Bishop Hill Hegerl lecture
Oct 6, 2010 Climate: IPCC Climate: MWP Climate: Models Climate: other I was in Edinburgh last night for a public lecture by Gabriele Hegerl. Hegerl, some of you may remember, is a climatologist and she appears briefly in the Hockey Stick Illusion as a witness at the NAS panel hearings.
The lecture was frankly rather disappointing, being pitched at an introductory level, and being largely a run through of the standard AGW talking points. That said, there were a few issues that I noted down as being of interest.
The first of these was when, early on in the talk, she said that the IPCC acknowledges different sides to scientific debate but that disputes are resolved, often by the author teams taking a position on the debate. As I understand it this is what happens, but it is against the guiding principles of the IPCC.
Glaciergate got a brief mention. Hegerl said in essence that Fred Pearce has misheard the number, which is not the way I remember the story at all. She also said that the figure SPM was correct in the SPM but the figure was wrong in the chapter. I hadn't heard this before.
Climategate was mentioned extremely briefly - there was an overwhelming sense of "moving swiftly on", with just enough of a pause to say that the allegations emerging from the emails had been "largely refuted".
There was little discussion of paleo although the spaghettin graph (Fig 6.13) from AR4 was shown. Hegerl said that the medieval/modern differential wasn't of particular interest - the response of temperature to drivers was more important.
She said that sceptics were "stupid" and that she wished we asked more intelligent questions.
[Updated to correct the nuance on what was said about Glaciergate]
Reader Comments (74)
Usual rowdiness! Never heard of it - unless zdb provokes us.
Gabi
Thanks again for commenting. I checked with my companion at the lecture and he also remembers you saying that sceptics were stupid and should ask better questions. I don't attach a great deal of importance to this, so if it was not what you meant to say, that's fine.
On the subject of the way IPCC author teams handle scientific disputes, Pielke Jnr has commented that the IPCC is supposed to describe scientific disputes, not decide who is correct. The panel says that authors:
Is this wrong?
ZED saith: "His [Pachauri's] first job was being a railway engineer - he's had a distinguished academic and industry career since then."
Oh, yeah, and don't forget his distinguished career as a writer of smutty novels, Zed. Remember this distinguished passage? "He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.” There are other parts of the book that are even more distinguished!
Gabriele, thank you for commenting - you are absolutely right that spoken comments are much freer and open to interpretation than papers, and even papers can be endlessly parsed.
I was wondering about the famous Himalayan glacier 2035 expiration date. This seems to have an earlier and broader origin than Fred Pearce's New Scientist piece - any comments?
Ms Hegerl
It seems to me that the IPCC wants to be seen as providing clear answers for governments in order that they can take decisions. This is a good aspiration except that in most of climate science at the moment, scientists are not able to give clear answers backed up by the science.
The IPCC has solved this problem by awarding itself to decide if some science is better than other science
"IPCC author teams discuss if some positions are supported by stronger arguments, but they do represent both sides of a scientific debate."
The IPCC then gives what appear to be clear answers to the politicians and hide the arguments and the science that point in other directions.
EDIT:
by awarding itself the right to decide
Very glad to see Prof. Hegerl dropping in to comment. Most encouraging.
Dominic
Not sure exactly how far I go with Mac above.
Hegerl et al (2006) doesn't exactly make the problem go away. Rather it makes the gross over-estimates of >9C go away.
Charney et al. (1979) estimated climate sensitivity to be 2C - 3.5C; Hegerl et al. (2006) determine a range of 1.5C - 6.2C. In either case, if correct, the likely warming from doubling atmospheric CO2 concentrations from the pre-industrial level will be >2 C, which is held to be dangerous.
So thirty years of investigation yields little change in the estimate for climate sensitivity.
We shall see, soon enough, if these estimates are well-founded.
Ms Hegerl
See:Oct 6, 2010 at 6:10 PM | geronimo
I am a physicist and I too would appreciate seeing a clear justification of these assumptions.
I am another physicist and I too would appreciate seeing a clear justification of the assumptions.
I am an architect. I'd like to see the foundation.
I am a lawyer. I'd like to see the evidence. All of it.
I am a tax payer, I'd like to see the foundation, to see the evidence. All of it. And a clear justification of the assumptions.
Dr GH:
1) With respect to the Himalayan glaciers: The SPM is written summarising the findings laid out in the report. How did you reach a conclusion that the report was wrong but the summary correct?
2) The Himalayan statement on glaciers is erroneous on two important counts, for the purpose of our discussion. One is the magical number: 2035. Secondly, but most importantly is the assignment of a "high likelihood" of all the Himalayan glaciers melting and disappearing by that year.
Likelihood estimates are supposed to be arrived at, as per the IPCC, by a careful consideration of the literature - in this case presumably all the factors that affect glaciers. How did the IPCC reach a "high" value for its likelihood, which in turn assumes that the question of melt and disappearance is settled and only the confidence in current estimates of rate of melt needed to be spelt out?
