Tuesday
Feb112014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Another AR5 hearing
Feb 11, 2014 Climate: Parliament The second of the Energy and Climate Change Committee's hearings into the Fifth Assessment Report is taking place this morning. The panels are:
- Sir Peter Williams, Royal Society, and Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Royal Meteorological Society
- Guy Newey, Policy Exchange, Jonathan Grant, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and James Painter, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford
The hearings started at 9:30 and the video is below (direct link here).
<script src="http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Embed/js.ashx?14877 460x322"></script>
Reader Comments (61)
She got the long term summer sea ice minimum loss wrong also(10:12). She has it at "3/4 the size of Europe" so ~7-8million km2. Eyeballing the JAXA graphs she's out by 3-4million km2.
Disappointing sceptics
After watching about the first 10 mins of the 'sceptics' defence', and skimming through some more, I have to say I found their performance very disappointing. In addition to Lindzen's off-putting smug attitude, they failed to provide clear cut killer responses to some basic questions. To the question: what do you find most worrying about the Summary for Policymakers? (not precise wording), they gave convoluted and cryptic responses. Lindzen has a way of responding that seems to be intended to confound or be over clever. While they presumably did not know the Qs in advance, I would expect them to have a clear enough knowledge of the SPM to provide a clear and confident response to this Q.
I can't say the pro-IPCC group were better.
oakwood - I don't think I agree. I've often been cautioned myself about the need to avoid giving full-frontal frank responses when addressing people with a completely different mindset.
"Killer responses", to such an audience, generally come across as smart-Alec wiseguy retorts. It has to be accepted that (with a chair such as Yeo) you are not going to win. But the fact that there is an MIT professor who does not think much of the idea that AGW calls for urgent action won't have been lost on some people.
For the umpteenth time and for those seemingly too thick to get it; any evidence of unalarming warming that is indistinct from natural warming gives no indication whatsoever about manmade warming. Moving the goalposts from the surface warming metric to the Argo floats, which also indicate non-warming at the surface does not help their argument. But even if there were unphysical heating of the deep ocean, for which data is far too scanty to determine, it just represents yet more natural variation that the pessimistic model assumptions missed: As indeed Lindzen pointed out. Further, if manmade CO2 was supposed to be dominating the planet after 1950 but not before then any previous period of hiatus is totally irrelevant, as we know that is assumed natural. What is happening in the Arctic is not unusual either but the real pointer to how much the scientists know about the poles is the fact they got the Antarctic totally and 100% wrong.
Lilley's point remains. They expected CO2 to dominate climate but it clearly doesn't therefore the scientists must have become less convinced of manmade warming whether they admit it or not. Lilley and the rest of us should expect honest scientific advice to base policy on and all we get is folk who cannot yet admit they were wrong despite the blindingly obvious evidence before them that tells them such.
I agree Martin. The 3Ls were reasonable, reasoning, questioning people puzzled variously by the political, scientific,and statistical shenanigans which now dominate public life on climate matters. This most recent hearing was by contrast a display of sophistry in the part of the recording which I have managed to see so far. The climate campaigners must resort to such behaviour during this transition phase in which they distance themselves from the surface temperatures with which they rose to prominence and power. As the temperatures rose, so did they. As the temperatures fail to rise, they step aside to ride on something else. The 'oceans eat my heat' is being toyed with, as is 'heating' rather than 'warming', disruption and storms, floods, and plague and simple lying (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-to-convince-your-friends-to-believe-in-climate-change-its-not-as-hard-as-you-think/2014/02/03/3a9a1fa8-8828-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_story.html). For the zealot, the cause is all, and all events are seen as portents of how right they are. Theirs is a faith, and it is immune to contradiction.
I concur also. And I am quite appalled at Emily's computer model generated 'evidence'. Her explanation that winds had no role to play in the decline of the Arctic sea-ice because the Arctic Ocean was effectively land-locked, was either malfeasance or astonishing ignorance. Satellite data clearly shows that a major loss of Arctic Sea ice is as a result of transport by wind, down the Fram Strait.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20070822_oldice.gif
"Take refuge in a long pointless narrative. – If you can ramble on long enough no one will remember the question and therefore no one can tell if you have answered it or not."
"All of these are good ways to deal with difficult questions. If you have nothing to say then say nothing. However, better yet is to have something to say and say it, no matter what they ask you. Pay no attention to the question, make your own statement. If they ask you the same question again, you just say ‘that’s not the question’ or ‘I think the more important question is this:’ then make another statement of your own. Easy-peasy."
