Guest commentary by Mark Boslough*
The Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change was held during Halloween week. It was most notable for the breadth of opinion — and the span of credibility — of its speakers. I have long complained about the lack of willingness of most contrarians to attend and present their arguments at mainstream scientific conferences. After three years of convening climate-related sessions at AGU, I have yet to receive an abstract that argues against anthropogenic global warming. Such presentations can usually only be seen at conferences held by the Heartland Institute. There isn’t much chance of a mainstream scientist attending a meeting organized by a political think tank known for its anti-science activism, so opportunities for interaction between the groups are rare.
The conference was the third in a series (the first was held in Halifax ten years ago) that actively solicits participation from conventional scientists as well as those on the fringes. Organized by the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with co-sponsorship from the International Arctic Research Center, Brookhaven, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the meeting has sufficient credibility to attract speakers like Richard Peltier and Gerald North, while also providing the podium to Christopher Monckton and Don Easterbrook. Travel grants from LANL were provided to assist some of the speakers.
It quickly became apparent that the meeting would be run with a firm, no-nonsense approach to confrontation. In my original abstract, I used the term “contrarian,” which I have always considered to be a polite, non-judgmental descriptive term. Petr Chylek, LANL Laboratory Fellow and chair of the conference program committee responded by telling me, “I would like to ask you for some revision. The designations like ‘contrarians, skeptics, deniers, etc.’ may be offensive to some scientists present. Perhaps you can re-write your abstract and your presentation without using such words.” Fair enough, given the potential for contentiousness. Later, a generalized request went to all speakers: “Please, do not use any demeaning labels like deniers, contrarians, warmers, alarmists, … Please, stick to science. Stay away from personal attacks on other scientists present or not.”
I was disappointed, however, that the poster abstract I submitted with Lloyd Keigwin (WHOI), “Misrepresentations of Sargasso Sea Temperatures by Global Warming Doubters,” was rejected. This abstract was essentially the same material we presented at last year’s GSA meeting in Denver, and revealed the fact that a graph in Lloyd’s 1996 Science paper had been redrawn for the paper “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Arthur Robinson and coauthors. Some of the original data on Lloyd’s graph had been removed and replaced by fabricated data, apparently in an attempt to argue that temperatures are lower now than the 3000-year average. The doctored version of the graph has been used repeatedly in opinion pieces and was reprinted by Fred Singer in the NIPCC report. It is arguably one of the most widely reproduced graphs in contrarian literature, and in one form was sent out to tens of thousands of scientists to solicit signatures for the so-called “Oregon petition”.
Petr Chylek, explaining his reason for rejection, said, “This Conference is not a suitable forum for type of presentations described in submitted abstract. We would accept a paper that spoke to the science, the measurements, the interpretation, but not simply an attempted refutation of someone else’s assertions (especially when made in unpublished reports and blog site).” Of course, I’m not sure that a correction by the author of a graph that has been improperly reproduced in the primary contrarian literature is not the same thing as an “attempted refutation”.
The first day of the conference was buzzing with news of Richard Muller’s announcement of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) results. Just a week earlier, he had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism (There were good reasons for doubt, until now)”. Then, only one day before the conference, David Rose of the Daily Mail broke a supposed “scandal”: “Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague”. Muller’s coauthor, Judith Curry, was quoted saying, “There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.” This story was picked up by Fox News and the narrative that spread throughout the blogosphere was that “Curry has turned on Muller.”
Reading about climate change in the mainstream media — let alone on blogs — can be like looking at reality in a funhouse mirror. When Muller got up to discuss the BEST results on Tuesday morning, the first thing he did was point out that the title of the WSJ piece did not come from him. His original title was “Cooling the Global Warming Debate.” But since his name was under the title he didn’t write, it was automatically attributed to him, as a direct quote. In fact he said, he had been misquoted more times since this was published than he had in the rest of his life. The Daily Mail/Fox News story seemed just as distorted. If Curry and Muller had a major scientific disagreement, wouldn’t a scientific conference be the appropriate place for the debate? If they were at loggerheads over the fundamental question of whether “global warming hasn’t stopped” wouldn’t one of them have mentioned it? They each gave two presentations, and this never came up in public or in any conversation I was aware of.
The conference was remarkably well run. For the most part, participants were well behaved and adhered to Petr Chylek’s strict rules—avoiding inflammatory terms, and steering away from personal attacks and interruptions. The one exception was Judith Curry, who apparently did not get the memo. She gave a banquet presentation entitled, “The Uncertainty Monster at the Climate Science-Policy Interface”. My impression was that her presentation was intended to be more of a vehicle to criticize her adversaries than to talk about uncertainty.
Her most personal attack was against Michael Mann, who she used to illustrate “uncertainty hiding” by showing a caricature of him standing next to the “uncertainty monster” holding a hockey stick and hidden by a sheet, with the cartoon-Mann saying “what uncertainty?” Next to the cartoon was and image of the cover of the book “The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science” illustrated with the multiproxy time series that Mann and his coauthors made famous. Ironically, Mann’s carefully plotted uncertainty bands were not visible on the presentation graphic, just as they were not reproduced in Fred Singer’s NIPCC report. “What uncertainty?” indeed!
