The “ensemble” of models is completely meaningless, statistically

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

This will be a “sticky” top post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one.

This  comment from rgbatduke, who is Robert G. Brown at the Duke University Physics Department on the No significant warming for 17 years 4 months thread. It has gained quite a bit of attention because it speaks clearly to truth. So that all readers can benefit, I’m elevating it to a full post

rgbatduke says:

June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Modeling | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 244 Comments

‘Lewd’ behavior: The pathologising of climate scepticism

Posted on June 19, 2013 by

ESSAY: The shoddy science of sceptic-bashing LOG12 paper by Lewandowsky attempts to turn rational criticism into a psychological illness.

“As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the basis for decisive action to save the planet has also increasingly been blamed on climate sceptics operating on the internet. Continue reading →

Posted in Stephan Lewandowsky | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

Vanishing Snow: Should There Be A Law?

Posted on June 19, 2013 by

North Dakota NOAA Article CaptionBy Steve Goreham

Originally published in The Washington Times

Last month, more than 100 ski resorts joined the Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP) Climate Declaration. The BICEP declaration urges that Americans “use less electricity,” “drive a more efficient car,” and choose “clean energy” to combat climate change. Ski resorts are concerned that global warming will reduce snowfall and hurt the skiing industry.

Skiing executive Auden Schendler said, “Aspen Skiing Company joined the climate declaration because if there is an industry that ought to care about climate change, it’s the ski industry.” The 2007 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of a difficult future for the industry: “…snow cover area is projected to contract…mountainous areas will face glacier retreat, reduced snow cover and winter tourism…shifting of ski slopes to higher altitudes.”

There’s just one problem. Continental snowfall has been increasing. Continue reading →

Posted in records, snowfall, Weather | Tagged , , , , , , , | 62 Comments

Hump day hilarity: Big Kahuna Warmy

Posted on June 19, 2013 by
BigKahuna

Note: this is NOT Professor Scott Mandia in another costume

From the overhyped and virtually overheated UK Met Office meeting yesterday where they tried to explain “The Pause” Telegraph blogger Sean Thomas was there and was able to get first hand reports on what was said. Bishop Hill says: “I think we should be worried.”

First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming.

Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,

Continue reading →

Posted in Humor, MetOffice, Satire | Tagged , , , , , , , | 35 Comments

Forcing The Ocean To Confess

Posted on June 19, 2013 by

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

According to the current climate paradigm, if the forcing (total downwelling energy) increases, a combination of two things happens. Some of the additional incoming energy (forcing) goes into heating the surface, and some goes into heating the ocean. Lately there’s been much furor about what the Levitus ocean data says about how much energy has gone into heating the ocean, from the surface down to 2000 metres depth. I discussed some of these issues in The Layers of Meaning in Levitus.

I find this furor somewhat curious, in that the trends and variations in the heat content of the global 0-2000 metre layer of the ocean are so small. The size is disguised by the use of units of 10^22 joules of energy … not an easy one to wrap my head around. So what I’ve done is I’ve looked at the annual change in heat content of the upper ocean (0-2000m). Then I’ve calculated the global forcing (in watts per square metre, written here as “W/m2″) that would be necessary to move that much heat into or out of the ocean. Figure 1 gives the results, where heat going into the ocean is shown as a positive forcing, and heat coming out as a negative forcing.

annual forcing into out of the oceanFigure 1. Annual heat into/out of the ocean, in units of watts per square metre. 

I found several things to be interesting about the energy that’s gone into or come out of the ocean on an annual basis.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ocean Heat Content, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 112 Comments

A data review to supplement the UK Met Office ‘Disappointing Weather Meeting’

Posted on June 19, 2013 by

A graphical review of 14.5 years disappointing UK weather

Guest essay by Neil Catto

A meeting today (18th March 2013) took place at the UK Met Office HQ in Exeter. See the report here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013/meeting-unusual-seasons

It was arranged to include the best climatologists and meteorologists to gain better understanding of the ‘disappointing UK weather over recent years’.

Now, that the AGW debate with regard to the relationship between CO2 and temperature has been shown to be insignificant, I can only imagine the next course of action. Listening to Roger harbinger of doom on BBC Radio 4 this morning; weird weather, extremes this and that…blah blah!

I thought I would have a look and see how unusual (oops! disappointing) it has been for the last 14.5 years at a southern UK location.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 91 Comments

Two years to a 1740-type event?

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

Guest essay by David Archibald

Wiggle-matching has been used by the best. Hubert Lamb, considered to be the most meticulous climatologist of all time, used wiggle-matching in this wind data graph he published in 1988:

clip_image002

He had plotted up 600 years of wind data at London, noted a 200 year periodicity and copied the line 200 years to the right to make a forecast.

One of the puzzles of the last 300 years of climate is the temperature drop of 1740. It came out of the blue after a number of warm years in the 1730s. There is nothing in the Be10 record or the volcanic record to suggest a cause. Continue reading →

Posted in Curious things, Forecasting | Tagged , , , , | 101 Comments

Quite possibly the dumbest example of ‘Tabloid Climatology’ ever from Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

Andrew Freedman writes in this Tabloid Climatology™ piece at Climate Central:

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City on October 29, 2012, the dark waters of Flushing Bay poured over the edges of LaGuardia Airport, flooding parts of the facility’s 7,000-foot long east-west runway, and damaging lighting and navigation systems. The floodwaters created an eerie image of jetways ending in water, as if they had been converted into boat ramps.

