The special contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson writes:

Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, recently passed his  70th birthday. To mark the occasion a Festschrift volume has been put  together, with a wide range of contributors. I understand that the main  topics in the book are: capitalism and the free market; European  integration; the euro; climate change issues; and the Czech  transformation after 1989.

 The English version of the volume has been sent for publication. Meanwhile I have been given clearance to circulate my own contribution,  which is herewith attached. It is entitled ‘Climate Change Issues: The  Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus’.

Climate Change Issues: The Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson

1 An established policy consensus

In relation to climate change issues, there is an official policy consensus. That consensus has been firmly in place for over twenty years, and virtually all governments subscribe to it. By way of recent example, paragraph 66 of last year’s G20 Summit Document year, begins as follows:

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Trenberth et al in Remote Sensing

Updated on Sep 16, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Kevin Trenberth has his own response to Spencer and Braswell in Remote Sensing. It's billed as a commentary rather than a proper paper.

The first thing you notice is this:

Received: 8 September 2011 / Accepted: 8 September 2011 / Published: 16 September 2011

so presumably it's fair to say that this is not a peer-reviewed contribution to the literature.

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Zeke on Spencer and Dessler

There's an excellent post by Zeke Hausfather at Yale Climate Forum. It's written as a layman's explanation of the controversy.

I was struck by this bit:

Dessler begins quite clearly by pointing out how "the usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change."

He suggests that Spencer and Braswell's formulation — that clouds are both a cause of and feedback on climate change — is rather outside of current norms.

Doesn't this just sum up the problem with climatology - that new ideas, particularly from those outside the mainstream, are seen as a problem rather than a possible step forward?

Wagner speaks to IoP

Physics World has managed to extract some brief comments from Wolfgang Wagner, the editor of Remote Sensing who resigned over the Spencer and Braswell paper:

I saw several basic problems [in the Spencer–Braswell paper], including that correlation does not imply causality, the fact that 10 years' of satellite data are not enough to come to such strong conclusions about the subtle and long-term changes in climate, and that, indeed, too little quantitative evidence was presented to support these strong claims,"

He also denies having any pressure put on him. Which is odd when one recalls his apology to Kevin Trenberth.

(H/T Jonathan Drake)

What's all this then?

The blogospheric dissection of the papers by Spencer and Braswell and by Dessler continue apace. In fact the pace is a bit of a problem, as I have been left rather behind - radiative physics is an area I need to get up to speed on. This is a pity because it looks as though today's excitement is all going to be focused the effect of clouds on the earth's energy budget.

Firstly there is this comment by Bart at CA. Then there's this post by Tallbloke, which is essentially just a reposting of a comment by Bill Illis at WUWT.

The Bill Illis/Tallbloke piece seems rather more straightforward to me - if I understand it correctly, it shows that the variability in the amount of heat escaping the earth is driven to a large extent by changes in cloud cover. As one commenter puts it:

But the [climate models] only assign a single, constant value for all clouds, at all latitudes, for all periods of day and night, for all seasons of the year, across all elevations for all values of humidity and rainfall and percent CO2.

Right?

I can see that this is a problem, although perhaps I haven't quite got my head around the implications yet.

The Bart comment at CA is, however, more tricky and I haven't made head or tail of it yet. Given that there seems to be general agreement that it may be significant, maybe readers here can explain.

Make haste more slowly

What fun - readers point out that some revisions are to be made to the Dessler paper in the light of comments made by Roy Spencer. I wonder if Steve M's comments will have an effect too?

Paul Nurse on geoengineering

Paul Nurse has a letter in the Guardian (where else?) on the subject of geoengineering. It's less bad than you might expect.

A time may come when mankind will need to consider geoengineering the climate to counteract climatic effects of greenhouse gases. If that time comes, we need to have a good understanding of whether such efforts will work and, just as importantly, whether they will have any negative side effects. Those who oppose such exploratory research on the grounds that we do not know what its effects may be ... are missing a fundamental point of research, which is to allow us to potentially rule out any technology that would have negative effects that outweigh the positive.

Researching stuff probably does little harm, although one can certainly question whether geoengineering research, or indeed any scientific research, should be a priority for government spending at the moment. Outside the ivory tower, times are hard, but it is not obvious that Sir Paul has noticed.

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Dessler on Spencer and Braswell

Updated on Sep 6, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Thanks to Anthony for forwarding me the Dessler comment on Spencer and Braswell. I'll post the same excerpts as AW has so that readers here can discuss.

Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget
A.E. Dessler
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

Abstract: The question of whether clouds are the cause of surface temperature changes, rather than acting as a feedback in response to those temperature changes, is explored using data obtained between 2000 and 2010. An energy budget calculation shows that the energy trapped by clouds accounts for little of the observed climate variations. And observations of the lagged response of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) energy fluxes to surface temperature variations are not evidence that clouds are causing climate change.