Sorry, late to the party but,
I am another physicist and I too would appreciate seeing a clear justification of the assumptions.
Specifically, for Gabi or others, what 'scientifically' clear evidence do you have that the recent (~30yr) warming is above and beyond that anticipated by natural variability. ;)
Gabi on consensus, Richard Lindzen and climate models:
http://climateedinburgh.blogspot.com/2010/10/great-pain-no-gain-no-pressure.html
I find this quote really intriguing.
"... indeed, I spent quite a bit of time saying it is hard to estimate if climate change has changed the probability of extremes"
(1) hard to estimate does not preclude the possibility that of a solution.
(2) if climate change has... Is this MMCC or natural CC or some unspecified amalgam? 1 to 0? 0 to 1? All points in-between!
(3) had changed the probabilities. Ignoring point 4, the question, what probabilities of any climate related event were known a priori or, with hindsight, afterwards? Unless we can assign the former with any certainty the forecast must be best viewed as a uncertain gamble!
(4) extremes? As in something that is unprecedented? The worst for 80 years? Forget the MWP, it is irrelevant in the light of recent advances by Climate Scientists. The fact that these advances came not from Climatologists but from those outside that field whose grasp of the mathematics and science was a tad imperfect.
The change of position was not a strategic withdrawal but a headlong flight. The current regrouping is admirable. A triumph of stubbornness over sensibility.
Definition of the phrase "tad imperfect"
That which using recognised mathematical and logical reasoning gives an excellent example of the use of the acronym QED within the context of the Climate Wars of the early twenty-first Century.
(creative writing tripos exemplar- UEA, June 2021)
Dr. Hegerl: Yes, thanks for commenting and clarifying.
The UN has more than a few difficulties with the IPCC to contend with,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/06/china-climate-talks-us-negotiator
US and China fighting again.
CAGW: Citizens Against Government Waste? hardly
I am Head of the School of Biomedical Sciences at Edinburgh University, responsible for the lecture course on Our Changing World. This is an introductory series of lectures aimed at first year students, but open to the public, I have reviewd the video of the Q/A session and can confirm that Professor Hegerl's account is accurate; she most certainly did not call skeptics stupid, what she did say was that many of the questions put to the IPCC after their report were stupid - she regretted that more of the skeptical questions were not scientifically more challenging; she qualified this by saying that the questions sounded reasonable but some seemed stupid to those who knew the science in depth. The lecture itself will soon be available on video on http://www.ed.ac.uk/about/video/lecture-series/changing-world . There is an open discussion forum linked with the course, and we encourage staff and the public to participate in that, so that our students can see and participate in the debate. We do not plan to include the Q/A session itself in the video because of concerns that doing so will inhibit free discussion after future lectures and because of unresolved concerns about privacy and consent from the questioners involved..
I am a geologist. It is abundantly clear to me that the traditions of scientific enquiry have been grossly vitiated in the pursuit of a 'justification' for a political ambition. To borrow from Hamlet I.iv : Something is rotten in the State of, not Denmark, (certain Nobel awards besides), but climate science.
Sceptics have been systematically sidelined, attacked and careers threatened. There is asymmetry, exemplified by the IPCC process, which lacks adequate audit procedures or checks and balances, of 'inappropriate torqueing' call it what you will, in the whole issue of cause and effect to pursue a 'message'. From the selection of raw data series and their adjustment, through devious graphical representation by mischievous use of selected start and finish points and scales through to partial and biased interpretation of results and the representation of effects- rarely if ever with proper weight to the beneficial or benign effects, such as crop yield, cultivable acreage, and lengthened growth season enhancement of warming conditions, but always emphasising negatives.
I can only endorse the conclusions of the House of Lords Report on the Economics of Climate Change, 2005, para 171. 'We can see no justification for an IPCC procedure which strikes us as
opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least
in part, by political requirements rather than by the evidence. Sound science
cannot emerge from an unsound process (also para 111).
And furthermore, from Early Cenozoic times the Earth has experienced a long slow descent in temperature trend. Let us recall that in Eocene times London had a subtropical climate- the London clay contains a rich fossil record including mangroves and warm climate fruits and spores, teredo-bored wood, turtles and other reptilian remains, sharks, snakes and so on. Since then it has relentlessly cooled, culminating in the rigours of the Quaternary-Recent Ice Age. This ice age has been characterised by a series of dibilitating glacial advances overwhelming large parts of the high latitude land masses in the N Hemisphere lasting around 100k years, interspersed with warmer interglacials and interstadials of much briefer duration, around 10k years. It is an impossibly blinkered and misleading approach to analyse climate and its risks using the trivial perturbations within one tenth at most of one short interglacial, without properly understanding the processes which drive the whole system, or indeed, making any effort to explaining that context properly to the public.