Singh's response to Nelson

Simon Singh has posted his response to Fraser Nelson. It's still amazingly thin gruel for a top writer on scientific matters. Is he unaware of the existence of feedbacks? And what about the error bars on that 0.6C warming figure?

Crisis over?

Anthony Watts is reporting a new paper that puts the climate's no-feedback sensitivity to CO2 at 0.45°C per doubling, less than half that of previous estimates. Interesting stuff.

Josh 72 redux

Supercomputers

Autonomous Mind has interviewed Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn about the use of supercomputers in long-range weather forecasting. I liked Joe's last word on the subject:

It’s not the computer, it’s the limits of the computer in  trying to adjust to what only men can understand and use. I dont think you need more money to arrive at the wrong answer faster. Should put it into fighting hunger, or giving men a chance to be free enough to dream and pursue that dream… much better causes in my opinion.

Slingo on climate models

There is an interesting interview with Julia Slingo at Nature's website at the moment. No mention of climate change, but the twin spectres of Pakistan floods and Russian warmth doing service in its place as a means to drum up support for the Met Office's hoped-for new supercomputer. Scaremongering has served the weather/climate community for so long, I guess it's hard to break the habit.

What's the biggest obstacle to creating better, hazard-relevant weather forecasts?

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. You just think: why is this so hard?

I'm sure I read somewhere recently that there is no guarantee that climate models at high resolution will be any better than what we have now. Can anyone recall having seen something like that?

Maybe their computer is too small?

Delingpole has picked up on the Met Office's claims of innocence over the issuing of "mild winter" predictions and notes just how much money we are spending on not getting a long-range forecast.

So let’s get this right. We paid for 90 per cent of the Met office’s £30 million computer; we also fund a hefty chunk of its annual £170 million running costs. And now the Met office tells us that it is incapable of providing the effective long range forecasts we could get for a fraction of the price from Piers Corbyn or Joe Bastardi?

Interestingly, the other day I came across this paper produced by Sir John Beddington and his team, calling for more money to be spent on the Met Office. The Review of Climate Science Advice calls for £90 million to be spent on upgrading the Met Office's Hadley Centre, including the purchase of a shiny new supercomputer. Still, it will enable some important questions to be answered...

Q4: How can confidence in the most uncertain aspects of large-scale climate projections be improved? Answer needed perhaps by 2015, although the sooner the better to answer questions such as:
• Are current global climate projections for mitigation decisions accurate?
• What are the sign and magnitude of key cloud feedback processes?
• Is geo-engineering a safe option?
• How can aviation be operated to minimise the impacts of emissions?

I must say I agree that it would be useful to know if current global climate projections are accurate. Presumably not though, if the "sign and magnitude of key cloud feedback processes" are unknown.

Climate models hopelessly simplistic

P Gosselin has an interesting story about an Austrian meteorologist who is completely underwhelmed by the reliability of climate models. As Karsten Brandt apparently puts it:

It is simply nonsense. These prognoses are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The Gulf Stream has an impact on European weather that is 100 times larger than CO2.”

Read the whole thing.

A letter to DECC's chief scientist

Do take a look at Matt Ridley's letter to David Mackay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The Hockey Stick Illusion is mentioned.

Update on Nov 9, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Matt has now posted up David MacKay's original letter.

Shade on Hulme

John Shade, who runs the Climate Lessons website left these thoughts on Mike Hulme's lecture as a comment. I thought they were worth pulling into a post of their own.

I must confess to having enjoyed the talk by Professor Hulme. He spoke clearly and in a structured way, presented lots of ideas, and generally came across to me as intelligent and thoughtful. I just wish I were bright enough or informed enough to follow all of them. As it is, I still got lots to think about from it, and the notes which follow are in part intended just to share my puzzlements and prejudices.

Click to read more ...

Mike Hulme on climate models

There is video available here of a lecture given by Professor Mike Hulme entitled "How do Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority?". Hulme asks whether deference towards climate models is justified and whether we should have confidence in them. I think the answer is "We don't know".

New solar study

There is much excitement in the MSM today over a new paper by Joanna Haigh et al. This is Nature's take:

An analysis of satellite data challenges the intuitive idea that decreasing solar activity cools Earth, and vice versa. In fact, solar forcing of Earth's surface climate seems to work the opposite way around — at least during the current Sun cycle.

The Express asked me to comment on the story and I gave them a couple of lines that I imagine they will have found rather too cautious for their liking. I can't see their story online though.

Update on Oct 7, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The Express story is here, and they have squeezed me in near the end.

Hegerl lecture

I was in Edinburgh last night for a public lecture by Gabriele Hegerl. Hegerl, some of you may remember, is a climatologist and she appears briefly in the Hockey Stick Illusion as a witness at the NAS panel hearings.

The lecture was frankly rather disappointing, being pitched at an introductory level, and being largely a run through of the standard AGW talking points. That said, there were a few issues that I noted down as being of interest.

The first of these was when, early on in the talk, she said that the IPCC acknowledges different sides to scientific debate but that disputes are resolved, often by the author teams taking a position on the debate. As I understand it this is what happens, but it is against the guiding principles of the IPCC.

Glaciergate got a brief mention. Hegerl said in essence that Fred Pearce has misheard the number, which is not the way I remember the story at all. She also said that the figure SPM was correct in the SPM but the figure was wrong in the chapter. I hadn't heard this before.

Climategate was mentioned extremely briefly - there was an overwhelming sense of "moving swiftly on", with just enough of a pause to say that the allegations emerging from the emails had been "largely refuted".

There was little discussion of paleo although the spaghettin graph (Fig 6.13) from AR4 was shown. Hegerl said that the medieval/modern differential wasn't of particular interest - the response of temperature to drivers was more important.

She said that sceptics were "stupid" and that she wished we asked more intelligent questions.

 [Updated to correct the nuance on what was said about Glaciergate]

Hoskins: climate models are lousy

The quote is at 4:30.

Sea-ice modellers open up?

An article in Wired magazine recounts how sea-ice modellers are sharing data and methods and are learning from each other in the process. It's not obvious whether the sea-ice community have actually made their data and code open to the world or whether this is just a case of sharing within the community, but it's a step forwards at least.

It's also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:

"In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”

If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome. It's therefore a pity that the Wired reporter, Alexis Madrigal, begins the piece with the obligatory reference to "record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic". It's not that she's wrong, but just a few months ago sea ice levels were higher than they have been for years, and the more representative global sea ice levels are actually currently above their long-term average.

Quote of the day

Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.

Mike Hulme in a forthcoming paper about the governance of the IPCC.