Warming World Affecting the Minds of Nature Editors

Much fanfare on Nature and elsewhere about a paper by Rosenzweig et al that appears to be a re-hash of chapter 1 of the IPCC AR4-WG2 report.

Now, there is one thing that is very evident: the vast majority of reported changes are about Europe.

Nature reporter Emma Marris admits “the bulk of the observations come from Europe”. That statement is somewhat incomplete. In the IPCC report, for example, there are, from Europe, 28,115 observed biological changes out of a worldwide total of 28,671.

That’s 98%. Just from Europe. And most of it, just from a single meta-analysis.

Perhaps Marris should have substituted “bulk” with “pretty much the absolute totality”.

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So the years are passing by, but the question remains: what if Global warming is just European?

ps I am worried about Californian birds (the ones with plumage, that is). There’s a researcher studying them, Cagan Sekercioglu of Stanford University, but he doesn’t show much interest in the real world:

““We shouldn’t even need to publish such papers at this point,” he says. “This paper is an argument that climate change is causing the observed changes. This should be a given. Thirty years later we are still trying to convince people of this.”

Well, Mr Sekercioglu, with an attitude like this, I bet you’re going to make lots of unexpected discoveries, aren’t you?

Dealing with Climate Change…in Ancient Rome

(thanks to LM for pointing this out)

Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella (AD 4-70) writes in De Re Rustica (”Agriculture”, or perhaps “Affairs of the Land”) (Book III, Chapter 20):

For there is never a year so mild and temperate as not to inflict some injury upon some variety of the vine: if it is dry, that kind which thrives on moisture is damaged; if rainy, that which delights in dry weather; if cold and frosty, that which cannot endure blighting cold; or if hot, that which cannot bear heat. 2 And, not to run through, at this time, a thousand rigours of the weather, there is always something to work harm to vineyards.

A Real Climate of Misunderstanding

What Climate Science?
Are AGW climate scientists and science-prone skeptics talking about the same subject? I thought so, but am not sure of that any longer.

Having read Real Climate (RC)’s “Butterfly” blog and engaged in some commentary about it at that site, and having followed the AGW debate for the last five years, my impression is that:

• the AGW climate scientists are just doing what they can, after heavily restricting their area of research
• I and some other fellow science-minded skeptics are simply pointing out to the vast, unexplored regions outside of your average climate modeller’s understanding and computational ability.

Imagine if paleontologists had decided to concentrate on the skulls of Rift Valley hominids, treating with disdain (aka as “noise”) all of a find’s context, including other human bones, remains of other animals, local geography (and climate). And deliberatingly ignoring every other hominid find, anywhere else in the world.

That’d still be science, but within such a very focused line of research quite unlikely to add much knowledge or understanding, apart than about itself.

There Must Be Some…
If such a colossal misunderstanding is indeed in place, that would go a long way in explaining the extraordinary ill feelings surrounding the whole of climate science at the moment (and I am deliberately keeping politics outside of this), with one side treating skepticism itself as a dishonest scandal that should be stamped out of existence once and for all, and the other side dismissing years and years of research as pretty much irrelevant gibberish written by incompetent liars.

No wonder they (we) can’t see each other eye-to-eye…how could two judges agree at a canine show contest, if one of them were only interested in (and had built a whole theory of canine beauty about) the shape of the tails?

Climatology: An Abridged History
The story of how contemporary climatology has ended up like this is illuminating.

At first, basic laboratory experiments gave some indications on how atmospheric constituents could interact with one another, and with the incoming solar radiation. Notable among them, the study of CO2’s “greenhouse effect” by Arrhenius in 1896. But the real world of meteorology (including climate) is somewhat more complex than a lab’s setting.

For example, vast energy exchanges manifest in atmospheric cell circulation, oceanic heat exchanges, and whole climate-affecting cycles currently known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, el Nino/la Nina, etc etc.

With no way of replicating that in controlled laboratory conditions, climatologists opted at one point to computational models of the atmosphere. This was of course possible only and after a minimum of computational power became available.

Computers of course understand only numbers and formulas/commands. In order to get to that, a momentous assumption was made: in an approach curiously reminiscent of the science of aeronautics, climate was taken as the response of the atmosphere to “forcings”, i.e. discernible components pushing and pulling the atmosphere in one or the other direction.

“Climate” is then the resulting overall effect of the action of each forcing, averaged over a certain lentgh of time.

