Diary dates: Slingalongajulia edition

Julia Slingo is giving a public lecture at the Institute of Physics in London next month on the subject of climate models.

Taking the planet into uncharted territory: What climate models can tell us about the future

Climate change is arguably one of the greatest challenges that human civilisation will face in the 21st century. With the rise in carbon emissions continuing unabated and the evidence for human-induced climate change stacking up, the need to take action to mitigate future climate change grows. So what are these climate models on that so much of our decision-making rests?

Dame Julia’s lecture will examine how fundamental physics has shaped our understanding of the climate system, and how over the course of her career as a climate scientist, this has been encapsulated in climate models.

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The poetry of global warming

Dame Julia Slingo has, like so many of her colleagues, been turning her mind to climate change communication, and reckons that talking about the science in dull technical reports may not be the way forward. Getting the message of impending disaster out requires a dose of funky, a dash of sexy, and a whole lot of poetry.

“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us… We increasingly recognise that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication,” Dame Julia told a recent gathering of leading climate change scientists at the University of Exeter.

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Slingo on Bengtsson

Julia Slingo has a letter in the Times addressing the Bengtsson affair:

Your articles on the recent events surrounding Professor Lennart Bengtsson ("Scientists in cover-up of 'damaging' climate view", May 16) are not a true reflection of the way the climate community conducts its research. My position, and my passion, is that all scientists - no matter what their viewpoint - must be free to review and debate their research unfettered and without personal attacks.

Science is about seeking the truth and acknowledging the uncertainties in what we currently know; it cannot be about subjective, unscientific beliefs and personal attacks of the kind that some of us have had to endure.

Just as we are very clear that climate models do not give us a definitive answer about the possible magnitude of future warming, neither do the estimates from observations as some in the climate sceptic community would claim.

I welcome scientific debate with those whose research challenges my understanding of climate change and scientists have a well established and robust peer review process for doing this. This process is there for good reason because it ensures the debate is rigorous but never personal.

Targetted rebuttal

Here's another interesting snippet from Julia Slingo's appearance on The Life Scientific. This is where Slingo is asked about the kerfuffle over her apparent linking of this winter's storms and floods to climate change. Readers will no doubt recall that this blew up when David Rose published an article in the Mail on Sunday which noted the contradiction between Slingo's remarks, as reported by Roger Harrabin, and conventional understanding of what was behind the storms, namely a shift in the jetstream, with no known link to AGW.

According to Slingo, her remarks had been "taken out of context" and all she had been trying to say was that warmer air will hold more water thus leading to more rainfall. So if she is to be believed, when asked if there was a link to between this winter's series of  storms and AGW, her remark that "all the evidence points to a link" was meant to mean that the storms had been made marginally worse by AGW.

I'm not convinced that this is the message that most people would have taken away with them.

And just as surprising is that when Rose reported Slingo's remarks as reported by Harrabin, the Met Office decided to issue a criticism of Rose.

Slingo 3

Slingo on The Life Scientific

Julia Slingo was interviewed on The Life Scientific this morning. The show is very much about a friendly chat  rather than a penetrating interview, so expectations were low, but there were nevertheless a couple of interesting moments.

One of these concerned the pause in global warming, Dame Julia putting the blame on deep-ocean heat transport and in particular the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Unfortunately, interesting followup questions were not put, for example

• the corollary effect of the PDO on late-twentieth century warming
• what this means for the IPCC's claim that most of that warming was manmade
• the risk to mankind from heat located in the deep ocean.

There was also a wonderful bit of footwork when presenter Jim Al-Khalili asked whether the climate models had predicted the pause and was told "yes these models have these periods of slowdown", which I think, on referring to Ed Hawkins' famous graph, means "no".

Slingo 1

On consistency

In the wake of the Press Gazette "debate", I was watching an exchange of views on Twitter between BH reader Foxgoose and Andrea Sella, a University College London chemist who moves in scientific establishment and official skeptic circles.

Sella was explaining how persuasive he found the observational record of climate:

Think like a scientist! Temperature is only a proxy. Energy balance is real issue & C19 physics is alive and well.

Like Warren Buffett you mustn’t be affected by shorter term fluctuations.

