Benny Peiser on LBC

Benny Peiser was just on LBC radio discussing the Bengtsson affair. Audio below.

Peiser LBC interview

The ERL reviewer's report

Updated on May 16, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Environmental Research Letters has published a statement on the Bengtsson affair, protesting its innocence over the accusation that it rejected the paper on political grounds. It seems to be arguing that there were scientific, as well as non-scientific reasons for rejecting the paper. Certainly the offending editor's quote is acknowledged:

Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side.

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Scientivism Media Centre on Bengtsson

The Science Media Centre has entered the fray on the Bengtsson affair, publishing one of its usual "expert reaction" pieces. Readers will recall that after the Oxburgh affair nearly every expert the SMC quoted was among those accused of wrongdoing regarding Climategate. It's a similar story today, with the SMC choosing to quote Bob Ward (an expert in what way?!), Myles Allen (who sits on the editorial board of the journal involved) and Simon Lewis, who can bring nothing to the party except his hard-core green activism. Only Tim Palmer might pass muster as a neutral.

This disclaimer at the bottom of the piece intrigued me:

Myles Allen is on the Editorial Board of Environmental Research Letters but played no part in the review of or editorial decisions on the Bengtsson paper.  He states: “I wasn’t even aware of it until yesterday, and still haven’t seen the paper — nor do I wish to see it, since rejected papers are meant to be kept confidential.”

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Sensitive dialogue

Climate Dialogue, the Dutch website that seeks to bring scientists from different ends of the climate debate together in a meaningful discussion, is looking at climate sensitivity today. Contributions have come from James Annan, Nic Lewis and John Fasullo.

Nic has made this comment:

May I start by thanking John Fasullo for taking part in this discussion of climate sensitivity at Climate Dialogue. I can see from the title of his guest blog that we are in for an interesting debate.

Enjoy.

Dessler rebuts

Updated on May 8, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Is it just me that reads every paper by Andrew Dessler as an attempted rebuttal of some sceptic position or another? His latest paper was submitted to Geophysical Research Letters just three weeks after the publication of the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity and reads as though it was written in direct response to it. Here's the abstract:

Estimates of the Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) from 20^th-century observations predict a lower ECS than estimates from climate models, paleoclimate data, and interannual variability. Here we show that estimates of ECS from 20^th-century observations are sensitive to the assumed efficacy of aerosol and ozone forcing (efficacy for a forcer is the amount of warming per unit global average forcing divided by the warming per unit forcing from CO₂).

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Lawson's standpoint

Nigel Lawson has a long article in Standpoint magazine, covering the whole gamut of the climate debate, from accusations of denial to climate sensitivity to the language used by the Met Office. Older readers may remember that Lawson was once the editor of the Spectator and his journalistic flair is on prominent display:

The unusual persistence of heavy rainfall over the UK during February, which led to considerable flooding, is believed by the scientists to have been caused by the wayward behaviour of the jetstream; and there is no credible scientific theory that links this behaviour to the fact that the earth's surface is some 0.8ºC warmer than it was 150 years ago.

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Shindell on Lewis

Nic Lewis's Climate Audit piece on Drew Shindell's TCR paper (BH discussion here) has engendered a response at Real Climate.

Oversensitive.org

Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok have just launched Oversensitive.org, a new website to document the responses to their GWPF report of the same name. Of particular interest is a post outlining Jonathan Gregory's claim that he had shown that the method used by Lewis underestimates climate sensitivity.

It seems that (surprise, surprise!) Gregory's case is based on the output of a climate model, although he neglects to say so. To put forward a hypothesis and to claim it as a proof is shoddy stuff, but all too predictable in the world of climate science.

Reading between the lines it looks as if Gregory has misunderstood the Lewis method and is now rather stubbornly refusing to admit that his mistake.

AR5 inquiry followup

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis, describing the flurry of activity since he appeared before the Energy and Clmate Change Committee.

My comments on Myles Allen's oral evidence to the ECCC, and his response have been published.

Some things in Myles' response that might be worth pointing out:

1. Under Point 1:  "The IPCC Summary for Policymakers does not give “best estimates” of 2100 temperature, largely because they would not be policy relevant: the one thing that can be said with confidence about best estimate predictions is that the real world will not follow them. A best estimate of a strongly skewed distribution is particularly misleading".

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Mann on climate sensitivity and counting

Michael Mann, a man who never saw a fray he didn't want to enter, has decided to enter the climate sensitivity fray, with an article published simultaneously in the Huffington Post and Scientific American. Some of it is a bit odd to tell the truth.