In that context, “forcings” were purely operational, “digitizational” tools, providing some basis for computing the climate. By definition, in fact, forcings cannot be measured: all observations of the actual atmosphere will (obviously!) include the effect of them all. If “forcings” exist or not is therefore irrelevant. For all they were worth, forcings could have been substituted by Fourier analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, or whatever other technical tool that can transform a set of signals (and formulas) of any sort into computer-friendly figures (and procedures).

However, alongside a steady increase in available computational power, there came the a shift in focus, from real (observable) climate to forcings: in a first dichotomy with the real world, models became ways of investigating the (possible) effect of each forcing, instead of forcings being ways of investigating the (possible) evolution of the planet’s climate.

This change is less subtle than it appears. It entails throwing one’s hands up in the air about trying to understand the actual atmosphere, choosing instead to concentrate on known (pre-set) effects of known causes. Models in fact are far from independent from assumptions about forcings: they are made out of them. The effect of each forcing is already written in the code of each model, and model runs will show that effect at work. Even if results could vary for example modifying a model’s representation of geography, there is no way that model will be able to run contrary to its pre-assumed behaviour, for example in the case of increased CO2 concentration.

If I write a computer program that just adds one every time a white objects traverses a camera’s field of view, there is no way my program will ever count down, say to minus 20. And the fact that the counter always increases says nothing about how many white objects there are in the real world. It just shows how the counter works.

Nothing But Parameters
What can you do when all you have are models only useful to investigate what a particular forcing’s effect might be? You are left with playing with the parameters, modifying them to “fit” observations and “plausibility”. This is manifest for example in Hansen et al’s 2007 article, “Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE“, literally saddled with innumerable “estimations”, six of them explicitly “subjective” (little more than guesses, that is) but still able somehow to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific article.

Note that comparison to the real world is but a side issue in that paper. “Observations” (25+ years of averages) are useful to evaluate what the parameters are likely to be, i.e. the relative importance of each forcing. There is nothing important outside of them. In a second dichotomy with the real world, in such a vision of the world everything that is not included in the modelling is “noise”, in other words “irrelevant”.

There is no “going back to the lab” in contemporary mainstream forcings-based climate science, eg to learn anything new after finding unexpected observations, because those are “noise” (sometimes called, “weather”) and thus have to be ignored. And there is no meaningful effort to measure what if anything is going wrong: for example, comparisons between model results and observations are simply visual.

The good thing about this is that there are enormous avenues of research left open to future generations. The downside is that the reality of climate models is, at present, literally set in stone, whatever the real climate is out there.

Can climate models predict anything?
Skeptics and non-skeptics alike seem to agree that models cannot predict (i.e. make predictions that can be falsified, or confirmed, by observations) for timeframes shorter than around 25 years from the time of computation.

In fact, RealClimate seems to be willing to take a quarter of a century, more or less, as the minimum amount of time needed to get “averages” that can be called “climate” rather than mere “weather”. That is a second example of AGW climate scientists pigeonholing themselves: just as anything that cannot be modelled by forcings is “noise”, so anything that doesn’t cancel itself over 25 years is “noise” too.

So we started with “climate science” only to get stuck into “multi-decadal averaging to evaluate parameters to use in estimating the effect of forcings”.

Can anything ever disprove a forcings-based model?
No. Nothing at all ever will. Some AGWers are answering that with improbable claims about Popper being long dead, an eery reply one would expect only from inventors of perpetual-motion machines.

Actually, the prove/disprove question may simply be the wrong question. Models are only tools to investigate the possible effect of each forcing. Hansen et al talk about “using the model for simulations of future climate change”.

The key word there is of course “simulations”.

Models are not a weather-predicting tool (remember, they are about “climate”, not “weather”). And they are not a climate-predicting tool either, even if they are often abused as if they were. In its 2001 report the IPCC itself stated as much, in no uncertain terms: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (from the IPCC TAR-WG1, 2001).

What models can do is simulate the effect of individual forcings in isolation, something that can never be observed anyway. They also simulate the cumulative effect of forcings, with added uncertainty as interactions must be modelled too. Such a cumulative effect is not necessarily expected to be observable either.

It must be stated that as far as I can remember RC has never claimed anything more. Good for them. Perhaps they could have been clearer before more clear and more often, but things are starting to move in the right direction, of late. As already quoted in a previous blog: “[...] The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world. [...]“

And Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.”