This was not the first time that LaGuardia suffered major flooding during a storm, nor will it be the last. Due to climate change-related sea level rise, LaGuardia and other coastal hubs throughout the U.S. face a growing risk of flooding during even modest storms.

Now, wait for it….here’s the fake picture they rendered to show what this might look like:

Continue reading →

Posted in Sea level, Tabloid Climatology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 93 Comments

Dammed if you do, Dammed if you don’t

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

Yes, the headline is purposely that way. From Oregon State University:

Dam construction to reduce greenhouse gases causes ecosystem disruption

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers conclude in a new report that a global push for small hydropower projects, supported by various nations and also the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, may cause unanticipated and potentially significant losses of habitat and biodiversity.

An underlying assumption that small hydropower systems pose fewer ecological concerns than large dams is not universally valid, scientists said in the report. A five-year study, one of the first of its type, concluded that for certain environmental impacts the cumulative damage caused by small dams is worse than their larger counterparts.

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Posted in Climate News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

On Muller et al (2013) “Decadal variations in the global atmospheric land temperatures”

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

I received an email yesterday morning advising me that Muller et al (2013) had been published. (Thanks, Marc.) The title of the paper is “Decadal variations in the global atmospheric land temperatures”. The abstract is here and a preprint version of the paper is available from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature website here. The primary finding of the paper is that land surface temperature anomalies are more closely correlated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) than they are to NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies (as a proxy for El Niños and La Niñas or ENSO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index. We’ll discuss the very obvious reasons for this.

Muller et al also briefly discussed a couple sea level pressure-based indices. They will not be discussed in this post.

We’ll discuss why Muller should have included detrended North Pacific sea surface temperatures instead of the PDO in their comparisons with the AMO data, and we’ll use correlation maps to help show what the PDO represents—and what it doesn’t represent.
Continue reading →

Posted in AMO, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, ENSO, PDO | 85 Comments

New paper by Ross McKitrick – ‘temperature data strongly affected by local population growth’

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Ross McKitrick writes:

I give a demonstration of why the Parker and BEST analyses don’t disprove the evidence of contamination of temperature data, and outline what it would likely take to settle the issue properly.
Cheers, Ross

ENCOMPASSING TESTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC SIGNALS IN SURFACE CLIMATE DATA: I have a new paper out in Climatic Change on the question of whether surface climate data are biased by non-climatic factors relating to socioeconomic development:

Rather than try to settle the debate once and for all, I focus on why the various attempts to show the data are not contaminated do not disprove the results showing that they are. The problem has been that authors use non-overlapping data sets and different methods, and end up talking past each other. The way to settle matters, I argue, is to adopt an encompassing framework in which both types of results can be demonstrated on the same data set, where one arises in a restricted subset of another model, and the restrictions can formally be tested. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate data, UHI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

It appears that by UN sponsored vote, the world just doesn’t care much about climate change

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Hilary Ostrov writes about another Internet poll gone horribly wrong:

==============================================================

Back in March of this year, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced an “innovative initiative” in which participants from around the world are invited to vote on what the priorities should be in a post-2015 world.

Continue reading →

Posted in Climate News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 55 Comments

ERL rejects Richard Tol’s comment on Cook et al 2013, but won’t say who rejected it

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, so much for consensus.

Richard Toll provides this communication:

Continue reading →

Posted in 97% consensus | Tagged , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Remember that ‘unprecedented’ Greenland ice sheet surface melt that was allegedly caused by global warming? Never mind

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

We covered this extensively at WUWT last summer, including the “unprecedented claim” where a researcher said it was a recurring 150 year event that was ‘right on time‘. It turns out jet stream changes and thin cloud cover was the driver. Also “the analysis shows that ocean temperatures and Arctic sea-ice cover were relatively unimportant factors in causing the extra Greenland melt.”.

From the University of Sheffield

Jet stream changes cause climatically exceptional Greenland Ice Sheet melt

The research team at the GrIS

Research from the University of Sheffield has shown that unusual changes in atmospheric jet stream circulation caused the exceptional surface melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) in summer 2012.

An international team led by Professor Edward Hanna from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography used a computer model simulation (called SnowModel) and satellite data to confirm a record surface melting of the GrIS for at least the last 50 years – when on 11 July 2012, more than 90 percent of the ice-sheet surface melted. This far exceeded the previous surface melt extent record of 52 percent in 2010.

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Posted in Greenland ice sheet | Tagged , , , , , , , | 67 Comments

Carbon sequestration driver: Spiders, why did it have to be spiders?

