It's going to get even hotter

That's the headline in the Times, reporting on the recent spell of hot weather.

But wait, what's this? They actually seem to be talking about tomorrow's weather rather than climate change. In fact the whole article doesn't seem to mention climate at all.

A miracle just happened!

Clive Hamilton in Oxford

This is a guest post by "DR".

This is my report of a talk by Clive Hamilton in Blackwell’s bookshop Oxford on 10 May 2010, on themes from his recent book Requiem for a Species. This is a write-up of my hand-written notes. I hope I’ve represented what Hamilton said accurately.  I’ve not read his book.

Hamilton started by describing the upsurge in ‘climate denial’ – describing deliberate attempts in the 1990s by US Republicans to link climate change and left-wing beliefs, he said that climate denial has been absorbed by right-wing populism. However, despite efforts from deniers such as Sarah Palin, Christopher Monckton, the American Tea-Party, and the UK’s BNP, it has become clear that if anything the IPCC AR4 understated the risks, for instance of sea-level rise.

Click to read more ...

Key climate model assumption wrong?

There's an interesting article over at El Reg, which discusses a new paper in Nature Geosciences on the subject of the reaction of soil bacteria to increases in temperature. The theory is that as temperatures rise, all the microbes in the soil will emit even more carbon dioxide than they do already, exacerbating warming still further.

That's the theory. Unfortunately, an ecologist from California has now rather thrown a spanner in the works by doing some good old-fashioned experiments. Steve Allison has discovered that although small increases in warmth do increase carbon dioxide emissions, as temperatures rise further, the effect tails off quickly and emissions plunge. 

Interesting stuff.

WaPo on climate models

The Washington Post has an interesting article on climate models which features Gavin Schmidt making a robust defence of their usefulness:

Put in the conditions on Earth more than 20,000 years ago: they produce an Ice Age, NASA's Schmidt said. Put in the conditions from 1991, when a volcanic eruption filled the earth's atmosphere with a sun-shade of dust. The models produce cooling temperatures and shifts in wind patterns, Schmidt said, just like the real world did.

If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, "You have to ask yourself, 'How come they work?' "

Now last time I heard, the models could get into an ice age but couldn't get out again, so I'm not sure whether Gavin is being entirely straight with us here. Perhaps the models have moved on though, although one could still wonder if they could move so quickly from not being able to get out of an ice age to being useful.

Sir John Lawton on AGW

The Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has just made some quite interesting comments in relation to the expected rate of warming. Speaking at the launch of a report into how the UK should adapt to possible climate change, he said:

The planet is already slightly above the worse case scenario so if we do nothing we could be looking at a temperature rise of 4C (7.3F) by 2100

Click to read more ...

More peer review gatekeeping

Icecap has an interesting new article by three sceptic scientists - John McLean, Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter - describing the successful attempts to deny them a right of reply in the peer-reviewed literature.

The practice of editorial rejection of the authors’ response to criticism is unprecedented in our experience. It is surprising because it amounts to the editorial usurping of the right of authors to defend their paper and deprives readers from hearing all sides of a scientific discussion before they make up their own minds on an issue. It is declaring that the journal editor - or the reviewers to whom he defers - will decide if authors can defend papers that have already been positively reviewed and been published by that same journal. Such an attitude is the antithesis of productive scientific discussion.

Read the whole thing (PDF).

Myles Allen's ad hominem

Reader DR sends these notes from A Meeting on Sustainability at the University of Oxford

'What can be said about future climate? Using observations to constrain the forecast and the implications for climate policy.'

Myles Allen introduced himself as a member of an endangered species, a climate scientist. He agreed that energy measures will be needed regardless of climate change, but wanted to argue that climate change is important. He said that climate scientists have recently been faced by many questions, both from sceptics and from the policy community, and said that most people are asking the wrong questions. It is clear, he said, that CO₂ is rising and temperatures are trending upwards.

Click to read more ...

Predicting climate 100 years from now

These are notes of a lecture given by Prof Tim Palmer on some of the fundamentals of weather prediction. The notes were taken by Simon Anthony. This is well worth a read, and I'm certainly struck by how little we know about how to forecast the climate.

If we can't forecast next month's weather, what hope for predicting climate 100 years from now?

Lecture at Dept of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford by Professor Tim Palmer, Royal Society Professor at Oxford, previously at European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.

[In contrast to simplistic fixed view of climate change preferred by journalists and politicians, TP adopts more traditional scientific view: create and develop models, make predictions, compare predictions with actual measurements, revise/replace models, try to understand models’ limitations. He seems happy to talk about uncertainties.  That said, he did sign the Met Office “Statement from the UK Science Community”… http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6950783.ece .  Taken together with his final suggestion of the need for a “CERN for Climate”, I’d say he seems like a good scientist who believes in the importance of his science, trying to argue the best case for that science but not necessarily too concerned about “collateral damage”.]

Why ask this question?

Following Climategate, Glaciergate and the repeated failure of Met Office’s seasonal forecasts, this is a question the public and commentators often ask rhetorically to argue that long-term climate predictions must be nothing more than guesswork.

