Bishop Hill Climatologists respond
Feb 1, 2012 "Travesty" Trenberth et al are in the Wall Street Journal today, taking issue with last week's letter suggesting that panic over global warming is not required. Presumably, the message from the scientific establishment is that panic is a necessity.
It's pretty dull stuff - "97% of climatologists whose funders expressed a preference" - that kind of thing. But I was struck by this:
Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record.
I do wish people would make it clear where the differences lie. Otherwise we will get nowhere. Sceptics note that the temperature has flatlined since the turn of the millennium. Upholders say this means nothing, it's just a pause, and the long-term trend remains upward. Fine. Maybe we should talk about model falsification or something.
But take a look at that sentence again. I don't see how the long-term trend (normally assessed over 30 years) can not have been abated to some extent by a 10-year flatlining. Is the maths they use in climatology a bit different?
Reader Comments (160)
I was just doing some Phil Plait style math. If you fix the satellite era as the starting point (~1980) and plot the warming of the next 20 years, you get a positive trend. If nothing happens for the next 10 years, the slope is still positive. If the same temperatures remain the same for the next 2000 years, the slope is still positive.
Like I said to zed before, if you undertake a bike journey from Edinburgh to London 20 years back, and then lived your life in London driving around its streets, you can put on a lot of miles on your odometer, but you haven't really gone anywhere.
Tremberth must know he's being misleading. I think these guys are starting to panic. Everything was fine and dandy as long as the temperature series kept rising. But if the models start to fall over, their reputations will be shredded and the gravy train dries up.
Who are these "climate experts" that know?
Let's have a list of "climate experts" who think the warming trend has not abated in the past decade and a list of "climate experts" who think the warming trend has abated in the last decade. Last decade = 2002 to 2011.
The best solution would be to take the issue out of the hands of "climate experts". Give the data for 2002 to 2011 to a team of statistical experts and ask them to be the judge of the trend.
I guess that 97% of doctors in the 19th Century believed in bleeding a patient to balance out the 'humours' as well....
I notice that many of travesty Trenberth's co-signatees are not "climate experts". Many of them include the words "sustainability", "economics", "ecology", "biodiversity", "environment", "development" and "security" in their titles. "gravity train experts" would be a more appropriate description.
Or even gravy.
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/4868-the-mail-on-sunday-the-met-office-and-the-temperature-standstill.html
David Whitehouse destroys Trenbeth's claim that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade.
"Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations."
Apparently, climate scientists are expert in climate science, and in handing out free medical advice.
I am reminded of a story my former boss loved narrating. It relates to the description of Gorlin syndrome by one Robert Gorlin who was a dentist in Minnesota. Gorlin noticed these kids with these cystic jaw tumors, and found they tended to develop brain tumors as well. As per the geniuses at Realclimate, he should have just minded his own business instead of putting things together and making medical discoveries.
Trenberth is the funniest climate scientist ever. The guy seems virtually incapable of making a right move.
I agree with James that they're starting to panic. But it's important that we get a firm grip publicly on the soundbite that is dragged out again and again in this area:
This is true but irrelevant to the trend - and it is in this that the last-gasp, cynical manipulation of the public lies lies.
The second lies was deliberate. I finally got fed up.
What is the right soundbite in reply? I liked very much the recent commenter of 45 who claimed he was growing as fast as he ever did ... because in the last 15 years he has been taller on average than any 15 years since records began. Totally true but a lie nonetheless.
But a person's height is unlikely to decline much. Another possible response to "the warmest decade on record" is to say "that's what happens when you reach a peak from which you will never return".
I'm not saying that globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA) will never again reach the heights of the current decade - I don't have a clue. But the whole of climate alarmism is based on the idea that without drastic cuts in emissions GATA will go through the roof. What's really important about "the warmest decade on record" is that it's totally consistent with a future where we are about to go through a new ice age.
Increase those carbon emissions now!
The language is sloppy, but I think that the statement about long-term trends may not be wrong. If you plot the linear trend on HadCRUt data from 1967 to 1997, and from 1981 to 2011, (I use the Bishop's 30-year rule, see WoodForTrees plot here), then the trend is in fact higher for the later period. That doesn't change the fact that the trend over the last few years is very flat. The thing is, linear trends only have so much meaning, as Douglas Keenan would no doubt remind us.
So Trenbeth says we wouldn't ask a dentist about climate change.
Why then do we have to put up with so much advice on climate science AND policy from someone who has a P.HD (not completed) in piezometry or whatever, which is I gather something to do with rocks?
Mentioning no names of course Bob (Ward).