Curry described her transition from a scientist who felt that it was the responsible thing to do to support the IPCC conclusions to someone who is “about 50% a denier”. She attributed this change to “climategate” and the reaction she received due to her initial comments about it. She was the only speaker who ignored the policy against the word “denier.” She used the banned “d-word” repeatedly for effect when setting up a straw-man argument against what she called “IPCC/UNFCCC ideology” — a term she coined to label notions such as “anthropogenic climate change is real” and “deniers are attacking climate science and scientists”. She assured the audience that she didn’t think there were any “IPCC ideologues” at the conference but she had heard rumors that some were invited and had declined. She called out Kevin Trenberth as a supposed example of such an ideologue (again rejecting the policy against personal attack).
Among her straw-man arguments was her dismissal of standard risk-reduction methodology for low-probability high-consequence events as a mere “precautionary principle” (the same principle that nuclear weapons engineers are taught when they told to always ask “what can go horribly wrong?”). One colleague later remarked that her approach to uncertainty quantification reminded him of an English major who had just finished reading Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
I met most of the conference participants during the course of the week, and had cordial conversations with all those with whom I disagreed. One thing I have long suspected was strongly reinforced: there is no common scientific understanding amongst contrarians. Many of them are just as critical of one another’s ideas as they are of conventional science. William Gray stood up after many of the presentations on solar influence to declare that solar variability is not important. It’s even less important than CO2, he said. It’s ocean variability that is the cause of most climate change. Petr Chylek stood up after Fred Singer’s presentation (in which Singer presented old uncorrected UAH MSU data that suggested cooling) and said emphatically, “Denying the warming makes no sense!”.
I spent a lot of time talking to Christopher Monckton, who may have been the only non-scientist to give a presentation. He has no understanding of science or the scientific method, and when I asked him about scientific prediction, he called it a “fool’s errand”. He has a strong authoritarian approach to those with whom he disagrees, and his conspiracy theories run deep and dark. He names specific names and calls IPCC contributors “malevolent”. I asked him to share the very worst hacked email he could remember. The only specific example he gave was the one in which someone referred to him as a “charlatan”.
Several of us had beers at the Marble Brewery overlooking the Santa Fe plaza on Thursday evening, where Monckton recounted his efforts to get the police involved in an investigation of one IPCC lead author who (he says) committed criminal fraud associated with a graph in the IPCC report. (His own adventures in graphical misrepresentation are of course completely unproblematic).
The main lesson I took away from the conference was this: there is no consistent contrarian science, and there is no defining contrarian ideology or motivation. Some are sincere. Others are angry at their lack of funding. Some appear to be envious of the IPCC scientists’ success, and others have found a niche that gets them attention they would not otherwise get. Only a few appear to be motivated by politics. No single label applies to them, and I found myself referring to them as “contrarians/skeptics/deniers/enablers/provocateurs/publicity-seekers”.
The one common thread I found among them was the fervent belief that “Climategate” was a conspiracy and that the IPCC is rigged. This faith-based belief seems to be unshakable, and is the antithesis of true skepticism. Those I met were uniformly cynical about the honesty and motivations of mainstream scientists. If I were forced to use a single label, I would be inclined to call them “science cynics”.
*These comments reflect the personal opinion of the author and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of his employer or his funding agencies.
John #149
At AGU, conveners can select up to four invited speakers per oral session. Invited speakers are usually given a bit more time and they are identified on the program as “invited”.
For the Santa Fe conference, the abstract submission form had two boxes to be checked: “invited” and “contributed”. According to Petr Chylek (the conference chair) the invited presentations were to be 15-20 minutes long, and the contributed presentations were to be 10-15 minutes. I checked the “invited” box when I submitted my abstract.
As it turned out, all the presentations were 20 minutes long, so I assumed everyone had requested an “invited” presentation. As far as I could see, there was no identification of invited speakers on the conference program or website (unlike the way AGU does it).
When I posted a comment yesterday saying that Fred Singer had given an invited presentation, I immediately got a message from Petr correcting me and telling me that Fred was not invited. Now I’m very curious about who *was* invited, and what the distinction was between invited and contributed speakers and I have a request out to Petr asking for the list. Perhaps the invited speakers were the ones who got travel grants.
I now wish I’d had the time to attend, since the discussion raises an interesting possibility, in parallel with my findings in Skeptics Prefer Pal Review Over Peer Review: Chris de Freitas, Pat Michaels And Their Pals, 1997-2003.
Consider:
1) Heartland ICC’s.
2) Energy and Environment
vs
3) Climate Research. That was a respectable journal with a “rogue editor” who for a while a certain set of authors’ papers, not all of which were necessarily bad, but some of which were awful … along with reasonable papers from many other authors.
Compared to 1) and 2), it is far better to have papers (or talks) where most of the research is reasonable, than it is to publish in E&E or talk at ICCC. Those sound more credible on a C.V. and can be quoted elsewhere.
I’m too busy with another project to look hard at this right now, but maybe others have the time. Talks by the following may be just fine, or not.Maybe others can comment, perhaps looking at Final Agenda, especially: the following.