Click to read more ...

It's the wrong dataset Gromit!

Marcel Crok writes:

This morning, there was lot of noise in the Dutch media (unfortunately in Dutch only) about new research that was claiming a dramatic warming of 4 degrees in 2050. The news report quoted Dutch econometricians from the University of Tilburg. They had done a statistical analysis of temperature data and the influence of CO2 and solar radiation and concluded that aerosols masked much more of the warming of greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Unfortunately, the econometricians concerned didn't read the instructions on the tin before use. Most amusing.

Read it here.

Hansen's colleague eviscerates AR4 Chapter 9

While perusing some of the review comments to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, I came across the contributions of Andrew Lacis, a colleague of James Hansen's at GISS. Lacis's is not a name I've come across before but some of what he has to say about Chapter 9 of the IPCC's report is simply breathtaking.

Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report - it's the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.

Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact several times as you read through his comment on the executive summary of the chapter:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn't the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community - instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

I'm speechless. The chapter authors, however weren't. This was their reply (all of it):

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

Simply astonishing. This is a consensus?

Two degrees/century still falsified

Those who are new to the nitty gritty of the climate debate may not be aware of the sterling work Lucia Liljegren does in monitoring monthly temperature anomalies against the IPCC's last published predictions of warming at 2°C/century.

Lucia is very careful to make her work bulletproof, in terms of avoiding accusations of cherrypicked start points and careful treatment of "weather noise". I think the warmists have stopped trying to poke holes in her results now.

The GISS figures are out for November and Lucia reports that they are highish, at 0.68°C, but not high enough to stop the IPCC's hypothesis from being remaining in falsified territory. I wonder why I don't read this in the newspapers?

Counting Cats on models

Climate modellers have created a plausible reality, not reality, says Nick M at Counting Cats.

Mathematics is an incredible toolbox and whilst it can be used to understand reality it can also be used to create new realities. For example it is entirely possible - indeed quite easy - to build a model of the solar system and then subtract Jupiter. The same perturbed Keplerian orbits pertain and the laws of motion and gravity are not changed because there is nothing in them to say “A gas giant must exist between Mars and Saturn”.

(H/T Chuckles)

The language of the left

The problem with trying to alter the meaning of words to suit your political programme is twofold. Firstly, ordinary people don't have a flaming clue what you're talking about. Secondly, you can get yourself in a right pickle.

You remember that there was a bit of a kerfuffle some months back when an opinion poll of published climate scientists found that a quarter of them reckoned the whole global warming thing was being overstated. Lots of people on the sceptical side of the debate then started jumping up and down and hooting like lovelorn monkeys (I include myself in this), and asking "where's your consensus now, greenies?"

To which the inevitable response was that, although the greens had for years been talking as if there were only two or three scientists on the whole planet who disagreed with the AGW theory and that they had been sectioned in 1968, the word consensus actually didn't in any way imply anything like unanimity and so their new position (that some scientists disagreed) was entirely consistent with the old one (there's a consensus).

Got that? It's nonsense of course. But wait for this: they're at it again!

Today's linguistic gymnastics revolves around the meaning of the word "most". A pretty simple word, you might think; one that a moderately literate schoolchild could use with ease? You'd be wrong. According to our green friends, "most" is a (ahem) most interesting word, full of subtlety and nuance.

First a little background. In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I wrote about the shenanigans around the American Physical Society's invitation to Lord Monckton to write a piece supporting the sceptical position on AGW. Today, a chap called Arthur Smith has written a rebuttal of the Monckton piece which he has posted at his website here. He has many criticisms of Monckton, but the one that concerns us relates to Monckton's statement that:

[IPCC, 2007] concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the global warming of the past 50 years

His objections to this statement are as follows:

The relevant statement from the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM is "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." (p. 10). Note Monckton has substituted "more than half" for "most" (English language implication is a lesser amount), "CO2" for "greenhouse gas" (incorrect but irrelevant), "probably" for "very likely" (strong reduction in implied certainty), "past 50 years" for "since the mid-20th century" (inconsequential) and "global warming" in scare-quotes for "observed increased in global average temperatures" (appears to discredit the observations of warming).

(My emphasis)

The statement I've bolded is simply not correct. "Most" can mean less than half, but when it is used in this alternate sense, the usage is quite different to the way the IPCC have used it.

By way of a non-climate example, we might say,

Tony Blair won the most votes in the 2005 election.

a statement which is true, and psephological nerds will also know that TB secured a share of the vote which was well short of half. But we'd also say of the same election (and again, quite correctly) that,

Most people didn't vote for Tony Blair.

The difference in usage is quite different. When used as a pronoun at the start of a sentence, the word "most" only ever implies more than half. The implications of a contrary view are amusing. Let's look at Arthur Smith's own rebuttal of Lord Monckton. He criticises Monckton's statement that climate models don't predict El Nino, La Nina, and so on, saying.

most of the models used by the IPCC exhibit significant oceanic oscillations of these sorts

[Not that many of them, eh? Less than half?]