Compounded Weaknesses
Don’t get me wrong: on its own, doing an estimation is part-and-parcel of conducting scientific research; computer modelling is a great tool for very complex situation; forcings are a good way to translate a system into a manageable model; and scenarios are the standard way to evaluate risk.

But with regards to forcings-based climate science, all of those combine together compounding their weaknesses rather than their strenghts: estimations are often subjective, computer models are used to study forcings rather than climate, forcings are taken as “real” even if they cannot be measured, and scenarios are interrogated not for current sensitivities but as forecasts.

They have become the basis for a large Intergovernmental organization, tens of international meetings, the collective action of thousands of people, one Oscar and one Nobel Peace Prize, all in the name of what every knowledgeable person knows it is impossible to predict.

What Kind of Science is Climate Science?
Restricted to “the computation of scenarios (the ‘what-ifs’ projections)”, climate modelling is a science (the “science of climate forcings”, in fact). And RealClimate is as good as it gets. The same applies to much of contemporary AGW scientific journalism and publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Nature, Science. And the BBC.

Just try, next time you read their reports, to imagine a world view (a “climate narrative“) where climatology, the most uncertain of exact sciences, is applied science, a policy-making tool where only forcings count and, among the forcings, only those of anthropogenic origin are relevant (as there is little to make policies about, for non-anthropogenic forcings).

That is too narrow a view to be useful for risk management, let alone to bring science forward. It may lead to worries wasting time worrying about possible future stronger hurricanes, rather than about certain concentrating on preventi present-day catastrophical levee failure for present-day storms.

Time to Expand the “Climate Narrative”
Models have been the cradle of climatology, Tsiolkovsky would have said, but we cannot live in the cradle forever. It is time to expand the “climate narrative”, by getting climate science of the models-forcings-scenarios hole.

Because “real” climate is much, much more than RealClimate.

Kudos to RealClimate’s Honesty and Sincerity

And no, I am not being sarcastic.

It’s just that (finally!) there is a RC claim that can be compared to the real world; next to it, a good dose of outright sincerity (surely it must have been there before,  perhaps buried in the polemic…)

From What the IPCC models really say (May 12, 2008):

• Claims that GCMs project monotonic rises in temperature with increasing greenhouse gases are not valid. Natural variability does not disappear because there is a long term trend. The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world.
• [...]
• Over a twenty year period, you would be on stronger ground in arguing that a negative trend would be outside the 95% confidence limits of the expected trend (the one model run in the above ensemble suggests that would only happen ~2% of the time).

Note that even the fabled 20-year negative trend may still be interpreted as consistent with at least one model run.

But it’s a good step in the right direction: bringing back climate science from its forcings cage to the actual world…

Climate Models Are Irrelevant, and Latest IPCC Models a Regression

(many thanks to LM for pointing this out)

• “[GCM] model outputs at annual and climatic (30‐year) scales are irrelevant with reality“
• “model predictions are much poorer that an elementary prediction based on the time average“
• “The GCM outputs of AR4, as compared to those of TAR, are a regression in terms of the elements of falsifiability they provide, because most of the AR4 scenarios refer only to the future, whereas TAR scenarios also included historical periods“

Those are not the insane ramblings of yours truly, but the conclusions of D. Koutsoyiannis et al’s “Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series“, a poster presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2008 in Vienna, Austria, 13‐18 April 2008.

Of course, it’s only a poster presentation…and of course, there was really no space at all to talk about it in the news, eg on the BBC.

Well, there is one good thing that has come out of this though: some explicit references in RealClimate about the need to have “a very civilized and friendly chat“, “to be respectful, sincere, and show courtesy in our criticism, even when we argue why we think that a paper has flaws“, and that “we some day may be mistaken, so it’s important to be humble and check our drafts amongst ourselves“.

This will mean no more verbal attacks about “negationism”, and few if any displays of condescension. Sure it will… 

Great News About Great Tits

Shameless traffic-enhancing post (just guess how) to mention Richard Black’s reporting of some great news about great tits (yes it’s birds, but alas, dear drooling visitors, of the avian variety).

A Place Where Climate Forecasts Should Be A Piece of Cake

Lloró, Colombia

It’s the place with the highest average annual precipitation: 523.6 inches / 13,300 millimeters of rain per year (estimated average, 29 years of records)

(note how the Google Maps photo in the link above does show Lloro shrouded by clouds)

That translates to 1.43in / 36.4mm of rain per day, every day of the year. And it looks like that’s what actually happens, as the forecast is of constant rain and thunderstorms.