Again, the papers may be perfectly fine … but I’ve never seen such a concentration of *familiar* names for a Federally-funded conference like this, and some of these titles make me nervous:
J. Curry (Georgia Tech) A Critical Look at the IPCC AR4 Climate Change Detection and Attribution
R. Lindzen (MIT) Climate v. Climate Alarm
D. Easterbrook (Western Washington U) Ice core isotope data: The past is the key to the future
F. Singer (SEPP) Is the reported global surface warming of 1979 to 1997 real?
Judy Curry (Georgia Tech) The uncertainty monster at the climate science-policy interface (Banquet speaker)
N. Scafetta (Duke U) The climate oscillations: Analysis, implication and their astronomical origin
C. Loehle (Nat Council for Air Improvement) Climate change attribution using empirical decomposition
P. Chylek (LANL) Ice core evidence for a high spatial and temporal variability of the AMO
C. Monckton (The Viscount of Brenchley) , Is CO2 mitigation cost-effective?
C. Essex (U Western Ontario) Regime algebra and climate theory
N-A Morner (Paleogeophysics, Stockholm) Sea level changes in the Indian Ocean: Observational facts
P. Knappenberger, Short-term climate model projected trends of global temperature and observations
W. Gray (CSU) Recent multi-century climate changes as a result of variation in the global oceans deep MOC
PM-3 P. Chylek, C. Folland, et al (LANL, UK Met Office) Observed and model simulated 20th century Arctic temperature variability: Anthropogenic warming and natural climate variability
PM-8 H. Inhaber (Risk Concept) Will Wind Fulfill its Promise of CO2 Reductions?
PM-12 H. Hayden (U Connecticut) Doing the Obvious: Linearizing (recall: his book lauded E-G Beck’s CO2 paper and he’s a retired atomic physicist … but maybe he’s become a climate researcher)
PW-3 Fred Singer (SEPP) Are observed and modeled patterns of temperature trends ‘Consisten’? Comparing the ‘Fingerprints’
–
John, perhaps this will be another opportunity:
February 29, 2012 – March 2, 2012
http://www.cvent.com/events/conference-on-data-analysis-coda-/event-summary-44bebcba2d694b949fad4ff244ee2866.aspx
“… the first Conference on Data Analysis (CoDA), hosted by the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The invited program features sessions exploring
Statistical Issues in Climate and Energy ….”
re MarkB (#151)’s
> “Now I’m very curious about who *was* invited…and I have a request out to Petr asking for the list” –
FYI, today I asked the Conference Coordinator of the (LANL) Center for Nonlinear Studies for the list of the conferences’s travel grant recipients, but he wasn’t willing to provide it.
Let us know when you hear back from Petr please.
Interesting that so many seem to reject the scientific consensus due to the “climategate” emails. For me, it was the outrageous antics of people like Fred Singer and Jo Nova that convinced me that the anti-AGW crowd pretty much has nothing worthy of serious consideration to present.
response to commenter 152’s request
In addition I have synopsized other interesting papers if others would like a further posting.
. Curry (Georgia Tech) A Critical Look at the IPCC AR4 Climate Change Detection and Attribution
Hard to comment on this paper since it’s diffuse in its discussion. Largely superceded by more recent work since AR4
R. Lindzen (MIT) Climate v. Climate Alarm
Right observations but Dessler (2010) shows fairly clearly wrong interpretation. I asked Richard about this at the meeting but he hadn’t read Dessler’s most recent paper.
D. Easterbrook (Western Washington U) Ice core isotope data: The past is the key to the future
Mostly a rant. His arguments left out most of the research in the past 15 years???
F. Singer (SEPP) Is the reported global surface warming of 1979 to 1997 real?
After Rich Muller’s paper, this was just an embarrassment to Fred.
Judy Curry (Georgia Tech) The uncertainty monster at the climate science-policy interface (Banquet speaker)
Perhaps the most unfortunate keynote talk I have ever heard.
N. Scafetta (Duke U) The climate oscillations: Analysis, implication and their astronomical origin
Nicola is a careful and persistent scientist, but this paper most would call numerology reminiscent of Ted —–,
Work a decade ago. Still it’s work that one needs to keep in mind. The premise, that gravitational effects on the sun by Jupiter could constrain solar activity, at least timing, is pretty far out, but not entirely far out.
C. Loehle (Nat Council for Air Improvement) Climate change attribution using empirical decomposition
Loehle looks at 20 and 60 yr cycles in the temperature record over the past 150 yrs or so. He uses observations through 1950 to “calibrate” natural warming and cooling and then applies this to temperature changes since 1970. He gets that AMO/PDO might have caused over 1/2 of warming 1970-2000 and substantial cooling since. But when I try to do the same thing, I have to omit the warming cycle 1910-1940 because there was a significant warming during that time due to rising AGHGs. That said, I get about 1/5 of the warming 1970-2000 due to multi-decadal ocean cycles. Later in the conference Chris Folland, Chylek et al showed a more rigorous cross-correlation attempt to sort out forcings which got about 1/3 warming from AMO. Others doing this don’t get as much, but I’m sure there will be lots more study of this in the growing body of literature. To me bottom line is that AMO/PDO does account for warming and cooling since 1920 and that will most likely reduce current estimates of median climate sensitivity, but by how much we’ll have to wait and see. (btw I’ve asked Gavin to consider a posting on RC about this.)
P. Chylek (LANL) Ice core evidence for a high spatial and temporal variability of the AMO
Fascinating paper which shows among other things that both the 20 and 60 yr ocean cycles come and go over the time period he looked at ~4,000 yrs. Modelers are looking at why this might be. Here they reproduce the results of another paper in the literature:
GET REFERENCE
C. Monckton (The Viscount of Brenchley) , Is CO2 mitigation cost-effective?
Monckton’s paper:
Monckton is a consummate debater and as such could easily win either side of the warming argument. His economic criticism of the Stern Report looked to me like setting up an unreal or exaggerated strawman and then of course easily knocking it down. Mostly useless to us.
Monckton’s poster—didn’t see it, but from the abstract it looks like something very similar to his talk.