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Santer says

Santer et al have a new paper out on trends in the tropospheric temperature.

Because of the pronounced effect of interannual noise on decadal trends, a multi-model ensemble of anthropogenically-forced simulations displays many 10-year periods with little warming. A single decade of observational TLT data is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.

Please keep comments to the subject matter of the paper.

Reasons to be a sceptic

Charlie Martin explains what a global warming sceptic is and why he is one. I liked this bit:

The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models.  Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.

El Reg on CLOUD

Andrew Orlowski has noticed a good quote in the CERN press release about CLOUD (emphasis added):

What has CLOUD discovered and why is it important for our understanding of climate? There are several important discoveries from CLOUD. Firstly, we have shown that the most likely nucleating vapours, sulphuric acid and ammonia, cannot account for nucleation that is observed in the lower atmosphere. The nucleation observed in the chamber occurs at only one‐tenth to one‐thousandth of the rate observed in the lower atmosphere. Based on the first results from CLOUD, it is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours and water alone. It is now urgent to identify the additional nucleating vapours, and whether their sources are mainly natural or from human activities.

I am slightly confused about this though - are we saying that the models include a factor for nucleation that is equal to the rate of nucleation currently observed, and which changes based on how we think sulphuric acid and ammonia levels in the atmosphere will change in future? Or are we saying that the level of nucleation in the models is 10--1000 times too small? I assume the former, but I had also believed that the models went back to first physical principles rather than using empirical measures.

Maybe somebody can put me right here?

Update on Aug 25, 2011 by Bishop Hill

David Whitehouse has more.

McKitrick and Vogelsang

Ross McKitrick has a new discussion paper out. This is an extension to the McKitrick, McIntyre and Herman paper that came out last year. In the earlier paper, MMH found evidence that climate models were overstating warming, particularly for observations that were right up to date. The new paper looks at the so-called "Pacific Climate Shift" of 1977-8 and develops a new method to determine confidence intervals when this shift is taken into account in the statistical model.

As our empirical findings show, the detection of a trend in the tropical lower- and  midtroposphere data over the 1958-2010 interval is contingent on the decision of whether or not to include a mean-shift term at January 1978. If the term is included, a time trend regression with error terms robust to autocorrelation of unknown form indicates that the trend observed over the 1958-2010 interval is not statistically significant in either the LT or MT layers. Most climate models predict a larger trend over this interval than is observed in the data. We find a statistically significant mismatch between climate model trends and observational trends whether the meanshift term is included or not. However, with the shift term included the null hypothesis of equal trend is rejected at much smaller significance levels (much more significant).

Or in Ross's layman's terms summary:

Controlling for the 1977 Pacific Climate Shift we find the trends are insignificant from 1958-2010 and the discrepancy with climate models is highly significant.

Climatefellas

A climatological tiff has broken out between some members of the Italian-American community. David Castelvecchi is singularly unimpressed with Joe Bastardi's recent appearance on Fox News.

The most jarring part however came later, when Bastardi commented that he didn’t believe CO2 emissions could ever affect the climate. Unfortunately, Bastardi’s argument was based on what seemed to be poor understanding of basic physics, including thermodynamics and atmospheric physics.

I must say that if JB really did say that the greenhouse effect breaks the first law of thermodynamics then there may well be a case to answer.  Not that Castelvecchi's article is much to write home about in terms of dispassionate analysis.

Zorita interview

Hans von Storch and a colleague interview with Eduardo Zorita at the University of Hamburg website. Zorita has some interesting things to say about climate models:

What would be your advice for young researchers who want to work on climate simulations?
Climate modelling is a quite broad and complex area. In my opinion, there are two dangers that a student should avoid. One is to get stuck in a daily routine of programming and launching simulations, and slowly forgetting that simulations are performed to answer some previous question. This question should be the main driver of the work, the model is just a tool. Climate models are nowadays so complex and require so much technical attention that it is easy to get off the track. The second danger is to fall in love with your model and lose sight of the real observations out there. Models are in this sense dangerous and climate models even more so.

I was also interested in his ideas for where some money should get spent.

What would you do with an additional million Euros for your research?
A million euros is nowadays not much. But to answer your question I would setup a project to understand the behavior of tropical clouds in the Late Maunder Minimum, at the height of the Little Ice Age 300 years ago, from proxy records and model simulations. This could give us hints about cloud cover changes in climates a bit different from the present and thus help us say something about the future climate change.

Timmy on the RCPs

Tim Worstall has picked up on the IPCC emissions scenarios (RPCs) and has an article up at Forbes.