There are 7,000 people living in Lloró and one can only imagine the strength of the local umbrella market.

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One wonders if any climatologist will step forward with a 1-year, 5-year, 10-year climate forecast of rain for Lloró?

(many thanks to RS at the Italian weather forum “Meteoweb” for writing about Lloró in the first place)

Webcast: “Consumer Perception of Climate Change”, May 12, 2pm GMT

I received this among the Comments yesterday

Consumer perception of climate change and its potential impact on business

A global survey from Havas Media

Havas Media the umbrella group which draws together the full global media expertise of Havas invites you to the weblaunch of their global survey on consumer response to climate change.

Webcast Details

Date: Monday 12 May 2008

Time: 3.00pm British Summer Time

To register for the webcast go to http://events.ctn.co.uk/ec/havas/513/

The webcast will begin with an interview on the results and then be followed by a Q & A session.

Details of how to obtain an advance copy of the research findings will be sent to all who register.

Key Facts:

With more than 11,000 respondents, this is one of the largest pieces of research of its kind.

Qualitative and quantitative research across nine key markets - UK, US, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and China.

Vast majority of consumers highly engaged with the issue and keen to further demonstrate their green awareness in how they shop.

Considerable expectation from consumers that brands should lead the way in tackling climate change.

 

Evidence for Warming - And Yes, It’s Good News!

The “Sahara dried out slowly, not abruptly“, according to a Reuters report of a new article by Kropelin et al., published in Science. That would be good news on its own, first as it means abrupt climatic changes happen not as often as once feared; and second, because it indicates climate was changing in an area the size of the United States, between 6,000 and 2,700 years ago (the latter date, coinciding with the legendary foundation of Rome).

Obviously, with no SUVs polluting at the time of Romulus, the end result is…more evidence that if anything is happening right now, is not necessarily the fault of us environmental sinners.

But the really good news is buried at the end of the piece:

[Kropelin] said there were already greener signs in a huge area with almost no reliable weather records. “I see a clear trend to a new greening of the Sahara, a very slow one,” he said, based on visits to some of the remotest and uninhabited parts of the desert over the past two decades. “You go to unoccupied areas over a long time and you know there was pure sand there without a single snake or scorpion. Now you see tens of kilometers covered by grass,” he said.

Finally! Some actual albeit initial evidence that warming is occurring indeed, and not just in continuously-corrected temperature measurements: because a warmer world is a wetter world, for the same reason why a colder world is a drier world, with all that water locked up in ice.

And what is a warmer and wetter world, if not a greener world?

Skeptics Society Confirms: AGW Skepticism Is Perfectly Legitimate

Volume 14, number 1 of “Skeptic”, the magazine of renowned American “Skeptics Society”, is partially dedicated to the topic of Global Warming.

Interestingly, the cover says “SPECIAL ISSUE: Global Warming and the Problem with Predictions [...]“, with three topical articles, the first two available online in full:

• “A Climate of Belief - The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable“, by Patrick Frank
• “How We Know Global Warming is Real - The Science Behind Human-induced Climate Change“, by Tapio Schneider
• “Turning Around by 2020 - How to solve the global warming problem“, by William Calvin

Keeping in mind that, according to the Skeptic Society, “the key to skepticism is to continuously and vigorously apply the methods of science to navigate the treacherous straits between “know nothing” skepticism and “anything goes” credulity“, it is pretty much self-evident that, whilst still leaning towards Al Gore, the Skeptic Society itself recognizes that AGW skepticism is _not_ an untenable stance.

In other words, if it is true that belief in AGW is not comparable to belief in UFOs, it is also true that disbelief in UFOs is not comparable to disbelief in the Apollo lunar landings. 

Something to remind people when they scream that “the science is settled”…

Climate Models: How Much Difference is Too Much Difference?

Does anyboy know the answer?

I re-post here a comment I just left at RealClimate (one never knows what gets published over there, and what doesn’t…)

Re: #101 As a matter of fact if you search on PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ there are four articles with my name. In two of them I appear as first author. And no, they are not first-rated earth-shattering Science or Nature articles about climate science.

But as we all agree now, that’s beside the point.

Let’s me start again from a simple question. Hansen et al did compare model results to observations.

“Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE”, Clim Dyn (2007) 29:661–696 - DOI 10.1007/s00382-007-0255-8

For example, consider fig. 9 (the PDF of the article is on the internet, apologies but I do not have time to search for it right now):

“Fig. 9 Global maps of temperature change in observations (top row) and in the model runs of Fig. 8, for 1880–2003 and several subperiods. [...]“

Observations there are shown in periods respectively of 124 years (1880-2003), 54 years, 61 years, 40 years and finally 25 years (1979-2003).

Presumably, this provides a first approximation of what time spans are needed to talk about climate (around 25 years). The actual shortest period may be 40 years or longer, as 1979-2003 has been chosen primarily as “the era of extensive satellite observations”. Please correct me if am wrong.

Let’s take now a clear-cut example. The authors write “All forcings together yield a global mean warming ~0.1C less than observed for the full period 1880–2003.”. And that’s a remarkable result.

But…may I ask this rather elementary question: say, if the global mean warming yielded by all forcings together had been much less, or much more than observed, what would have been the (absolute) threshold above which the climate simulations would have been declared a failure?

Or has this question no meaning either? If not, why not?

Once again, I am consciously simplifying things here but this is a blog…more a brainstorming session than a week-long workshop.

Italian Examples of AGWers’ Totalitarianism

A period of cooling may or may not lie ahead, but there are signs that the average AGWer’s inability to handle dissent is starting to show in Italy too. Here two examples

(1) A comment by somebody signing up as “ina” in (my) Italian version of Numberwatch’s Warmlist, stating that people that do not believe in AGW are to be blamed for the world going to the dogs

(2) A comment by Marco Ferrari: having found no way to reply to my arguments, Ferrari asks on RealClimate’s Butterflies, tornadoes and climate modelling for help in silencing me, of course after calling me a “negationist”, in true goebbelite fashion

It’s just two examples, but having been mobbed not once but twice in an Italian mailing list when I dared to speak out again the AGW credo, the fact that they happened almost at the same time is not an encouraging sign.

Climate Change Inspires Verbal Gymnastics at UNICEF

When something is fashionable it is so much better if you can dress up whatever you care about with the right clothes. Step forward UNICEF, then, launching itself into a remarkable case of verbal gymnastics to link the very much serious-but-evidently-unfashionable problems of poor children around the world, with…climate change.

“Warming ‘affecting poor children‘“, reports the BBC, notably with those single quotes, but with no link to the UNICEF report itself “Our Climate Our Children“. From UNICEF’s presentation of the report, by Lord Nicholas Stern:

Here in the UK, flooding is becoming a more common occurrence. Birds are nesting earlier, animals are moving territories, the duration and range of seasons is changing.

The usual collection of baseless remarks then? Not encouraging. Let’s move further:

[Children] are already seeing the impacts of climate change through malnutrition, disease, poverty, inequality and increasing risk of conflict – and ultimately an increase in child mortality rates.

Unfortunately, malnutrition, disease, etc were with us long before anybody had said “climate change”. Has UNICEF and/or Lord Stern found a way to identify the climate-change signal in current child mortality rates? Let’s find out. Here’s a quote from the Press Release:

the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children are being hit the hardest by the impact of climate change…the implications of climate change for the world’s children’ draws attention to the fact that climate change is impacting very seriously on children and their rights

So the BBC is right…it does look like UNICEF is claiming climate-change stuff is affecting children RIGHT NOW. But is that so? Here’s the list from the same press release:

…Climate change could cause an additional 40,000 to 160,000 child deaths per year…
…an additional 30 - 200 million people will be placed at risk of hunger…
…may make it more likely that parents remove their children from school…
…Malaria…is now being seen in areas which were previously outside the range of malarial mosquitoes, such as the highlands of Kenya and Jamaica. Diarrhoea: Climate change will increase the burden of diarrhoeal disease…

Out of FIVE claims, only ONE is for the present (malaria in Kenya and Jamaica highlands). Everything else is for the FUTURE. So much for “already seeing the impact“…

How can this be reported as happening in the present? By creatively using the vocabulary: as written by the BBC: “Climate change is already affecting the prospects for children in the world’s poorer countries, according to Unicef“.

What is claimed to be affected right now is the ESTIMATED FUTURE RISK for children. A strange definition of “PRESENT” indeed…

ps it’s sadly ironic that the one PRESENT consequence of UNICEF’s work about climate change, is that kids are getting anxious. One wonders if the UNICEF’s founders ever planned for their organisation to be on the forefront of the business of…scaring young children.

pps At page 8 of the UNICEF report there is a separate section “Examples of hazardous weather in 2007″. But as we well know, weather is not climate, so what is that list about, one is not sure. Also, note that more or less any kind of “hazardous weather” would do, cold, warm, dry, wet, whatever.