C. Essex (U Western Ontario) Regime algebra and climate theory N-A
His reasoning assumes that those involved with modeling haven’t thought of his concerns. I think a careful look at the literature might show a stronger basis for turing to models to understand observations. As for climate being said to be “average” weather, we all know that’s an over-simplification but one that helps the lay person see the difference between precise April day behavior and average April behavior. Everyone agrees there is more to it thatn that, but to first order…
Morner (Paleogeophysics, Stockholm) Sea level changes in the Indian Ocean: Observational facts
Pretty much a rant. He showed that there has been little SLR in the Indian O.—Maldives, etc. and claims the satellite observations are just plain wrong. Not much new there.
P. Knappenberger, Short-term climate model projected trends of global temperature and observations
Chip gave a nice, thoughtful talk, but it’s results have been superceded. He looked carefully at whether the AR4 model simulations adequately predicted the warming “hiatus” of the past 10 years. He found it just barely likely. However, those simulations knew nothing about the anomalous lack of solar activity, unexpected dust in the stratosphere (paper given at this conference), and Sue Solomon’s study showing decreased stratospheric H2O also had caused cooling. Were he to repeat his work with models incorporating these, he probablyl would have come to a different conclusion. I note here also that at least two carefully initialized model simulations done around 2000 did predict a hiatus due to existence of ocean cycles in their cooling phases. Chip, unfortunately didn’t discuss these publications.
W. Gray (CSU) Recent multi-century climate changes as a result of variation in the global oceans deep MOC
Classic Gray. Not much new there, but useful as he keeps urging us to look at the oceans more carefully. Byw, during the conference Bill kept saying that it’s the oceans—that solar and dust loading aren’t all that important in determing climate…….
PM-3 P. Chylek, C. Folland, et al (LANL, UK Met Office) Observed and model simulated 20th century Arctic temperature variability: Anthropogenic warming and natural climate variability
Another study arguing that AR4 models underestimated ocean multi-decadal warmings and coolings especially in the Arctic.
PM-8 H. Inhaber (Risk Concept) Will Wind Fulfill its Promise of CO2 Reductions?
Interesting paper making the point that inefficiencies of having to daily start up fossil fuel backups will greatly reduce their efficiency. Something to think about.
PM-12 H. Hayden (U Connecticut) Doing the Obvious: Linearizing (recall: his book lauded E-G Beck’s CO2 paper and he’s a retired atomic physicist … but maybe he’s become a climate researcher)
Didn’t see it.
PW-3 Fred Singer (SEPP) Are observed and modeled patterns of temperature trends ‘Consistency’? Comparing the ‘Fingerprints’
Fred’s ideas are pretty old-fashioned. The many recent studies of satellite temps are showing increasing agreement with models.
> some of these titles make me nervous
Google the title; the ones I’ve looked at so far were retreads of stuff previously cited or commented on, but not necessarily updated to reflect that,
e.g.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Knappenberger%2C+Short-term+climate+model+projected+trends+of+global+temperature+and+observations
Re: 156 Chick: thanks!
#156 Thanks Chick, very good break down, I understand more why they are so stiff with accepting AGW. From what they disclose I don’t read what is really going on. First they don’t deal with the duality of light and dark, adiabatic lapse rate and layered boundary layers, they don’t have an idea about CFC’s as a Greenhouse gas having opposite effects in the Polar stratospheres. They fail to reveal sea ice implications, even if W Gray is right, cold air caps the open ocean, without a colder Arctic atmosphere, the polar seas have less ice, subsequently Arctic seas are more susceptible to become the agent of change. W Gray must include both, at the surface there is an interface interplay, excessively important for hurricanes, tornados as well as climate. Which brings me back to Curry’s work about boundary layers, of which they appear to disappear when there is less and no ice, even in darkness. My horizontal refraction work brings that out in spades. So all in all they are talking about substance having little to do with present deeply changing climate circumstances. They are talking about ants when they should be observing Gorillas.
Michael Doliner
>> 3. Possible explanation for temporary leveling off of warming.
The theory of catastrophic global warming based on positive feedback is wrong? Could you even entertain the possibility that an unpredicted period of levelling off might indicate that to be the case?
[Response: Strawman premise, incorrect assessment, pointless rhetorical question. please try and do better. – gavin]
> Chip gave a nice, thoughtful talk, but it’s results have been superceded
That’s advocacy science in action (his company is the 2nd hit if you search for “advocacy science” — along with a plethora of hits to seemingly reasonable and sober work citing the usual deniers doubting the IPCC).
Any opportunity to repeat an already debunked paper as though it were fresh and new is precious for these folks.
What matters to the advocate is repeating his talking point, not updating it.
@ timg56 — 22 Dec 2011 @ 7:13 PM re your skepticism of dangerous wet bulb global temperatures – “I have a hard time believing this statement:
‘..will experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress at wet-bulb temperature above 95 degrees sustained for six hours or more,'”
from http://www.mcrdpi.usmc.mil/weather.asp (Marine Corps Paris Island, the place where “We make Marines”)
Category……WBGT °F……..WBGT °C……..Flag color
5……………….=>90……………..=>32.2…………..Black
“Black Flag (WBGTI of 90 and above degrees F): All nonessential physical activity will be halted.”
You may not believe it, but the guys that train the tough guys that become Marines believe it – from experience.
“Many studies have measured the incidence of heat casualties among military personnel in a training environment. The reported incidence of heat injury at basic military training facilities is typically about 5 to 8 cases per 10,000 troops per week, although higher rates were reported in the Marine Corps prior to implementation of heat-related training restrictions.”
