Climate science from climate scientists...
The publication ‘Learning from mistakes in climate research’ is the result of a long-winded story with a number of surprises. At least to me.
I have decided to share this story with our readers, since it in some aspects is closely linked with RealClimate.
The “World Climate Widget” from Tony Watts’ blog is probably the most popular deceptive image among climate “skeptics”. We’ll take it under the microscope and show what it would look like when done properly.
So called “climate skeptics” deploy an arsenal of misleading graphics, with which the human influence on the climate can be down played (here are two other examples deconstructed at Realclimate). The image below is especially widespread. It is displayed on many “climate skeptic” websites and is regularly updated.
The “World Climate Widget” of US “climate skeptic” Anthony Watts with our explanations added. The original can be found on Watts’ blog
What would a more honest display of temperature, CO2 and sunspots look like? [Read more…] about The most popular deceptive climate graph
As the World Meteorological Organisation WMO has just announced that “The year 2014 is on track to be the warmest, or one of the warmest years on record”, it is timely to have a look at recent global temperature changes.
I’m going to use Kevin Cowtan’s nice interactive temperature plotting and trend calculation tool to provide some illustrations. I will be using the HadCRUT4 hybrid data, which have the most sophisticated method to fill data gaps in the Arctic with the help of satellites, but the same basic points can be illustrated with other data just as well.
Let’s start by looking at the full record, which starts in 1979 since the satellites come online there (and it’s not long after global warming really took off).
Fig. 1. Global temperature 1979 to present – monthly values (crosses), 12-months running mean (red line) and linear trend line with uncertainty (blue) [Read more…] about Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?
The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing. That means that the greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global warming.
NOAA posts regularly updated measurements of the amount of heat stored in the bulk of the oceans. For the upper 2000 m (deeper than that not much happens) it looks like this:
Change in the heat content in the upper 2000 m of the world’s oceans. Source: NOAA
[Read more…] about What ocean heating reveals about global warming
A while ago, I received a request to publish a paper on a post that I had written here on RealClimate, exposing the flaws in the analysis of Humlum et al., (2011).
Instead of writing a comment to one paper, however, I thought it might be useful to collect a sample of papers that I found unconvincing (usual suspects), and that have had a fairly high public profile.
[Read more…] about A new experiment with science publication
Guest commentary from Tim Osborn, Tom Melvin and Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, UEA
Records of tree-ring characteristics such as their width (TRW) and density (usually the maximum density of the wood formed towards the end of the growing season – the “maximum latewood density” – MXD) are widely used to infer past variations in climate over recent centuries and even millennia. Chronologies developed from sites near to the elevational or latitudinal tree lines often show sensitivity to summer temperature and, because of their annual resolution, absolute dating and relatively widespread nature, they have contributed to many local, continental and hemispheric temperature reconstructions. However, tree growth is a complex biological process that is subject to a range of changing environmental influences, not just summer temperature, and so replication, coherence and consistency across records and other proxies are an important check on the results.
Tree-ring records have greater replication (both within a site and between nearby sites) than other types of climate proxy. Good replication helps to minimise the influence of random localised factors when extracting the common signal, and it also allows the comparison of information obtained from different independent sets or sub-sets of data. If independent sets of data – perhaps trees with different mean growth rates or from different sites – show similar variations, then we can have greater confidence that those variations are linked to real variations in climate.
In a new QSR paper (Briffa et al., 2013), (BEA13) we have used these approaches to re-assess the combined tree-ring evidence from the Yamal and Polar Urals region (Yamalia) of northern Siberia, considering the common signal in tree-growth changes at different sites and in subsets of data defined in other ways. Together with our Russian colleagues and co-authors, we have incorporated many new tree-ring data, to increase the replication and to update the chronology to 2005 and have reassessed the inferences about summer temperature change that can be drawn from these data. The paper is published as an open-access paper (no paywall) and supplementary information including the raw tree-ring and instrumental temperature data are available from our website.
[Read more…] about Yamal and Polar Urals: a research update
… if your data do not look like a quadratic!
This is a post about global sea-level rise, but I put that message up front so that you’ve got it even if you don’t read any further.
The reputable climate-statistics blogger Tamino, who is a professional statistician in real life and has published a couple of posts on this topic, puts it bluntly:
Fitting a quadratic to test for change in the rate of sea-level rise is a fool’s errand.
I’d like to explain why, with the help of a simple example. Imagine your rate of sea-level rise changes over 100 years in the following way:
[Read more…] about Don’t estimate acceleration by fitting a quadratic…
This is a guest posting from some Dutch colleagues on a new online experiment in fostering dialogue on climate change. Bart Verheggen has asked us to host this quick introduction. We are interested to hear if you think this is a good idea.
