The daft and the non-daft climate model runs

Nic Lewis has published another fascinating article about the Marvel et al paper over at Climate Audit. I was particularly taken by the discussion of the GCM runs that lay behind Marvel et al's assessment of the effect of land-use changes.

In essence, the authors did five runs of the model, with only land-use forcing changes. This tends to produce a cooling, and four of the runs gave similar results, with their average looking like this:

But one looked entirely different; like this:

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What's up with El Reg?

A few days back The Conversation published a moderately dull article about paleoclimate, written by a couple of postdocs at Bristol. Its title kind of gave the game away up front:

The last time Earth was this hot hippos lived in Britain (that’s 130,000 years ago)

This introduced a temperature reconstruction that had been bodged together by an author at Wikimedia. It all seemed fairly pitiful to me, and hardly worth the bother, although I wondered for a time about whether I could get an easy laugh by noting that the authors had cited approvingly Michael Mann's 2008 carcrash paper:

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Paris and the risk of green judges

@Robin Hutton under CC licence. Click for link.Paris has been and gone and attention has mostly moved on to the latest eccentric claim about what the climate is going to do to us next (intoxicated fish anyone?). But a few outlets are still asking questions. Yesterday Carbon Brief explained that the timetable for ratification is almost impossibly vague:

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Real-world efficacies

BH readers have long been aware that low estimates of climate sensitivity based on observations are little affected by the pause and will therefore be little affected by this year's El Nino either. The discussion in this area will continue to focus on subjects like efficacies and aerosols. Marvel and colleagues are apparently formulating a response to Nic Lewis's critique, which is sure to be interesting. While we're waiting, I have been passed a preprint of a forthcoming Piers Forster paper in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, which makes some interesting observations on the efficacy debate.

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Hot, apparently

© Copyright ronnie leask under CC licence. Click for link.So the stove is on, and outside the snow is starting to melt a little. It looks as though a thaw will set in by this evening.

Meanwhile Twitter and the newswaves are awash with tales of warmest years, although I have to say most of it has passed me by. I did pick up this interesting exchange on Josh's feed though.

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Xing's bendy hockey stick

You wait for ages for a hockey stick to turn up and suddenly two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of the Wilson et al temperature reconstruction comes Xing et al, a new effort from a Chinese team. In their figure, shown below, it's the blue line we're interested in. In truth it's a pretty bendy hockey stick.

A few thoughts and observations based on a skim of the paper:

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Quote of the day, sound science edition

...can you guys fill in the "look at the impacts we're already seeing" part with a bunch of examples? In addition to the scientifically sound examples you'll give it would also be good for me to get an updated list of extreme events that are plausibly climate related.

US climate envoy Todd Stern reaches out beyond the scientifically sound

Via Chris Horner.

Fifty shades of green

Peter Lilley's speech during the Energy Bill debate in the House of Commons on Monday is well worth a look. This is the text, lightly edited.

Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con):

…Wherever we are on the spectrum on global warming, from sceptical to alarmist, we can surely all agree on one thing: that we should try to achieve the targets to which we are committed for reducing CO2 at the least cost to our constituents, - because it is ultimately they who bear it either through their [household] budgets or their jobs. So when the Secretary of State found that subsidies were proving unnecessarily generous to achieve our targets and we were achieving them ahead of time, so that without changing those targets she could reduce those subsidies, I assumed the whole House would be in universal agreement with what she was proposing; even I, for once, was on her side. But it was not so: there were calls from the green lobby and the Opposition to keep subsidies higher than necessary for longer than necessary to achieve the targets to which we are committed.

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Bob Carter

I awake this morning to the sad news of the passing of Bob Carter.

I never met Bob, but we exchanged emails from time to time, particularly when I was providing editorial input to his paper on sea-level rise, which I still rate as one of the best things GWPF has published. He had a very sharp mind, but was great fun to work with. His strength of character in the face of years of personal attacks is an example to us all.

Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts both have more personal recollections.

Diary dates, tree rings edition

Academic: let's try violence

It goes without saying that huge numbers of academics are a waste of time, space and money, but on a purely selfish level I'd hate anyone to actually deal with the problem. Where else are you going to get an endless stream of people willing to make fools of themselves in public? Without them I'd have nothing to write about.

There I was this morning struggling for something to write about, when Dr Tara Smith came to my rescue. Dr Smith is a legal scholar (allegedly) at Bangor University in Wales, although she is a native of Ireland. In The Conversation, she has set out her view on why environmentalists should be able to break the law with impunity. This was prompted by a US court deciding to throw out an argument by a bunch of hippies that their blocking oil trains was justified by "necessity" and therefore not criminal. 

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Wam, bam

At the start of March, the University of Exeter is hosting an extreme weather day, as part of WAMfest, the festival of weather art and music. The festival programme can seen here, and the extreme weather event is described as follows:

What is happening to our weather? An entertaining and informative evening full of surprises with one of the country's leading science communicators, Helen Czerski and the Chief Scientist of the Met Office, Prof. Dame Julia Slingo OBE FRS. 

In the first half of the evening Helen Czerski and leading climate scientist, Dr. Peter Stott of the Met Office will embark on an exploration of extreme weather, including here in Devon, and how this fits into a pattern of changing climate. As they will discuss, there is so much more to climate change than global warming. Find out how the climate varies from a host of fascinating natural processes, and how science is making progress at helping all of us be more resilient to its vagaries.

After the interval, Helen is joined by Prof Dame Julia Slingo OBE FRS, Chief Scientist of the Met Office and other leading experts to explore with you, the audience, some of the intriguing questions raised earlier. Chaired by Prof. Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Institute of Physics and with Prof. Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, our panel will invite your questions and take you on an entertaining journey through the science of weather and climate and what it means for you.

If anyone is going along, a report would be welcome.

Old Reliable - Josh 357

There's a video titled "How reliable are satellite temperatures?" with the usual suspects giving their expert opinions. You can watch the video here and there is a post on WUWT here. 

H/t @GroenMNG for the idea.

Cartoons by Josh

A crack in the ivory tower

The Bookseller is reporting that Penguin Random House has been experimenting with a non-graduate recruitment scheme. So successful has it been that they have now decided that they are going to waive the need for candidates to be degree qualified at all.

The main point of universities was always to act as a filter for employers, revealing those best academically equipped for management positions. When Tony Blair decided to vastly increase the numbers of young people who went to university, that raison d'etre disappeared. Penguin's new approach is therefore simply a logical response.

Is this the beginning of the end for university education?

Update on Jan 18, 2016 by Bishop Hill

In related news, the latest free speech on university campuses ratings are up at Spiked! Another reason why universities are going to make themselves redundant.

Carbon debrief has its pants down

Updated on Jan 18, 2016 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jan 18, 2016 by Bishop Hill

With the Port Talbot steelworks layoffs in the news, I was interested to see this tweet from Carbon Brief's Simon Evans this morning.

Reminder | Factcheck: The #steel crisis and UK electricity prices | @DrSimEvans https://t.co/vz4PP2ce3I pic.twitter.com/QrHcC7DXWW

— Carbon Brief (@CarbonBrief) January 18, 2016

The linked article, which seeks to divert blame away from energy costs, has this rather remarkable claim:

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