For example, take this bit about the IPCC's decision to reduce the lower bound on its estimate of climate sensitivity down to 1.5°C.

The IPCC had lowered the bottom end of the range, down from the two degrees C it had set in its Fourth Assessment Report, issued in 2007. The IPCC based the lowered bound on one narrow line of evidence: the slowing of surface warming during the past decade—yes, the faux pause.

However, those who have read the relevant parts of the Fifth Assessment and indeed those who are familiar with the recent Lewis/Crok report on climate sensitivity will be aware that the IPCC actually gave a completely different explanation for their decision to reduce the lower bound.

The lower temperature limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2°C in the AR4, but the upper limit is the same. This assessment reflects improved understanding, the extended temperature record in the atmosphere and ocean, and new estimates of radiative forcing.

I don't know about you, but I count that as three lines of evidence not one.

Ed's evidence of low TCR

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis.

As many readers will know, there is a lengthy and pretty civilised discussion of the recent Lewis/Crok report ‘A Sensitive Matter’ on Ed Hawkins' blog Climate Lab Book, here. In that report, we gave a 'likely' (17-83% probability) range for the transient climate response (TCR) of 1.0°C to 2.0°C. TCR is more relevant to warming over the rest of this century than equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS).

The guest post by Piers Forster that headed the Climate Lab Book thread made the mistaken claim:

Particularly relevant, is our analysis in Forster et al. (2013) that confirms that the Gregory and Forster (2008) method employed in the Lewis & Crok report to make projections (by scaling TCR) leads to systematic underestimates of future temperature change (see Figure 1), especially for low emissions scenarios, as was already noted by Gregory and Forster (2008).

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Walport's presentation

Mark Walport's staff have kindly made available the slides he used in Glasgow. They can be seen here.

As I have suggested previously, the talk was a recitation of the standard case for alarm, but there were many aspects of it that piqued my interest. For example, I noted that while warming up to the first slide he spoke about energy security first, before moving on to climate. Later on in the talk he spoke of the three lenses through which the climate problem had to be viewed and the first of these was again energy security. Is this a new tack? Are backsides starting to be covered? Perhaps.

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Myles out of line

The reverberations from the Lewis/Crok report are still playing out in the blogosphere. In particular there are some interesting comments at Ed Hawkins' blog.

One of the memes that is being pushed by our climatological friends is the idea that the Lewis/Crok range for transient climate response (i.e. short-term warming) is similar to that of the IPCC models. Myles Allen was the first to promote this idea, in his comments at the Science Media Centre.

Their 5-95% range of uncertainty in TCR (kindly provided by Nic Lewis) is 0.9-2.5 degrees C, almost exactly in line with the range of the models shown in their figure (1.1-2.6 degrees C).

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Explaining Otto

The Otto et al paper, along with all the other observational estimates of low climate sensitivity, has been a bit of a bore for upholders of the climate consensus, distracting them from the daily grind of generating ever more more outlandish estimates of future warming and ever-more scary tales of the impacts.

Riding to the rescue is Drew Shindell of NASA GISS, who has analysed the models and found that he can explain the discrepancy with the observations:

Understanding climate sensitivity is critical to projecting climate change in response to a given forcing scenario. Recent analyses have suggested that transient climate sensitivity is at the low end of the present model range taking into account the reduced warming rates during the past 10–15 years during which forcing has increased markedly. In contrast, comparisons of modelled feedback processes with observations indicate that the most realistic models have higher sensitivities. Here I analyse results from recent climate modelling intercomparison projects to demonstrate that transient climate sensitivity to historical aerosols and ozone is substantially greater than the transient climate sensitivity to CO₂. This enhanced sensitivity is primarily caused by more of the forcing being located at Northern Hemisphere middle to high latitudes where it triggers more rapid land responses and stronger feedbacks. I find that accounting for this enhancement largely reconciles the two sets of results, and I conclude that the lowest end of the range of transient climate response to CO₂ in present models and assessments (<1.3 °C) is very unlikely.

scary stories and ever

Orlowski on the GWPF report

Andrew Orlowski in the Register has an interview with Nic Lewis here. I liked this bit:

You've spent a lifetime modelling - surely [models are] not completely useless"

Lewis: Models are extremely useful but better at somethings than others. They're pretty good at atmospheric circulation. But when it comes to ECS there's really no reason to think they’re going to be accurate.