Climate Change Detection/Attribution? Some Hope!

Curious situation on the website of the PCMDI - the “Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison”, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with a stated mission:

to develop improved methods and tools for the diagnosis and intercomparison of general circulation models (GCMs) that simulate the global climate

Here’s what the PCMDI has to say about “devising robust statistical methods for climate-change detection/attribution“:

Coming soon…

That’s it.

Wow.

Sure.

Well, it looks like we will just have to be patient. We will be told how to detect and attribute climate change…one day, perhaps after some considerable amount of time will have ben spent in the frankly rather wasteful efforts of mostly comparing climate models to each other, rather than to the actual world.

p.s.: Applause to the PCMDI for their frankness:

The need for innovative analysis of GCM climate simulations is apparent, as increasingly more complex models are developed, while the disagreements among these simulations and relative to climate observations remain significant and poorly understood. The nature and causes of these disagreements must be accounted for in a systematic fashion in order to confidently use GCMs for simulation of putative global climate change.

More on RealClimate’s Unfalsifiable Models

This being the age of the Internet, not everybody reads after the second or third paragraph. So here’s a quick summary explaining why I write that “RealClimate Raises the Bar AGAINST Climate Models“:

(1) In the “RealClimate World”, models cannot be falsified by a single observation (i.e. atmospheric phenomenon). That  phenomenon is called ”weather”, and “weather” for RealClimate is “noise”)

(2) In the “RealClimate World”, models cannot be falsified by a set of short-term observations. That set is just part of a “specific trajectory” towards the expected climate change / global warming. And RealClimate is “not too concerned” about a “specific trajectory“.

Example for point (1): If models indicate the world will get warmer by the year 2100, but world temperatures dip in January and February 2008, RealClimate can still “honestly” claim the models are right, and whatever happened is just a momentary event, during which the “signal” of anthropogenic global warming has been “obscured” by this or that natural (or man-made) cause.

Example for point (2): If models indicate the world will get warmer by the action of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, but world temperatures don’t climb after 1998, RealClimate can still “honestly” claim the models are right, and whatever happened is just the way things are going at the moment, with a random pause in temperature increases that is just one of the hundreds of possible “trajectories” that will take us to a warmer world.

The only way to verify if the climate models are right is by waiting a sufficient number of years in order to statistically check the world has actually got warmer. How many years? More than 10, evidently (see 1998), perhaps more than 30, following the classical definition of “weather”. And by how much, the temperature increase? Pretty much any positive amount would suffice to state, once again, that the “models are right”.

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This looks like some kind of “suffocating love”, with the modellers so worried about their models, they have shielded them from almost all possibilities of falsification (in the process, pretty much abandoning “science” as usually understood).

And this is not the only contradiction: if the only way to see the models at work is by waiting a number of years, how could anybody advocate to “act now to save the Planet” because “the science is settled”?

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The issue of model falsifiability has already been a topic on the NYT’s “Tierney Lab”, daring to ask this past January questions such as “Are there any indicators in the next 1, 5 or 10 years that would be inconsistent with the consensus view on climate change?” and “Are there any sorts of weather trends or events that would be inconsistent [with global warming}?“.

And what did Gavin Schmidt reply on RealClimate? No, and no:

this subject appears to have been raised from the expectation that some short term weather event over the next few years will definitively prove that either anthropogenic global warming is a problem or it isn’t. As the above discussion should have made clear this is not the right question to ask. Instead, the question should be, are there analyses that will be made over the next few years that will improve the evaluation of climate models?

No “short-term weather event over the next few years” could ever disprove that “anthropogenic global warming“. And observations (events) and their analyses, in the RealClimate world, are only interesting to “improve the models“.

It’s hard to fail to spot in Schmidt’s reply that they did go back to “Hansen’s 1988” and other old projections, but whilst the bits that agree with the models are signs that those projections are “good“, those that disagree are so “for reasons that are as yet unclear“.

Instead of scientists trying to interpret the world, in RealClimate we have people subordinating the world to their models.

RealClimate Raises the Bar AGAINST Climate Models

With the death of Ed Lorenz and a world apparently taking a hiatus on the way to unstoppable anthropogenic global warming, It has taken a group effort at RealClimate to try to deal with the issue of chaotic weather vs. climate modelling: “Butterflies, tornadoes and climate modelling“.