The problem these people have is that the 1990s were a period of fast OHC rise, then it stopped and the oceans are cooling. At times like this, you need cool heads. Look at these data: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-101.png
The global OHC rise was mainly the N. Atlantic. You can't have GHG-AGW cooling the N. Atlantic, so what is it? The answer is simple: Much of the fast rise in temperature was warmed, denser melt water from the fast Arctic melting. This regional warming, which included some of the N. Atlantic surface waters, was from a reduction of cloud albedo, and perhaps area.
As for the explanation, the wrong physics is used in the models. The warmists hate this. the models are broken and always have been. If you fix the physics it all becomes very simple. CO2-AGW is much lower than claimed and we're now into fast cooling from two influences, the end of the supply of iron in old ice, until 40 years' time, and the sun's magnetic field is falling.
The problem these people have is that the 1990s were a period of fast OHC rise, then it stopped and the oceans are cooling. At times like this, you need cool heads. Look at these data: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-101.png
The global OHC rise was mainly the N. Atlantic. You can't have GHG-AGW cooling the N. Atlantic, so what is it? The answer is simple: Much of the fast rise in temperature was warmed, denser melt water from the fast Arctic melting. This regional warming, which included some of the N. Atlantic surface waters, was from a reduction of cloud albedo, and perhaps area.
As for the explanation, the wrong physics is used in the models. The warmists hate this. the models are broken and always have been. If you fix the physics it all becomes very simple. CO2-AGW is much lower than claimed and we're now into fast cooling from two influences, the end of the supply of iron in old ice, until 40 years' time, and the sun's magnetic field is falling.
Your perplexity may relate to your taste in expertise. Trenberth and his 37 et als are all functioning climate scientists , many with work in current issues of the journals that define their profession.
Before you leap to dismiss them , consider the caliber of the climate science adduced by the authors of the WSJ letter to which they respond. Foremost in public profile is Burt Rutan, a cultural icon of the space age. But rocket scientist though he be, his views on climate history, notes this 2003 Wired interview, reflect his taste in architecture.
The aerospace pioneer dwells ‘in a white pyramid on the edge of the [Mojave] desert… Inside…a floor-to-ceiling mural depicting three large white pyramids glowing against a lush tropical background; toward the front, a strange creature strides across a white veranda. The mural was painted a week ago, and everyone is ogling it.
"Giza plaza, 17,000 years ago," he explains. "See, I think the pyramids were made by aliens before the last ice age, and the ice destroyed them and they were just put back together by the Egyptians." Is he serious? "I've seen them and I'm an engineer, and you can't tell me that the technology is ancient Egyptian. If you were a superior race and you knew your time on Earth was ending, wouldn't you build something really big so people would know you'd been there?"…
Rutan turns to the mural and says, "You know that face on Mars? NASA did the dumbest thing. They said it wasn't a face, it was a pile of rocks. If they'd said it was a face, they'd have full funding!"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/space.html?pg=4&topic=&topic_set=
It's not a decade. It's not 2002-2011. It's not just 'this century'.
There has been no statistically significant increase since 1998. That's going on 14 years. It takes 30 to make a trend? The next 16 are going to have to work hard.
Sure, I'm cherry picking. Why not use a proxy subgenus of prunus if it makes the point?
To paraphrase Esper, the ability to pick and chose reality in the furtherance of one's career goals is an advantage unique to climatology.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
If you want to know how MMGW is going.....going.....has gone; step outside today and breath in the warming, or give someone living in Alaska, Siberia, Romania, Poland a bell and ask how their global warming is going.
Travesty Trenberth and his motley crew spend too much time in Connolley's statistics lab/universe.
Looks like an opportunity for the 3% to write in response with their objections.
I will accept Trenberth's assertion that only climatologists can give advice about the climate on condition that climatologists do NOT give advice on anything outside of climatology.
They do not tell us how to generate electricity.
They do not tell us how to run our economies.
They do not tell us how to run our transport systems.
They do not tell us how to run our lives.
When an expert in statistics (a field they are not expert in) tells them they are wrong they correct or withdraw the paper concerned, they do not argue about it.
etc.
When is a warming trend not a warming trend?
When it has no significance!
When climate scientists end up lying to themselves in public you know the game is up.
We are not dealing with science here, we are dealing with a flawed and failing political ideology.
James Lane
Everything was fine and dandy as long as the environmental lobby was onside and the politicians were onside and those damned sceptics were just individual voices in the wilderness that could be easily shut up by spraying a few sciencey phrases around.
Once the sceptics found a voice and it became evident that a large number of well-qualified people in relevant disciplines — like physics and engineering and geology and statistics and others — started looking closely at their "science" and didn't like what they saw then they were in trouble.