Yes Prime Minister- (Jay and Lynn)
Here's what Peter Williams said (about 1:19) in response to a question from Robert Smith about research being tailored to funding opportunities:
Paul Matthews: That point about "...research being tailored to funding opportunities:" was succinctly covered by Richard Lindzen in his evidence to the committee. He said [I paraphrase]: Scientists will never come up with a solution; if they did they would lose their funding. I imagine Emily Shuckburgh is one of those.
Talking of Emily (strange that the first two letters of her name identify someone else on this thread), as she's from the RMS I guess she would be familiar with the MO's three month forecast Dec-Feb which said the likelihood of heavy rain was probably less than 20% for the period. I do have the link to the MO's PDF but I can't be arsed to dig it out for the likes of EM...
Shucks:
Applied mathematicians in academia deal in toy problems. They are more than pleased if they can generate something which even vaguely recalls the physical phenomena observed in nature. Toy problems are useful in undergraduate teaching. It is their use that convinces the students that applied mathematics really can do wonders with grossly simplified equations.
Applied mathematicians are able to show ‘relevance’ while reproducing restricted aspects of the real world and reflecting limited, simplified causes. However, their main concern is not to predict natural behaviour but to demonstrate the reasoning behind the simplification of the more exact equations and the consequent solution schemes. It is far more rewarding to be able to take the process to a conclusion than to tackle a problem more accurately but which cannot be solved completely because of its intractable difficulty. Complex difficulties, which may well be overcome with heavy-metal numerical methods, nevertheless obscure qualitative understanding.
Only engineers actually try to simulate nature both faithfully and quantitatively by solving the most complete equations known. Their object is to be able to predict specific observable behaviour to arbitrary precision. To the engineer the methods of preparing and performing the calculations are no more than intermediate tools.
The following is a presentation made by Shuckburgh just over a year ago to professional mathematicians. It should therefore represent current thinking. There is no accompanying text so any conclusions drawn from it might not be well founded.
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/staff-profiles/webspace/emsh/talks/AMS-Jan13.pdf
Shuckburgh is evidently an applied mathematician. The 64-page presentation is full of toy problems.
She repeats the simple minded back-of-envelope derivation of global average temperature (p4-5) and as usual gets 255K. Since the true value is assumed to be approximately 288K she needs a correction factor and invokes radiation for it. Knowing the answer in advance, it is sometimes not very hard to start from where you want to be and work backwards to where you are.
In correcting the first estimate she allows for just two species of photon (p6-7). S-photons arrive from space, 30% are reflected and she lets 90% of the remainder get through the atmosphere to reach the ground. L-photons are generated by the Earth but only 20% of them can escape to space. She assumes the atmosphere to have a temperature which is different from that of the globe itself.
She makes the atmosphere radiate both up and down. This seems to be required only to answer the question of where the 10% downward loss and the 80% upward loss went. They were held up temporarily in the atmosphere. The important figures are the 90% and the 20% because they lead to a ratio 1.9/1.2 which, when raised to the power of 0.25 (Stefan/Boltzmann), converts 255K to 286K.
This ruse is new to me. Where do the 90% and 20% numbers come from? I wonder what she thinks the global average temperature would be if the same side of the Earth always faced the Sun.
There is a slide (p12) which displays a system of equations. This system is specifically labelled as being used in weather and climate models. These are certainly not the equations that should govern the behaviour of the atmosphere. They are not the threedimensional Navier/Stokes equations. The vertical velocity is assumed to be zero, which rules out convection. Vertical momentum is reduced to the hydrostatic equation. The energy equation is not mentioned. The effect of the radiation field on the local energy balance within the atmosphere must surely be at the very core of AGW. I found no mention of initial or boundary conditions either.
She goes on to describe a number of toy problems which appear to have been solved using the crude sets of equations. This method would be typically used to get a rough qualitative understanding of why certain flow patterns tend to arise but I believe it would be totally inadequate for quantitative prediction of weather and climate.
Is her ardent warmism based on no more than these undergraduate exercises? If this is truly representative of her work in climatology it is not impressive. “We thought we were dealing with experts.” She should talk to some computational aerodynamicists.
It seems from all the comments here that it is infinitely more useful to watch these committee meetings on a computer than to attend in person.