Rather unfortunately for the authors, the conclusions contain a remarkable amount of unintended irony.

[...] But how can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic? The trick lies in the statistics. In those same models that demonstrate the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it turns out that the long term means and other moments are stable. [...] Climate change then is equivalent seeing how the structure changes, while not being too concerned about the specific trajectory you are on

In other words, “climate change” is an entity that can only become observable in the long, long term. And since there is little concern for the “specific trajectory”, there literally exists NO possible short-term sets of observations that can falsify the climate models.

Another way of saying it is that for the climate problem, the weather (or the individual trajectory) is the noise. If you are trying to find the common signal that is a signature of a particular forcing then averaging over a number of simulations with different weather works rather well [...]

In other words, since each and every atmospheric event can be obviously described as “weather”, there is no single observation that can falsify the climate models.

Their work doesn’t have to deal with any single observation, no short-term sets of observations…do they realize what they are saying???

Real climate is in their own words almost perfectly insulated from the real world. Nothing that can ever happen will be able to disprove the work of the climate modellers, apart from multi-decadal averages that are so poorly defined, they can easily be used to demonstrate anything.

Is this “science”? Looks more like long-term guaranteed employment to me… No wonder Anthropogenic Climate Change has important detractors in the metereological community.

In further irony, the above pairs up perfectly well with RC’s “comments policy” that can be summarized more or less into “we will censor everything we do not like“.

RealClimate: the insulated web site, where insulated researchers post insulated content. Now I understand why poor Gavin Schmidt had such a hard time dealing with an open debate…

Spare a Thought for the BBC Journalists’ Pension Plans

(thanks to SBC for pointing this one out)

In a sentence: the BBC Pension Trust has been investing left, right and centre in climate-change-related products. If the AGW bubble bursts, so many a journalist’s pension funds will evaporate.

It is surely a coincidence that the BBC Climate Change Propaganda Committee has been remarkably active in pumping up the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming for quite some time now.

Investors fall short on climate risk assessment – IIGCC
London, 17 April: Investors are more aware of climate change than previously, but are failing to fully assess the risks it poses when the financial implications are not clear, according to the European investor body Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC).

In its first report of members’ activities, the IIGCC found that investors are struggling to assess the risk posed by uncertainties over future climate change regulations and the physical impacts of global warming. But an increasing number of asset managers are focusing on the issue and are expanding their ability to analyse the effects of climate change.

“The IIGCC’s report highlights that the investment community has come a long way in understanding and analysing the investment implications from climate change, but also that there is room for further progress from investors, companies and government,” said Peter Dunscombe, chairman of the IIGCC and also the head of investments for the BBC Pension Trust.

The report also found that asset managers increasingly are looking to invest in low-carbon or clean energy funds, are working with companies to improve their disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and are using environmental rankings or analysing climate change impacts on their whole portfolio. And around 80% of pension funds and asset owners are asking their managers to exercise their voting rights on climate change issues.

But only 30% of respondents are integrating climate change considerations when appointing fund managers or seek advice on the matter from their advisors, reports the IIGCC. Investors are also failing to engage with companies on unavoidable climate change risks and climate-friendly products.

Corrected Text for Friends of the Earth’s Goebbelite Campaign Against Houghton Mifflin

Troubled about Friends of the Earth’s goebbelite campaign in the USA against Houghton Mifflin’s decision to dare suggest to high school pupils that there can be a thing called “debate” about global warming? 

“Goebbelite” in the sense of being yet another attempt at using all means and powers to repress dissent, so that people will eventually come to believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Well, trouble yourself no further: just go to Friends of the Earth’s US website and enter the following text in place of the existing “message”:

Subject (instead of “Teach the truth about the Environment”):

Keep up the good work about the Environment

Message under “Dear Sir, Madam” (instead of a long, incoherent tirade that first asks for censorship by appealing to authority and then claims to uphold the need for people to be provided all information):

I am writing to support Houghton Mifflin against the debate-stifling, coarse, ethically unsound attempts by Friends of the Earth to force Houghton Mifflin to immediately issue a corrective packet to all the school districts currently using the textbook: American Government, 11th edition, by Professors James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr. 

I also ask that Houghton Mifflin keep up in the future too, its consensus-challenging, fact-based outlook that can only enhance the capabilities for critical thinking in high school pupils.

The reason? Chapter 21 on Environmental Policy is a godsend, not a “disgrace” as claimed by Friends of the Earth.