And when the global warming itself stopped co-operating, well ...
Mike Jackson: - moreover the last I heard, Dick Lintzen was a climate scientist.
They could have said the same thing in the 1940s.
Abated means to reduce in intensity. In what way hasn't the warming trend abated?
Russell: your comment about Rutan is valid. however, your support for accepted climate science is misplaced. Trenberth and Kiehl's 1997 diagram of energy flows in the atmosphere is fantasy physics based on Arrhenius' mistake. He can be let off because at that time, radiation physics was being developed. However, climate science, and that means Trenberth and Hansen, cannot be absolved from having made two elementary mistakes, the other two are more subtle.
'Back radiation' is a basic error no professional should make: climate science by teaching this 'GHG blanket' idea is reverting into alchemy. It really is that serious.
Hansen's 33 K present GHG warming claim, really ~9 K GHG plus lapse rate, seems to have been deliberate misinformation, but I could be wrong - he may just be incompetent in this most basis of physics, which I doubt.
The enquiry into this affair will be similar to the enquiry into RBS - the checks and balances against incompetency were there but did not work.
"warmest decade on record"
Starting when? 'On record' sounds so much better than 'since satellites were put up'.
Feb 1, 2012 at 8:59 AM | Russell
You demonstrate your misunderstanding of the climate arena. You see climate is not a science it is an application of several fundamental disciplines one of which is modeling.
Now rocket science is all about modeling but modeling without the fiddling. If you choose to fiddle the models in rocket science something falls out of the sky in full view of the public.
Physics is about the fundamentals of the universe.
Engineering quality is one of the major elements missing from climate technology. In spite of Richard Betts protestations NO climate model has ever been falsified to an engineering standard.
So, you see, climate 'scientists' are actually rather less qualified to espouse their advocacy than every other discipline.
I keep telling my mathematician friend that sine waves are monotonically increasing functions. Look, I say, average the values over 10 degree increments from -95 degrees to +95 degrees - higher and higher and higher, QED!
"Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short-term variations that always occur, together with the long-term human-induced warming trend."
I'm no scientist, but the language is illuminating. Surely a rigorous scientific mind would have written "...to fully monitor trends..." and "...together with the long-term trend." The published wording suggests a preconception.
If your Doctor got his medical training at the University of Easy Access with 2 D A levels would you even go near him ;)
Ian E: we have a developing sine wave: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-101.png
Now the Arctic is freezing again in its 50-70 year cycle, also the PDO is the cooling phase, we enter the down track.....
confused has hit the nail precisely on the head. The problem is that 'climate science' is exactly equatable with 18th and 19the century medicine. Both know very little fact about their subject and their inter-related fields and as a consequence have come up with a whole host of speculative 'fact' that supports their prejudice. It may be that they are right, but it is far more likely that, like their medical predecessors, they have got it totally wrong.
Just missed Caroline Lucas on The Wright Stuff on channel 5
Caught the tail end of a debate about The Economy or The Enviroment
Guess which side of the argument callers they were putting through
Clue it wasnt the common sense side
Smug Mathew and Caroline were loving it
Catch it 5 Demand Iplayer
Caroline Lucas should be grateful for Global Warming real or not she be a making a great living as an MP without it
When Louis Pasteur established a cause and effect relationship between microbes and disease his findings were at first rejected by the establishment because he was a chemist, not a qualified medical doctor. Argument from authority is a dangerous to health.
More medical and epidemiologic wisdom from the "I went to my dentist for a brain transplant" department.
"...a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science."
Firstly, smoking does not 'cause' lung cancer. It increases the risk for malignant tumors known as carcinomas. There is a difference in meaning. Cannot be too careful when dealing with medical geniuses. Secondly, a few scientists continue/d to state that the risk from exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke (ETS) is overstated. Again, a vast difference from our friendly neighbourhood geniuses are saying.
With "the long-term warming trend" they probably mean the 30 year running average. That average has increased this last decade, since this decade was warmer the one 30 years ago. So technically they are correct, although in the last decade the year-to-year average temperature trend has remained flat.
'Climate experts know' the trick here is to know that for Trenberth only those that agree with him can be such 'experts ' otherwise no matter what their qualifications or backgrounds their not 'experts' so count for nothing . Once again don't think science, think religion and you will understand how this works .
Oddly oral hygiene can give an indication of a person physical health as well as their teeth.
'So, you see, climate 'scientists' are actually rather less qualified to espouse their advocacy than every other discipline.
Feb 1, 2012 at 10:48 AM | stephen richards '
I think part of the problem is the inflated opinion that many of them seem to have of their subject, most especially with regard to their ability to understand and predict the climate system. A hubris which has caused a great deal of harm since it was so dramatically co-opted by powerful and accomplished political players such as Maurice Strong.