He also tells us along the way that

I have recently been closely involved in several email and online discussions on climate and thus have become quite familiar with most of the issues involved.

[Doesn't he think he should be familiar with more than half of the issues before launching his rebuttal?]

Really, guys - with the best will in the world, you'll find life so much easier if you just stick to the everyday meaning of words.

Global warming to stop

As the global warming fraternity seeks to explain away the lack of any actual observable warming, they've come up with a whole new explanation - that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation will wipe out any warming for the next few decades. Even the most observant followers of the climate debate will have failed to notice anyone mentioning that the AMO might have been boosting temperatures in recent decades. And neither will they have seen any inkling of this fall in temperatures being predicted by the IPCC.

Which brings us on to this quote from the climatologist Roger Pielke Snr (via CCNet):

If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun. This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy.

Looks like all the IPCC projections may just be bunk. 

What's wrong with the IPCC - a guide for the layman

This is an attempt to summarise some of my previous postings on the IPCC process into a single article. What I'm trying to do is to make the case that there are signficant problems with the science that can be readily understood by the average reader. Even for a layman, these issues should give pause for thought.

The posting was inspired by this article by the Lazy Environmentalist - a blog I chanced upon while idly surfing my way around Technorati.com. The author seems to be, shall we say, an enthusiastic and unquestioning believer. 

Temperatures are going up

Temperature records are derived from surface stations, satellites and radiosondes (weather balloons).

There are many problems with the surface temperature record. Firstly, it's not really a record of the temperature, but a theory of what the temperature record would have looked like if it had been measured correctly. The records from many stations are subject to significant adjustments to deal with issues like station moves, creeping urbanisation and so on. These adjustments are often larger than the trend which comes out at the end of the process. In other words the raw data shows cooling, but by the time they've adjusted it, it shows warming. The adjustments are largely shrouded in mystery, so it's not possible to say if they are reasonable or not. One surprising artifact of these adjustments is that the historic temperature record keeps changing - the past keeps being made to look colder so the warming seems ever greater.

A new website, surfacestations.org, has started to uncover a worrying failure of many temperature stations to site their instruments correctly - including several next to airconditioning units and carparks, and more than one next to a barbeque.

The weather stations are mostly on land, but most of the earth is ocean. While the sea surface record carries a greater weight in assessing the global temperature, the accuracy of that temperature is questionable because of this unevenness in the spread of the stations. The sea surface record, like the land record, is also subject to large adjustments which dwarf the warming which it is claimed has been detected. Here is an example of very shaky reasoning for a major adjustment.

The satellite and weather balloon records are much less convincing if you are looking for evidence of warming.

Temperatures in the past

The estimates of temperatures before widespread instrumental records became available are created from proxies - the temperatures are estimated from tree-ring widths and densities, and from ice cores. There are particular problems with the tree rings. Trees can grow faster or slower when temperatures rise, and it is not clear that the attempts by scientists to deal with this issue - by measuring trees at the upper tree line  - have been successful. One scientist has found treeline samples from the same site showing both responses.

Another problem is that some temperature reconstructions have been suggesting declining temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century when, of course, things are meant to have warmed up rapidly. This embarrassing problem ("the divergence issue") has been quietly brushed aside by the IPCC, and in their report the offending records have been truncated at the point at which they start to fall away, so that the remaining records all show a rising trend. It is hard to see this as anything other than dishonesty.

The reconstructions with rising trends all use include a couple of particular species of trees - bristlecone pines and foxtails. These have both shown rapidly increasing growth rates in the twentieth century, something which is believed to be caused by non-climatic factors. Despite this being widely understood, the reconstructions have still been put forward by the IPCC as valid.

Most of the reconstructions stop in the 1990s. One simple test of whether they are reasonable or not would be to measure recent tree ring widths and to use this to derive a temperature. This could be compared to the actual temperature from the instrumental records. Despite all the money poured in to climate research, this has not been done and so questions over the accuracy of the reconstructions remain. And since we don't know if the reconstructions are valid, we can't say whether current temperatures are above, below or the same as, temperatures in warm periods in the past (eg "The Medieval Warm Period"). This extraordinary failure means that in essence we don't know if the problem is a problem we should worry about or not.

Data and code

One of the basic tenets of the scientific method is that work should be reproducible by other scientists. In order for climate scientists' work to be reproduced it is necessary for their data and the computer programs which transform it into results to be freely available. There are many instances of climate scientists refusing to release data, or "losing" it. This has happened with prominent scientists and key scientific papers. So some of the most important scientific work of recent years - work which underpins the IPCC process and the doom-laden results which it announces to the world - is not capable of being replicated. A reputable scientific body would disassociate itself from suspect papers of this kind. The IPCC embraces them.

The consensus

The IPCC's assessment report is said to represent the consensus view of 2500 scientists. Who these scientists are and how they made their happiness with this alleged consensus clear is not known. The comments of reviewers on the draft IPCC reports cannot be reproduced, despite this contravening the IPCC's own rules. The public have to accept the existence of a consensus on trust.