“…Vietnam [heat casualties] ran as high as 378 per 10,000 per week. Because these figures do not include soldiers who were adversely affected by heat but did not come to the attention of the reporting system, the true incidence of heat illness may have been much higher.” PRACTICAL MEDICAL ASPECTS OF MILITARY OPERATIONS IN THE HEAT, LARRY A. SONNA, MD, PHD* http://www.raems.com/MAHE/11.pdf
Of course, if you’re not a physically very fit and well trained soldier under the observation of Medical Officers who frequently check the temperatures and your responses, and order you to refrain from dangerous physical activity when conditions warrant(or conversely, accept that the necessities of war require sacrifice), YMMV –
http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environment-and-health/Climate-change/activities/prevention,-preparedness-and-response/heathealth-action-plans/heat-threatens-health-key-figures-for-europe
“Over 70,000 additional deaths were recorded in the summer of 2003 in 12 European countries.”
“Russia Heat Wave May Kill 15,000, Shave $15 Billion of GDP” “The capital broke another record today when the temperature reached 32.8 degrees Celsius (91 Fahrenheit).” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-10/russia-may-lose-15-000-lives-15-billion-of-economic-output-in-heat-wave.html
“What I have doubts about are many of the predictions.” How ’bout the observed facts? Do you also believe that the public health officials who report heat related deaths are in on the conspiracy with the climate scientists?
The reason you are getting piled on is because your doubts are based on some combination of social/political/religious/economic/educational background considerations; and you not only lack knowledge to base your doubts on facts, you do not respect the years of work and hard gains in knowledge achieved by the experts because the facts they know disagree with your “gut feelings”.
If you ask “how do you know that?”, you will likely get a polite explanation – and probably more information than you want.
If you say instead “I have a hard time believing” to someone who has been maliciously attacked by the likes of Monckton, or Plimer, or Morano, or Palin, or Limbaugh, or even Curry(who’s smart enough to know better), you immediately signal that you’ve chosen a “side”. Reality is like a Möbius strip – there’s only one side.
Do you also have a hard time believing that “skeptics” might have a reason to mislead you, perhaps by omitting error bars on a reproduced graph, and then claiming that “warmists” are ignoring uncertainty?
As Chris Colose points out in 128, with references to the slides used, it is clear that the slide JC used in her presentation is not the one she has in her PDF. The projector did not incorrectly project the uncertainty ranges. The slide in the presentation has clearly visible erase marks. The one in the presentation has obviously been tampered with to remove the uncertainty. One can only wonder who did the tampering? And why would the PDF not match the slides used in the presentation? What is JC’s response to these questions?
Michael #128
In the conclusion of my essay I pointed out that the contrarians at that Santa Fe conference appeared to have one thing in common: the cynical belief (contrary to the evidence) that climategate was a conspiracy and that the IPCC is rigged.
The accusations you are making about Prof. Curry–that she intentionally hid the uncertainty bands–are no different than the cynical accusations that climategate conspiracy theorists have made about the authors of the stolen email. There is no evidence that she did this, just as there is no evidence that anybody “hid the decline” in global temperatures. In fact, if you look at other slides from the pdf version of her presentation, you will see other gray-scale shading that is not visible in the youtube video.
If you are going to accuse someone of doctoring a graph or other misconduct, you need bomb-proof evidence. Please, let’s not sink to the level of making unsubstantiated and false accusations, or we are ceding the high ground.
In my essay, I said “Mann’s carefully plotted uncertainty bands were not visible on the presentation graphic, just as they were not reproduced in Fred Singer’s NIPCC report.” I did not know why they were not visible. I assumed at the time they were not shown on the original book cover just as they were removed from the NIPCC version of the graph. But let me say again for the record that I never suspected or accused Prof. Curry of expunging them.
I hope Prof. Curry will give the subjects of her own criticism the same benefit of the doubt in the future.
BTW, via Climate, Etc I found Don Easterbrook’s 49-slide talk, presumably for 20 minutes.
“The 1977-1998 global warming period is over and we are now in a period of global cooling that will last several decades, similar to continuing natural cycles dating back thousands of years.”
I love the conclusion:
“Dogma is an impediment to the free exercise of thought. It paralyzes the intelligence.”
In Chick’s (156) response to John Mashey he said that Fred Singer had embarrassed himself.
With all due respect to Chick: I don’t think that it is possible for Fred Singer to embarrass himself.
re: 166
Actually, I think it is possible, for other reasons that should become clear within the next week or two. But: does anyone have a copy of Fred’s talk at Santa Fe?
That would be specifically useful.
For a sympathetic and fascinating take on William Gray, check out Chris Mooney’s Storm World (a good read as well). He was *the* giant in his field for a very long time, but it seems an object lesson in how a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when traveling into strange waters. Authority is not self-substantiating forever, unless backed by facts and evidence.
Perhaps the most unfortunate keynote talk I have ever heard. …
Interestingly, recently a worthwhile, I think, discussion broke out in an old thread at Climate Etc., and Judy has tossed in several comments. Fred Moolten has done his usual patient and seemingly thorough job of presenting current science.
Fred gets it going here with a discussion on a new paper: Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance – Huber and Knutti.
The discussion resumes here, and again here.
Some may have forgotten this, but Judith thought Pat Michaels had the better argument in the dust up between Santer and Michaels before congress earlier this year. The video is here, panel 2.
It’s rare these days that anything is interesting there, but I thought this back and forth was.
JCH, that is indeed interesting, particularly this brief assessment of the Huber&Knutti paper.
We need a climate hearing; some Qs need to be asked where they can be answered under oath.