Posted on June 17, 2013 by
Cyrtophora

Cyrtophora (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

New study shows predators affect the carbon cycle

A new study shows that the predator-prey relationship can affect the flow of carbon through an ecosystem. This previously unmeasured influence on the environment may offer a new way of looking at biodiversity management and carbon storage for climate change.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, comes out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looks at the relationship between grasshoppers and spiders—herbivores and predators in the study’s food chain—and how it affects the movement of carbon through a grassland ecosystem. Carbon, the basic building block of all organic tissue, moves through the food chain at varying speeds depending on whether it’s being consumed or being stored in the bodies of plants. However, this pathway is seldom looked at in terms of specific animal responses like fear from predation.

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Posted in Carbon sequestration | Tagged , , , , , , , | 42 Comments

NOAA GOES-13 satellite becomes first ever to recover from a micrometeoroid impact

Posted on June 17, 2013 by
An unclassified metallic spherule (possible micrometeorite) on the tip of my index finger. Image Courtesy: Ryan Thompson, 2012

An unclassified metallic spherule (possible micrometeorite) on the tip of my index finger. Image Courtesy: Ryan Thompson, 2012

I had been watching this, as my own weather imaging business was affected by it, and I wanted to wait to see if the fix held before writing about it. It has, and here’s the story from NOAA/NESDIS:

NOAA returns a healthy GOES-13 to normal operations as GOES-East

(June 10th) NOAA today officially returned the GOES-13 spacecraft to normal operations, after tests showed a micrometeoroid, likely hit the arm for the solar array panel on May 22, knocking the spacecraft off its delicate, geostationary balance.

Continue reading →

Posted in Space | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

Essay: carbon footprint as ‘original sin’

Posted on June 17, 2013 by
Original Sin Oil on panel, 237 x 87,5 cm

Original Sin Oil on panel, 237 x 87,5 cm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This essay appears today in The Chronicle Review and it makes an interesting claim:

What is the carbon footprint, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, the stain we inflict on Mother Gaia?

Pascal Bruckner writes:

There are at least two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian. The first wants to tell us about the damage done by industrial civilization; the second infers from this the human species’ guilt. For the latter, nature is only a stick to be used to beat human beings. Just as third-worldism was the shame of colonial history, and repentance was contrition with regard to the present, catastrophism constitutes the anticipated remorse of the future: The meaning of history having evaporated, every change is a potential collapse that augurs nothing good.

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Posted in Carbon footprint, Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , | 51 Comments

Global cooling as significant as global warming

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

From Newcastle University

Global cooling as significant as global warming

A “cold snap” 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to those witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published today in Nature Geoscience.

The international study involving experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK, Cologne, Frankfurt and GEOMAR-Kiel, confirms the link between global cooling and a crash in the marine ecosystem during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse period.

Continue reading →

Posted in Global cooling, Global warming, Paleoclimatology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 63 Comments

The East Anglia Rococo

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Steve McIntyre has a new analysis up, one that has a strong headline.

Though as he says, “not in so many words”, but more about techniques and exclusions. He writes:

Briffa Condemns Mann Reconstructions

Continue reading →

Posted in Paleoclimatology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 52 Comments

How Long Will the Naturally Caused Drought Persist in the U.S.?

Posted on June 16, 2013 by

AND DOES THE UPCOMING NCADAC REPORT ADDRESS THE AMO’S INFLUENCE ON THE DROUGHT?

Anthony Watts recently published a post about the current drought in the U.S. titled To NCDC: We Haven’t Seen an El Nino since 2009/10, What Do You Expect? It reminded me and other persons (see Don B’s comment here) of Roger Pielke, Sr.’s post last year Perspective On The Hot and Dry Continental USA For 2012 Based On The Research Of Judy Curry and Of McCabe Et Al 2004. Roger, Sr. initially referred to a presentation by Judith Curry (Climate Dimensions of the Water Cycle). Judith discussed the presentation in her blog post here. Her presentation included a group of drought maps from McCabe et al (2004).

McCABE ET AL (2004)

McCabe et al (2004) Pacific and Atlantic Ocean influences on multidecadal drought frequency in the United States is an examination of the impacts of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation on drought in the United States. Full paper is here. The abstract reads:

More than half (52%) of the spatial and temporal variance in multidecadal drought frequency over the conterminous United States is attributable to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). An additional 22% of the variance in drought frequency is related to a complex spatial pattern of positive and negative trends in drought occurrence possibly related to increasing Northern Hemisphere temperatures or some other unidirectional climate trend. Recent droughts with broad impacts over the conterminous U.S. (1996, 1999-2002) were associated with North Atlantic warming (positive AMO) and northeastern and tropical Pacific cooling (negative PDO). Much of the long-term predictability of drought frequency may reside in the multidecadal behavior of the North Atlantic Ocean. Should the current positive AMO (warm North Atlantic) conditions persist into the upcoming decade, we suggest two possible drought scenarios that resemble the continental-scale patterns of the 1930s (positive PDO) and 1950s (negative PDO) drought.

My Figure 1 is Figure 5 from McCabe et al (2004). The two right-hand maps indicate drought conditions (in red) during positive AMO conditions. Map c is for positive AMO and positive PDO conditions, and map d indicates positive AMO with negative PDO conditions.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Continue reading →

Posted in AMO, Drought, NCADAC | 28 Comments