As I said, don’t just look at surface temps. Look at sea level and global ice mass too. All part of same.

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Catching up - Josh 262

Recently, particularly since the 'Communicating the pause' blog post and discussion, it seems that Climate Science is trying to play catch up with sceptics. The latest Climate Sensitivity discussions have had a similar tone. Whatever the excuses for tardiness I think this is an entirely welcome development.

Cartoons by Josh

Met Office tweaks the evidence

In the comments on the previous posting, Doug Keenan notes that the Met Office have been..ahem...tweaking the evidence:

The video shows, at about 1:10, a document that was issued on 21.11.13, by the Met Office. The document is available at
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/m/8/A3_plots-precip-DJF-2.pdf

I found the document by googling this:
"21.11.13" site:metoffice.gov.uk

The google results list the title of the document as “below-average precipitation”. That must have been the title at the time that Google indexed the document. On the Met Office website, the title is now changed to “A3 plots-precip-DJF-2”.

Update on Feb 26, 2014 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, it has been determined that Doug was mistaken.

Euan Mearns on the Met Office report

Euan Mearns has been analysing the Met Office's report on the floods and has raised some important concerns:

Sea level along the English Channel has already risen by about 12cm in the last 100 years. With the warming we are already committed to over the next few decades, a further 11-16cm of sea level rise is likely by 2030. This equates to 23-27cm (9-101⁄2 inches) of total sea level rise since 1900.

12 cm in 100 years translates to 1.2 mm per year of sea level rise along the English channel over the past 100 years. The Met Office is now suggesting that this is going to accelerate to 13.5 cm (median) in the next 16 years giving a rate of 8.4 mm per year until 2030. This represents an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise of 700% that is forecast to start happening tomorrow! This must surely be total drivel (Figure 3).

There is also this worry about the report's coverage of tides:

In the main body of the report the authors do discuss the exceptional Spring tides of early and late January but in the summary instead choose to present drivel on sea levels. Clive Best has estimated that the additional tidal height caused by rare alignments of Earth, Moon and Sun may have added over a meter to the normal Spring tide events. If correct this will have added significantly to coastal flooding and is totally unconnected to manmade global warming.

As Euan explains, the report is not all bad, but some of the issues he raises, and the fact that some high, but not exceptional rainfall caused a report to be published in the first place, make it look as if there is a political subtext to its publication.

Read the whole thing.

Slingo out to dry

I have written up the story about the travails of Professor Slingo for the Spectator's Coffee House blog.

See here.

Slingo alone

Readers will remember last week's joint Met Office/CEH report on the floods, of which I gave a favourable review at the time. In particular, the report noted that "As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding."

What was not so good was Julia Slingo's "intepretation" of the report's contents. The BBC, among others, reported her as saying "all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change".

Readers will also recall David Rose's report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, which described the apparent contradictions between the views of Slingo and Professor Mat Collins of Exeter University, who was quoted as saying "There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge".

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Deliberately or otherwise, Slingo has misled the public

Almost every scientist who has said anything about the floods has said that there is no way to link them to global warming - Brian Hoskins was fairly clear about this on the Today programme. The latest is Matt Collins from the University of Exeter, quoted in the Mail on Sunday:

Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’

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Climate Change Drugs Report - Josh 258

H/t Lord May on the Daily Politics Show who thought the weather being on steroids was an apt metaphor. Thanks also to Julia Slingo for the latest suitably vague scientivist phrase "consistent with".

Cartoons by Josh

Floods of PR - Josh 257

 But to be clear, we love water voles!

Cartoons by Josh

Julia Slingo on the storms

The Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) - a government research centre - have issued a joint report into the storms in south-west England. To mark the occasion Julia Slingo has taken to the airwaves, trying desperately to insinuate that there is a link to climate change:

Dame Julia said while none of the individual storms had been exceptional, the "clustering and persistence" were extremely unusual.

"We have seen exceptional weather," she said.

"We cannot say it's unprecedented, but it is certainly exceptional.

"Is it consistent with what we might expect from climate change?

"Of course.

"As yet there can be no definitive answer on the particular events that we have seen this winter, but if we look at the broader base of evidence then we see things that support the premise that climate change has been making a contribution."

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