@170
According to Dr. Curry
“It is a weak methodology that agrees with a bunch of previous studies, so there is no surprising result. I can do a post that tears the paper apart, but since I don’t think this is a very significant paper, i don’t think it is worth the effort?”
I doubt she’s capable of “tearing the paper apart”, or even making a significant dent on its conclusions, especially considering that her previous foray into detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change ended with an embarrassing train wreck…
#165–Wow. Cherry-pick HADCRU starting in ’98 and you still get a basically flat linear trend (-.0013C/decade.) Talk about dogma and evidence!
Chick @ 156, thanks for the extensive summary. A question: are you thinking of the AMO as a forcing?
All: James links a nice new little paper and a previous blog post on the same subject:
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-observational-assessment-of-climate.html
At #117 Mark Boslough asked if Fred Singer was invited. At #121 he noted that Petr Chylek had e-mailed him to say that Singer was not invited. I don’t believe Chylek’s comment since Singer appears as an invited speaker on Judith Curry’s web site which has a list of speakers:
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/santafe/
re: #174 Ian thanks!
From that list, I note that 2 organizers (Chylek & Schwartz) had invited papers, I guess OK.
But Singer had 2 and Scafetta 1 (Rhodes Fairbridge appears again!). Singer has “proved” that the warming of 1978-200 is NOT real.
Suggestion: could we have a discussion thread for each of the 3 papers, as each deserves some analysis,
remembering that tax dollars paid for this conference.
Gavin’s response to 160.
Gavin the question is only seen as rhetorical as it is unlikely that you would furnish an answer. Positive feedbacks are essential to the theory that AGW constitute an urgent problem for mankind to tackle and these positive feedbacks are assumed in the models. Is it even conceivable to you that this assumption is wrong and that explains the recent lack of warming? And for the record this is not a rhetorical question, or a straw argument, this is a question from a taxpayer to a modeller who’s paid for by my taxes, and I would at least appreciate the courtesy of a response.
[Response: Since we appear to live in different countries, I’m not sure of the relevance of your financial affairs to commenting on a blog, but regardless, I’m happy to respond. First off, your conception of what goes into models is wrong – positive feedbacks are outcomes that derive from the physics, not a priori assumptions. Secondly, the constraints that we have on what the net feedback is do not come from models at all, but from the records of past climate. Thirdly, I’m happy to test any reasonable variation in the model physics that is in accord with physical observations – that unfortunately rules out changing the conservation of energy, Clausius-Clapeyron, Navier-Stokes, radiative absorption properties of greenhouse gases etc. though. Indeed, climate modellers across the world have been varying what can be varied for decades – and none of those variations give you matches to the real world while at the same time indicating that climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is negligible. Instead, you have dozens of models that indicate that short term trends in temperature can vary widely due to the internal variability, and that what we have seen in the last decade is neither exceptional nor predictive of changes in the future (presumably you don’t think that the Excel linear regression function is a climate model). There certainly are observations of climate that do challenge the models – the warm poles during the Eocene, the abruptness of the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas – but recent temperature trends are not anything like as anomalous – indeed, given the relative uncertainty in aerosol or solar forcings and the importance of internal variability on short time scales – it doesn’t appear very anomalous at all. – gavin]
To Pete @ comment 173– “Chick @ 156, thanks for the extensive summary. A question: are you thinking of the AMO as a forcing?”
In the sense that semi-cyclic ocean variability can alternately warm and cool the atmosphere. Thus AMO could have alternately warmed the earth in the 1930-40s, cooled it 1960-70s, and warmed again 1990s (note no trend here, just ups and downs as with solar activity). If this cycle is not taken into account we get an incorrect idea of the magnitude of AGHG forcings and feedbacks and thus a less accurate estimate of climate sensitivity from 20th century observations compared with models. The big problem is to determine the fraction of the warmings and coolings attributable to AMO cycles.
I believe that it would be very helpful if RealClimate made a post on AMO – what it is, how we know it’s “for real”, how much of an impact it can have on temperatures, etc.
toto, Most of what you need to know about AMO is in its name–it oscillates. It doesn’t increase quasi-linearly. If one is to contend that a partial cycle is responsible for much of current warming, one must also explain why it has not caused similar warming in the past.
AMO is just the latest straw grasped by the “fun-with-Fourier” mathturbators.
Gavin’s response to 176
Do you have a view on the findings of this paper?
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02626667.2010.513518
They do appear to cast doubts on the reliability of the climate models currently being used for predictions of future climate?
[Response: Their study is mostly confused and that conclusions doesn’t follow. Mainly they have misunderstood that any real-world climate record is made up of a combination of a particular realisation of the internal variability (when a El Nino occurs, how the jet stream wiggles, when there is a storm etc.) combined with a component that is externally driven (by volcanoes, greenhouse gas changes, orbital variations, the sun, aerosols etc.). The internal variability part is unpredictable by climate models because it is chaotic (with the exception, for relatively short periods of time, of simulations that are initialised to the observed state like weather forecast models), while the component driven by the external factors is predictable (at least in theory). On short time scales in local regions, the ratio of the unpredictable internal variability to the predictable component is very high. This is what these authors found, but is neither surprising nor determinative of how useful long term projections are. There is a comment on this paper that makes the same points (and more) (Huard, 2011). – gavin]
There is a thread on Catholic Answers Forum about the Curry-Muller fallout; they cite & link: http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/280948/Is-global-warming-over
Here is how I responded (hope I got it at least partly right, bec I haven’t been following Curry’s gripes):
Gavin’s response to 180
Thanks for the feedback Gavin, I am sure you will do a rebuttal paper this time around rather than just critiquing their paper on here and I look forward to reading it. They do mention you several times in the paper and refer to your original comments re their method, stating that you did not have an issue with the findings. From your comment that does not seem to be the case.
