What Julia told Dave

In the wake of the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report, the Met Office issued various briefings for the political classes. These have just been released to me under FOI and the results can be seen here.

Many of the papers are extraordinarily short, and to tell the truth the only one of any major interest is a collection of powerpoint slides from which it seems that Met Office staff can draw to illustrate oral briefings. As the nearest thing to a comprehensive official view of AR5 this is fascinating. Suffice it to say that it's not what you'd call a balanced view. There remains a real possibility - a probability even - that the climate models are badly wrong and greatly overstate future warming - see for example the issues with the energy budget vs GCM estimates of climate sensitivity and the observational/GCM estimates of aerosol forcing, or the implications of the new claims that the missing heat is in the deep oceans, which presumably implies that such deep-ocean heat transport is an important climatic process that is not incorporated in the models.

See if you can find any hint of such concerns in the briefing. In fact see if you can find any caveats or examples of evidence running against the "we're all going to fry" narrative. I noticed just one. See if you can see it too.

More Met Office gongs

Thanks to Greensand for alerting us to a new set of awards for Met Office staff, including our very own Richard Betts:

The new Science Fellows and their areas of expertise are:

• Mike Bell: Ocean Processes
• Richard Betts: Climate Impacts
• Dave Matthews: Computational Science and Modelling Infrastructure
• David Jackson: Space Weather and Stratospheric Dynamics

Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist, said 'I am delighted to make these appointments, which exemplify the excellence of our science, modelling and prediction activities across weather and climate. Along with the Deputy Directors and Strategic Heads, our Science Fellows play a critical role in the senior leadership of our Science Programme, and this leadership helps us to maintain our global standing in weather and climate science and services'.

Walport and Ridley

Mark Walport has a letter in the Times, taking issue with an article that Matt Ridley wrote a few days before. Matt's article was about cherrypicking in science, and mentioned Briffa's Yamal series.

Sir,

Matt Ridley falls into his own trap in his Opinion column (Jan 6), though the title “Roll up: cherry pick your research results here” is apposite, because that is exactly what Ridley does with respect to the research evidence for global warming.

Click to read more ...

Met bashes Cameron

The Met Office, ever ready to knock back climate alarmism, has taken issue with David Cameron's linking of floods and climate change yesterday.

Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.

“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.

“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.

“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”

King says Met Office has it all wrong

Climate models provide a broad range of projections about changes in storm track and frequency of storms. While there’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess, this is an active area of research under the national climate capability.

The Met Office, a couple of days ago.

"The important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

Sir David King, yesterday

OK, so he didn't say so in as many words, but he clearly thinks that there is evidence of an increase in storminess in the UK. The Met Office is unequivocal that there is none.

Who is right?

Slingong

Congratulations to Julia Slingo, who has been damed (if that's the right word) in the New Year's honours list.

Making fog

Updated on Dec 12, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Readers may remember Nic Lewis's paper demonstrating a major flaw in the UKCP09 climate predictions. In brief summary, the predictions are a weighted average of a series of virtual climates produced by the HadCM3 climate model, the weight each one gets being determined by how well it matches the observations. Nic discovered that the HadCM3 model was incapable of producing virtual climates that match the real-world climate as regards two key parameters - the climate sensitivity and the aerosol forcing. This obviously meant that the average produced is meaningless.

Nic's paper had a response from Julia Slingo which acknowledged that HadCM3 could not produce low-sensitivity/low aerosol forcing climates, explaining that this was an emergent property of the model. Nic noted that she was therefore implicitly accepting his core argument and I mentioned this in a blog post about the related UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.

Shortly afterwards I had an email from a press officer at the Met Office:

Click to read more ...

FOI fighters

The Met Office has refused to release the Zero Order Drafts of the Fourth Assessment Report (yes, that's Fourth, not Fifth). This is quite interesting, because a the Information Commissioners have recently suggested that once the assessments have passed into history, the related drafts should be published.

Andrew Orlowski has the full story at El Reg.

Slingo writes to Lewis

There has been another exchange in the flow of correspondence between Julia Slingo and Nic Lewis. Slingo wrote to Lewis at the end of last week, her letter not addressing the points made in Lewis's rebuttal last week, but instead moving the discussion onto the observationally constrained estimates of climate sensitivity.

