the climate, which is based on the extreme rate of the twentieth-century temperature changes and the inability of climate models to simulate such warming without including the role of greenhouse-gas pollution." This logic, which is repeated again and again, is a fallacy-the arguement from ignorance. I cannot understand how any scientist could accept this arguement as valid. This logic has been used by primitive religions to explain the existence of God; it is not accepted by modern theologians because it creates a god of the gaps, and when new discoveries are made, the god is diminished.
www.socratesparadox.com
Financial Times: UN abandons climate change deadline
By Fiona Harvey in London and Anna Fifield in Washington
But Yvo de Boer, the UN’s senior climate change official, admitted that the deadline had in effect been shelved.
“By [the end of] January, countries will have the opportunity to . . . indicate if they want to be associated with the accord,” he said. “[Governments could] indicate by the deadline, or they can also indicate later.”
“You could describe it as a soft deadline,” Mr de Boer said. “There is nothing deadly about it. If [countries] fail to meet it, they can still associate with the Copenhagen accord after.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87479ee2-0600-11df-8c97-00144feabdc0.html
and this from a few days ago:
State of the World Forum: 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign
Dear Friends,
I want to inform you that we have decided to postpone indefinitely the
Washington conference Feb. 28 - Mar. 3. I apologize for any inconvenience
this might cause you. There is simply not a critical mass of receptivity at
this time for the kind of "Climate Summit" we have designed, which has
emphasized an integral approach to climate change and the need for an
"urgency coalition" to come together to take immediate and decisive action
to resolve the climate crisis..
As disappointed as we are that the conference will not take place, the
considered opinion of all our conference partners has been that this is
simply not the right time to convene a major conference of this kind in the
nation's capitol. It would have virtually no impact on either the thinking
or the agenda with which the U.S. Congress and the president are now
engaged, such is the paralysis to which Washington has succumbed with regard
to any action on global warming. In due course, this situation will no doubt
change, probably induced by a sufficiently strong climate related
catastrophe, but this is the stark reality we face at the moment. As a
result, raising funds and registering sufficient numbers have been extremely
challenging.
State of the World Forum will in time convene a Climate Summit in Washington
but that time is not now. ..
http://www.worldforum.org/2009WashingtonDC.htm
It has this gem:
"The climate of suspicion we are working in is insane. It is drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science"
Did I hear that right?
We are preventing Gavin from telling us that the Science is not settled.
Sorry we couldn't hear the sniveling qualifiers you whispered in between the very loud self-righteous wailing.
Some people have all the luxury man! They delete everyday blog comments on their website, and then get to whine about it in Nature.
Interesting. I just finished a post which I believe provides proof (or at least a clear way to prove) the AGW theories are mathematically invalid.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12246
Comments welcomed!
Anand:
"They delete everyday blog comments on their website, and then get to whine about it in Nature."
Strangely, Gavin has allowed me to take apart Hansen's polar temperature extrapolations without a word of protest and without a single censoring.
For example, he allowed me to post this:
"I’ve been talking about the qualitative problems that I noticed in the GISS charts in figure 3 above. So I thought that I would try to take a rough shot at quantizing the problem as well. I used the HadCRUT 2005 chart and the GISS 2005 chart to make comparisons. And I wanted to compare the HadCRUT gridcell row that was furthest north to the GISS gridcell row that occupied the same position. First I counted the number of gridcells in a row. There are 72. Then I counted the number of HadCRUT cells that have data in that row. There are 24. This means that the topmost HadCRUT row has 30% coverage. So I added up all of the covered gridcell anomaly values in the row. The total was 43.8. Dividing by 24 I got an average covered gridcell value for the HadCRUT row of 1.85 C. The GISS row obviously had 100% coverage using interpolation and extrapolation. When I added all of the gridcell anomaly values together for the GISS row I came up with 300. Dividing by 72 gave me an average anomaly value of 4.17 C. So the anomaly for the top row of GISS is 2.25 times as large as that of HadCRUT.
It seems to me that this reflect very badly on the GISS interpolation extrapolation algorithm. The other problem is that there are 6 cells in that top row that HadCRUT has negative values for. GISS turns them all to the maximum positive value. The difference is 6.7 C or greater per cell for those 6 cells.
I can only conclude from this that the GISS divergence from the HadCRUT data is an artifact of the GISS processing algorithms and not a reflection of actual temperature variance at the poles."
Which is about this chart presented in a guest post by the esteemed Dr Hansen:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen09_fig3.jpg
Most of the RC sycophants seem to be at a loss for how to deal with the point as well.
Well, they aren't giving up. This on CNN, which is quite Bolshi:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/01/20/glacier.melt.comparison.climate.change/index.html?hpt=T2
The thesis of the piece is that the pictures of Glaciers "prove" that they are melting, No mention of decrease snow fall and sublimation.
Oh, well, back to Fox News.
The main apologetic thrust in the Nature article in question is that climate scientists are not able to talk about the 'gaps', the 'holes', the 'deficiencies' without eliciting adverse comments or reactions.
To all commenters in this blog, and viewers coming in from different backgrounds who have some understanding or personal experience with RealClimate, is that your main 'take home' impression from RealClimate ? One where the 'real scientists' are trying to tell you that not everything is known, that there are caveats and qualifiers, but the roaring tide of ignorant lay commenting just drown these sane pronouncements? Is that what you come away with?
I think an honest answer would be: No. But yet, Gavin gets a platform from Nature to spread this very tissue of lies.
Gavin's moderation strategy might have slightly changed from the early Climategate days, others seem to have noticed this too. But this in no way substantiates any contention it is the commenters and the lurkers have created a hostile atmosphere of suspicion.
I believe it has been the exact opposite. The professed strategy at RealClimate, and this problem is indeed in no way limited to RealClimate, is to adopt a tone of benign neutral zen-like certainty regarding all anthropogenic warming to incoming newbies and escalation to overt hostility, post control, post-holdup and post mutilation once any whiff of persistent questioning or poking rears its head. The abusiveness and patronizing is rooted first and foremost in scientific certainty - a sort-of an insider knowledge aura of the workings of climate itself.
This strategy has its basis, I believe, in an understanding amongst AGW proponents that it is OK from some point on, to bash skeptics with smear terms and chase them away because a critical mass of peer-reviewed papers have accumulated in Science and Nature (as in, 'the science is settled) and a smack on the head is what questioners henceforth deserve. And must seeminlgy be enjoyable indulging in too.
And now we are being told that they cannot communicate their uncertainties. Well, who painted themselves into that corner? RealClimate is one example of where climate scientists had clear control of the message their own public countenance. How illustrative it is of the trust-worthiness of climate scientists speaks volumes.
Gavin would like to believe that all anti-AGW suspicion flows from oil money, and SUV-loving human selfishness, and nothing else. I would say - it is the climate scientists and their relentless activism and fundamental dishonesty who have primarily created this aura of suspicion in the first place.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alena
http://grantsforeducation.info