[Response: The Huard commentary makes most of the points I would make. I have certainly never stated that I ‘have no problems with their method’, so if that is the impression given, it would be incorrect. My comments on their first paper are here. – gavin]
Aside, earlier note that David Harrington:30 Dec 2011 at 11:44 AM
refers to “the recent lack of warming” — rebunking; correction needed.
LV @ 181
Re: Curry
Diplomatically stated, and there does seems to be some truth in it, but it may not be quite fair to climate scientists. IMO, it’s more like Kim Kardashian crashing the set of Nova and trying to make attention getting waves.
#184, you mean like the family kid throwing a temper tantrum bec the parents and older sibblings have been involved in fighting against some dangerous disaster and have ignored the little one?
re: #174 & `175, and various comments from thsoe who attended.
Regarding Singer:
Synthesizing various public information and some private emails, I conjecture a pattern.
Does this fit behavior seen at the conference?
1) When speaking to experts, Singer’s work often gets clobbered or is seen as irrelevant.
However, when people point out multiple serious problems, he is polite, pleasant, says he will followup, but usually does not.
2) He has often lectured to larger groups, usually friendly to his messages or with minimal expertise to challenge him. See Minnesota Free Market Institute, pp.52-59 or Strange Scholarship…, pp.80-82 where Ed Wegman ran a session at his Interface conference (statisticians, mainly) called:
Testing the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming: A continuing controversy,
S. Fred Singer, Science & Environmental Policy Project
I hear Singer gave his talk, than had to leave immediately for the airport, so there was little or no time for questions.
3) While polite in person, Singer often acts elsewise: the Justin Lancaster episode, the attacks on Ben Santer, sic’ing lawyer (unsuccessfully) on Science and Naomi Oreskes, writing numerous negative things about people in friendly venues like the Washington Times or the Heartland newsletters.
4) No matter how much his material is debunked (as on satellites), or challenged in person, the same talks keep coming.
For example, the 2nd piece at Santa it seems to have been his standard talk around Europe earlier in the Fall, mostly for friendly, inexpert audiences. At least one (expert) group challenged him strongly, but that seems to have been ignored.
5) He hasn’t really produced much in the last decade or two of:
a) Climate research in credible peer-reviewed journals (not E&E)
b) That has stood up very well.
Does anyone know of anything beyond:
1) S. Fred Singer, “Statistical Analysis does not support a human influence on climate,” Energy and Environment, 2002
2) David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer, “Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation,” Geophysical Research Letters 2004
3) David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer, Paul C. Knappenberger, Patrick J. Michaels, “Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: New evidence,” Geo. Research Letters 2004.
4) David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer,, “A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions,” Intl. J Climatology, 2008.
5) Fred Singer, “Lack of Consistency Between Modeled and Observed Temperature Trends,” Energy and Environment, June 2011.
Do take a look at that, as he acknowledges:
“I thank Roger Cohen and Christopher Monckton for useful discussion, three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, and Robert Warren Anderson and Wm McBride for technical assistance.”
(Robert Warren Anderson, I think, is recent Economics PhD at George Mason University.
#176 David Harrington
Of course this is a tired old question but ‘what lack of warming’?
http://ossfoundation.us/the-leading-edge/projects/environment/global-warming/current-climate-conditions/temperature
Or are you only considering a narrowly limited view of the available data to justify your unsubstantial statement?
David Harrington,
First,there is strong evidence that the feedback for a forcing is positive–be that forcing CO2 or TSI. It is pretty much impossible to make a climate model look Earthlike without a positive feedback. Then there are the estimates of CO2 sensitivity–nearly all of which give values of 2-6 per doubling of CO2. The 90% confidence interval is 2 to 4.5 with a most probable value of 3, and far more probability on the high side than the low. You seem to want to bet the future of human civilization on a 20:1 longshot.
There is far more to climate science than the past 40 years of warming. There is the explanatory power of the consensus model, which allows us to understand hundreds of millions of years of climate. There is the predictive power of that model (e.g. ongoing warming, Mt. Pinatubo, increasing drought and impulsive precipitation…). There is the fact that the stratosphere is cooling even as the troposphere warms–a sure sign of a greenhouse mechanism.
As to the paper you cited, both you and the authors of the paper need to understand how climate models work. Climate models display both weather and climate. Unless the weather for a particlar run of a model matches the weather that actually occurred in our reality, the results of that run will differ from reality. Essentially, what your authors have done is take a single or a few runs and look at details of the predictions. Not only is this an invalid approach, it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of scientific models: They don’t give “answers”, but rather insight into trends and important contributing factors.
Once scientists understand these factors and trends they can make reliable predictions for future climate. These are what you need to pay attention to, as they have proven reliable.
You appear to be a “lukewarmer”–that is, you are reluctant to reject science, but you do not want to embrace ALL the conclusions of scientific analysis because of their implications. The lukewarmer position seems to be based on the fallacy of argument from consequences. It is like the creationist who embraces “micro-evolution”, but rejects “macro-evolution” because it undermines the holy writ of his choice. Grasping at straws is not a consistent position.
See Fred Singer’s Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!