As a physicist who has worked extensively on using observations to understand climate processes and natural climate variability, and subsequently to model them, I would like to understand in more detail how you estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and aerosol radiative forcing from the observational base.

Click to read more ...

Keenan writes to Slingo

Doug Keenan has just written to Julia Slingo about a problem with the Fifth Assessment Report (see here for context).

Dear Julia,

The IPCC’s AR5 WGI Summary for Policymakers includes the following statement.

The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C, over the period 1880–2012….

(The numbers in brackets indicate 90%-confidence intervals.)  The statement is near the beginning of the first section after the Introduction; as such, it is especially prominent.

Click to read more ...

Steve Jewson on Bayesian statistics

Steve Jewson is the statistician whose trenchant comments on climatologists' use and misuse of Bayesian statistics was discussed here some months ago.

This presentation he gave to a conference at the University of Reading is in similar vein, but goes beyond Bayes' theorem to areas such as the UKCP09 climate predictions.

UKCP

• unashamedly uses subjective methods

• Includes subjective beliefs that go beyond the models and the data

Nic Lewis has analysed the impact of these additional subjective factors:

• And it seems that they push the rate of climate change higher than that suggested by the evidence
• If true, then UKCP predictions of future temperatures would be higher than their own models and data would suggest
• And should not be expected to be ‘reliable’

Oh dear.

His conclusion - that the Met Office could easily strip the subjectivity out of their predictions - seems to me to be of critical importance. Time, I would say, for the empanelling of the review that Nigel Lawson called for.

Met Office concedes the error

Over the last day or so, Julia Slingo has sent a polite, but somewhat evasive response to Nic Lewis regarding his critique of the UKCP09 model. It can be seen here.

Nic Lewis's reaction is here. I don't think he is very impressed. The key exchange relates to the following paragraph in Slingo's paper:

Having said that, it is true that the relationship between historical aerosol forcing and equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) depicted in your Figure B1 is based only on the PPE. But we disagree with your assertion that the results from HadCM3 are fundamentally biased. It is certainly the case that versions of HadCM3 with low climate sensitivity and strongly negative aerosol forcing are incompatible with the broad range of observational constraints. But the key point is that the relationship between aerosol forcing and ECS is an emergent property of the detailed physical processes sampled in the PPE simulations.

Click to read more ...

Obsessive talk of deniers at the Met Office

This is a guest post by Ken Bosomworth.

Obsessive talk of deniers by some at Met Office headquarters

An afternoon, which included plans to grab foreign met equipment, ends with a bang

It was a chilly November afternoon when I made my most recent visit to the UK Meteorological Office headquarters at Victory House, London.  (This description of my visit is, incidentally,  entirely true, and it is unlikely that any of the Met Office staff involved will deny it.) As on previous visits I accompanied my father who had worked there as a met officer, and had now received a couple of promotions.  On this particular occasion he was involved, I gathered, in an important and hush-hush plan relating to the future coordination of observations and forecasting of winds and temperatures in the extreme North of Europe, particularly Norway.

Click to read more ...

Not waving but drowning

Updated on Sep 23, 2013 by Bishop Hill

A couple of journalists seem to have shown some interest in Nic Lewis's critique about the UKCP09 climate projections. This may explain why the Met Office has suddenly issued a response a week after Nic's report came out:

Today an article by the GWPF think-tank looks at one element of this – the UK’s official climate projections, known as UKCP09, which were produced by the Met Office.

It claims the Met Office climate model used to make those projections, HadCM3, contains an error and that, because of this error, the projections overestimate warming. The GWPF’s article, however, accepts that the claims of an error have not been substantiated.

Click to read more ...

The Climate Model and the Public Purse

In the kerfuffle over the Mail on Sunday's spread on climate change last week, the panel looking at the problem in the Met Office climate predictions got sidelined somewhat. But the implications of the error are potentially very expensive.

This is the conclusion of a new briefing paper I've put together for GWPF, entitled The Climate Model and the Public Purse. It outlines the nature of the problem and then looks at where the UK climate projections are being used.

Click to read more ...