"I don't see how the long-term trend (normally assessed over 30 years)"
Normal to whom? Why exactly 30?
"warmest decade on record"
Think about this. You buy a 1 foot high sapling because the nurseryman tells you it will grow 1 foot every year until it is 50 feet tall. After 20 years it is 21 feet tall. Then for the next 10 years it grows not one inch. You go back to the nurseryman to complain and he responds, “You can't complain. For every year in the last decade your tree has been the tallest it has ever been.” Would you be satisfied with that response?
any model with navier stokes equations in it can be dissed rightaway.
If you don't you should use the navier stokes equations for store window dressing as well.
After all human decisions are made with their brain cells which are modelled by their neurons firing which is steered by blood supply through veins which gets steered by .. navier Stokes !
gcms : elephant, trunk, wiggle
Remember the notorious 2004 press conference in which Trenberth participated? The subject matter was climate change and hurricanes - even though he has no expertise in hurricanes. Remember that another participant was medical doctor Paul Epstein, and a third was oceanographer James McCarthy?
Chris Landsea, the bona fide hurricane expert, resigned from the IPCC as a result of that organization's failure to confront Trenberth's inappropriate behaviour in this regard. And now Trenberth has the chutzpah to talk about dentists and heart conditions. Really?
Using the 30 year rule, which is simply a convention so there's no point arguing against it, then it is plausible that Trenbirth is correct.
The follows plots are for each 30 year period since 1952 to present, at 5 year intervals. The recent levelling off is not apparent at this scale - if anything, they could still argue for accelerating warming!
Graph here, from woodforthetrees
Interesting that, when WSJ published the sceptic article the blogs and warmist media were ablaze with "Murdoch media/ big oil/ Fox News/ right wing extremism" smears.
Now they've published a balancing response - peace reigns again.
Hell will freeze over before the Graun matches its daily doses of alarmism with equal space for sceptics to reply.
Which organ is "fair & balanced"?
Absolutely spot on Donna
(and thanks for the book)
Anybody who believes in that 'back radiation', and cannot explain to this laymen in very simple terms how this can be squared with the rules of thermodynamics, is, to me, not a scientist, not an expert on anything physical, and is devoid of logical thinking processes. If CO2 could do what they say it does then not even a Big Oil conspiracy would stop us using it as an energy source.
Are we saying the temperature record over the last 30 years doesn't show a warming trend even if the last 10 years have flat lined and we may be starting a downward trend if you eyeball Roy Spencer's latest UAH graph?
If so, I don't think that's the case.
Russell Feb 1, 2012 at 8:59 AM
2003 is quite a while ago. Is that the best you can com up with?
Burt Rutan describes himself as "a flight test engineer who has spent 45 years doing data analysis/interpratation/presentation". He's also an aircraft designer. As he says, in engineering, if you get your analysis wrong, people die.
Take a look at his recent paper "An engineer's critique of global warming 'science' " to understand properly his views on the subject.
Ken Harvey Feb 1, 2012 at 1:10 PM
Ken,
I'm eager to understand this point of view. I can see nothing that contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics in the greenhouse theory as it is normally explained, yet I don't think I am altogether "devoid of logical thinking processes".
So long as the net flow of heat is from warmer to cooler, there is nothing to say that a smaller flow cannot exist in the reverse direction**. The explanations of the greenhouse effect I have seen are consistent with this - the net flow of heat, as described in the explanations, is from warmer to cooler.
**For example, given a hot body and a cool body, you could use a flow of heat between the two to drive a heat engine. The mechanical output of the heat engine could then drive a heat pump producing a small flow of heat from the cool body to the hot body.
Have I missed a point?
Martin A
This letter is most reassuring. That this is the best these senior climate scientists can do comprehensively demonstrates the weakness of their position:
1. The "dentist practicing cardiology" analogy is - as many have pointed out - ridiculous.
2. The tired reference to the smoking/cancer link (supported, in total contrast to CAGW, by a wealth of published empirical evidence) is valueless.
3. "The warmest decade on record" doesn't mean there's no abatement: any more than my resting for an hour after climbing for six hours means that, because throughout that hour I'm higher than I was at any time during the previous six hours, I'm really still climbing.
4. Their appeal to authority ("major national academies of science around the world and every other authoritative body of scientists active in climate research") is not science. (Thomas Huxley: "The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment … not authority.")
5. The 97% claim is without foundation - and anyway reference to consensus is not science. (Huxley again: “In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.”)
6. And, especially after the dentist analogy, their claimed expertise in politics and economics is pathetic.