[Response: Singer states “But I do claim that the commonly reported and accepted warming between 1978 and 2000 is based only on thermometers from land surface stations and is not supported by any other evidence that I could find.”. Now since the completely independent satellite data show significant warming over this period (UAH-TLT: 0.09ºC/deg, RSS-TLT: 0.14ºC/dec), and the completely independent ocean datasets (HadSST2 and HadSST3) show significant warming over this period (HadSST2: 0.13ºC/dec, HadSST3: 0.13º/dec), one is left only with the conclusion that Singer is unable to find these sources, since of course, Singer is an honourable man. In which case, here are the links (RSS, UAH, HadSST2, HadSST3. I’m sure that will help clear things up, for Fred Singer is an honourable man. – gavin]
> Fred Singer’s “Fake …”
Weird. And regrettably, nobody can be wrong all the time. Some of the information he has is correct, some is imagined. How do you tell?
(seriously) don’t miss his http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/new_nationwide_fema_camps_should_raise_eyebrows.html
It’s easy to imagine horrors being prepared for, then let imagination run and think “but what _other_ reason can I imagine for them doing that?”
For example, temperature hotter than molten lead is needed to inactivate ‘mad cow’ prions, and the lag time could be years between spreading the stuff by handling it carelessly and consequences showing up. Scary. For a while the Federal Register had requests for bids for a system of incinerators around the country, for burning mad cow carcasses.
I don’t know what ever became of that. I suppose nowadays there’d be a different scenario, to have them available for a bird flu epidemic if one got going.
But it’d fit right in with Singer’s worry about the plans to set up prison-like FEMA camps on a 72-hour notice.
No, I’m not saying that. But you can put pieces together, if you cherrypick the pieces, to make nightmares.
Look back seven or eight years and poke around for what our more suspicious not to say paranoid fellow citizens made of that idea.
“Carcass Disposal Working Group. August 2004. Chapter. 2. Incineration. Authors: … Kansas State University. © 2004 by National Agricultural Biosecurity Center, Kansas State University”
http://fss.k-state.edu/FeaturedContent/CarcassDisposal/PDF%20Files/CH%202%20-%20Incineration.pdf
It remains possible that Nehemiah Scudder will take the presidency in 2012 regardless of how people think they voted.
> don’t miss his
to be clearer–Singer didn’t write the FEMA camps piece at American Thinker.
The American Deranged Thinker demonstrates that if you start out believing the absurd, your thinking will lead you to ever more absurd conclusions until you reexamine the source of all the absurdities. That way madness lies.
#189
“Now since the completely independent satellite data show significant warming over this period (UAH-TLT: 0.09ºC/deg, RSS-TLT: 0.14ºC/dec) …”
UAH-TLT looks low to me – isn’t also 0.14ºC/dec, not 0.09?
Any word on when Nesdis-Star project at NOAA will release an LT product? Their T2 (MT) analysis runs quite a bit warmer than RSS, and falls squarely in the middle of synthetic “MT” trends from CMIP model ensembles, as I recall from Santer et al.
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_validation.html#compare
Sliders!
David,
You are partially correct regarding model inputs regarding feedback. The feedbacks are not assumed, but calculated based on painstaking research. Even so, some of the feedbacks are not so well understood, that their calculated values could be significantly in error.
Explanations for the descrepencies between the models and observed temperature changes or paleoclimatological data center around two explanations: first, the climate has not reached equilibrium, such that temperatures will eventually reach the modelled values, or that some of the inputted feedbacks are too high (if positive), or not low enough (if negative), and that future models will be able to incorporate these newer inputs.
With regards to the recent lack of warming, most explanations center around either natural cooling events such as a solar minimum or changes in ocean cycles, or additional human inputs. such as aerosols from coal burning. It is difficult to zero in on either cause at the present, because they each had an opposite influence a decade ago.
Dan H. wrote: “With regards to the recent lack of warming …”
There is no “recent lack of warming”.
“With regards to the recent lack of warming”
Dan H.- There isn’t any “recent lack of warming.”
Repeating false statements you heard from Fred “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” Singer or some bozo blogger on WTFUWT won’t make them come true. It will get you ignored by people with better things to do, and treated rudely as a denialist by snarky commenters with lots of time on their hands – like me. I can cherry pick statistically non significant time periods which show warming, and I know that the larger increase in T over the last 6 years versus the last 10-30 years isn’t meaningful climatologically. I usually assume that anyone who apparently thinks that short term trends are significant has a deceptive agenda, and is pretending to misunderstand(misunderestimate?) OLS fits, cherry picking endpoints, and the difference between climate and weather – especially when they obstinately refuse to acknowledge the facts.
Dan H is really good at this, isn’t he?
An effective tactic is to fill a thread with misinformation quickly while seeming — to a new or naive reader — to be a reasonable commenter.
One method: person A posts faux-naive leading questions; person B posts deceptively worded calm and apparently reasonable answers.
Indicia: rebunking; no citation; misstatements; partial quoting from single papers; using co2science’s always-twisted misreadings of papers; never correcting or engaging, just steadily posting the talking points.
I’m not cynical enough yet. Working on it though.
[Response:Pegged perfectly–Jim]
Brian Dodge @ 187
Not much of a warming trend since 1998 according to these data sets . I think that is what folks are generally referring to when the mention a lack of “recent” warming. Looks pretty flat to me unless I am missing something ?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2011/plot/gistemp/from:1998/to:2011/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2011
Indicia: rebunking; no citation; misstatements; partial quoting from single papers; using co2science’s always-twisted misreadings of papers; never correcting or engaging, just steadily posting the talking points.
Look up ‘16,000 children die from hunger and related causes’.
These people are trolling from the religious community.
Guaranteed. That’s their evolution technique as well.