We trust the textbook authors to be fair and speak the truth.  To address global warming as “enmeshed in scientific uncertainty” is to describe things as they are. Far from dismissing the work of the nation’s and the world’s top climate scientists, such text underlines the huge challenges facing them and us in understanding the relationship between humanity and the rest of the planet. 

We need the nation’s youth to be given all the information we have available, not just the so-called “consensus”, so that they are able to make their own well-informed decisions.  For years, Houghton Mifflin has provided that information–and I am encouraged to see that a company with such a highly respected reputation is continuing to publish along the same tradition.

I am copying my governor with this message to ensure that my state knows that there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with this textbook!

Sincerely,

(alas, I do not have a US address as yet, so I took the liberty of putting Hayden Planetarium’s, a place I do consider like home).

Of course, my message is unlikely to reach Houghton Mifflin or Governor Paterson of New York via Friends of the Earth, but who knows? And by the way: here’s a form to send your support to Houghton Mifflin directly.

Many thanks to JunkScience for pointing in this direction. More here about Friends of the Earth’s “contempt for democracy”.

The BBC Stumbles on “Cosmic Climate Link”

Letter sent to the BBC via their website:

The title of Richard Black’s article “More doubt on cosmic climate link” is wrong, as Mr Black proceeds in the second part of the article to illustrate a relationship between cosmic rays and “local” polar temperatures. A better choice would be “New findings in cosmic climate links“. How on Earth can an effect on both poles be considered as “local”, I cannot understand. The maps published in the article seem to show cosmic rays changing temperatures over large parts of the globe.

Some hope! Since I am not a pro-AGW rabid activist threatening the reputation and livelihood of Richard Black or any other journalist, chances are my comments won’t be taken into consideration.

 

BBC’s Unbound Climate Zeal: Again!

After a few days of rest, aimed perhaps at calming down the furore around the Harrabin-Abbess story, the BBC Climate Change Propaganda Committee is running at full steam once again. Now is the turn of Richard Black to be on-message with a new scary piece about sea levels in fabled year 2100.

There are several interesting points to consider.

(1) Mr Black mentions how the new “scientific analysis” by Svetlana Jevrejeva and others “from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL), near Liverpool, UK”, provides results of the same order of magnitude as other efforts in the past, for example by “German researcher Stefan Rahmstorf”.

Unfortunately there is no mention of the fact that the pages of Science magazine are hosting a peer-to-peer debate among Rahmstorf, the POL group and others, about the very significance of Rahmstorf’s linear-modelling methods.

(2) For some reason (more about this later), Mr Black leaves unchallenged the notion that “for the past 2,000 years, the [global average] sea level was very stable, it only varied by about 20cm” adding that according to POL’s Simon Holgate “There is some limited archaeological evidence [based on] the sill heights of fish enclosures that the Romans used, that’s probably the strongest evidence that there hasn’t been any significant change in sea level over the last 2,000 years”. Some major news would that indeed be: compare it to the POL’s much nuanced FAQ (e.g. “Changes in ocean level due to climate change can be greater in some places than others because the ocean circulation will adapt to accommodate the new climate regime”).

And go look for Roman sills and sea levels in the POL website, if you can.

(3) Mr Black doesn’t involve himself that much in numbers. Too bad. Here some results. If the current rise rate of 3-mm per year is true, by the year 2100 the sea level will have risen by 28 centimeters. For that level to reach “between 0.8m and 1.5m”, the yearly rate must go up to 9-16 millimeters per year (3 to 5 times more than today), or more. One would hope that measurement systems able to “see” 3 millimeters with any significance, will be able to measure a three- to five-fold increase. By when that is going to happen, we are not told.

(4) Funnily enough, it’s at the end of the article that we are told that “Dr Jevrejeva’s projections have been submitted for publication in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”. So the whole the piece was about a poster presentation at the EGU conference? So much for a major breakthrough deserving front-page space in the BBC News website.

If anybody asks me, that’s the strongest evidence for climate-change zeal…

There is more…looking around Google News, it becomes evident that the news story originated with a Reuters reported at the EGU conference in Vienna. Apart from the BBC, most if not all news media are now reporting the Reuters piece verbatim. On the BBC site, Mr Black does not mention Reuters, and is reported as actually physically being in Vienna himself.

The whole BBC article looks like original research: perhaps it is. Suspiciously, though, the same people are mentioned by Mr Black and by Reuters…