Guest Commentary by Bart Strengers (PBL)
ClimateDialogue.org offers a platform for discussions between invited climate scientists on important climate topics that have been subject to scientific and public debate. The goal of the platform is to explore the full range of views currently held by scientists by inviting experts with different views on the topic of discussion. We encourage the invited scientists to formulate their own personal scientific views; they are not asked to act as representatives for any particular group in the climate debate.
Obviously, there are many excellent blogs that facilitate discussions between climate experts, but as the climate debate is highly polarized and politicized, blog discussions between experts with opposing views are rare.
Background
The discovery, early 2010, of a number of errors in the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report on climate impacts (Working Group II), led to a review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC by the InterAcademy Council (IAC). The IAC-report triggered a debate in the Dutch Parliament about the reliability of climate science in general. Based on the IAC recommendation that ‘the full range of views’ should be covered in the IPCC reports, Parliament asked the Dutch government ‘to also involve climate skeptics in future studies on climate change’.
In response, the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment announced a number of projects that are aimed to increase this involvement. ClimateDialogue.org is one of these projects.
We are starting ClimateDialogue with a discussion on the causes of the decline of Arctic Sea Ice, and the question to what extent this decline can be explained by global warming. Also, the projected timing of the first year that the Arctic will be ice free will be discussed. With respect to the latter, in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, IPCC anticipated that (near) ice free conditions might occur by the end of this century. Since then, several studies have indicated this could be between 2030-2050, or even earlier.
We invited three experts to take part in the discussion: Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Walt Meier, research scientist at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado; and Ron Lindsay, Senior Principal Physicist at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Future topics that will be discussed include: climate sensitivity, sea level rise, urban heat island-effects, the value of comprehensive climate models, ocean heat storage, and the warming trend over the past few decades.
Our format
Each discussion will be kicked off by a short introduction written by the editorial staff, followed by a guest blog by two or more invited scientists. The scientists will start the discussion by responding to each other’s arguments. It is not the goal of ClimateDialogue to reach a consensus, but to stimulate the discussion and to make clear what the discussants agree or disagree on and why. To round off the discussion on a particular topic, the ClimateDialogue editor will write a summary, describing the areas of agreement and disagreement between the discussants. The participants will be asked to approve this final article, the discussion between the experts on that topic will then be closed and the editorial board will open a new discussion on a different topic.
The public (including other climate scientists) are also free to comment, but for practical reasons these comments will be shown separately.
The project organization consists of an editorial staff of three people and an advisory board of seven people, all of whom are based in the Netherlands. The editorial staff is concerned with the day-to-day operation of researching topics, finding participants for the discussion and moderating the discussions between the experts. The main task of the advisory board is to guard the neutrality of the platform and to advise the editorial staff about its activities
The project leader is Rob van Dorland of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), a senior scientist and climate advisor in the Climate Services section and is often active at the interface between science and society. The second member is Bart Strengers. He is a climate policy analyst and modeler in the IMAGE-project at the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) and has been involved in the discussion with climate skeptics for many years. The third member is Marcel Crok, an investigative science writer, who published a critical book (in Dutch) about the climate debate.
We welcome comments here and are happy to answer any questions regarding this project. You can also send an email to info [at] climatedialogue [dot] org.
The video of Tuesday’s PBS show on the politics of the climate debate is available – I make a minor appearance…
The PBS website has more background.
I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:
‘Only genuine pre-war British and American whiskeys served here’
I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more …”
Dashiell Hammett, “The Golden Horseshoe”
Google News occasionally throws up some obscure postings that I would never otherwise come across. A recent example was a letter to an editor of a Scottish newspaper (not my usual reading material) declaring that “Climate change is not man-made”. The letter itself is uninteresting – a basic confusion between weather and climate seguing into a NIMBY-ish rant about windmills. Ho hum.
However, in one of the comments from a “Dr John Cameron, St Andrews” (posted 9/Oct/2012), there was this unrelated pseudo-factoid:
As regards the catastrophic sea level rise in the Pacific, it became obvious some 20 years ago that results from island tide gauges did not support computer predictions. Scientists from Flinders University in Adelaide set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands to test whether there was in fact any evidence of sinking. Recently the whole project was abandoned as there had been no sign whatsoever of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years.
Now this is specific enough to probably actually refer to something real, but doesn’t pass the sniff test for something that might actually be true. Scientists don’t set up monitoring stations only to get the answer they want and then stop monitoring if it doesn’t happen. This only happens in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists. So I was intrigued enough to investigate what this actually referred to…
[Read more…] about A sea level Golden Horseshoe nominee*