Will Replicated Global Warming Science Make Mann Go Ape?
By Patrick J. Michaels – from World Climate Report
About 10 years ago, December 20, 2002 to be exact, we published a paper titled “Revised 21st century temperature projections” in the journal Climate Research. We concluded:
Temperature projections for the 21st century made in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a rise of 1.4 to 5.8°C for 1990–2100. However, several independent lines of evidence suggest that the projections at the upper end of this range are not well supported…. The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low end of the IPCC TAR projections.
We examined several different avenues of determining the likely amount of global warming to come over the 21st century. One was an adjustment to climate models based on (then) new research appearing in the peer-reviewed journals that related to the strength of the carbon cycle feedbacks (less than previously determined), the warming effect of black carbon aerosols (greater than previously determined), and the magnitude of the climate sensitivity (lower than previous estimates). Another was an adjustment (downward) to the rate of the future build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide that was guided by the character of the observed atmospheric CO2 increase (which had flattened out during the previous 25 years). And our third estimate of future warming was the most comprehensive, as it used the observed character of global temperature increase—an integrator of all processes acting upon it—to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a collection of climate models. All three avenues that we pursued led to somewhat similar estimates for the end-of- the-century temperature rise. Here is how we described our findings in paper’s
Abstract:
Since the publication of the TAR, several findings have appeared in the scientific literature that challenge many of the assumptions that generated the TAR temperature range. Incorporating new findings on the radiative forcing of black carbon (BC) aerosols, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity, and the strength of the climate/carbon cycle feedbacks into a simple upwelling diffusion/energy balance model similar to the one that was used in the TAR, we find that the range of projected warming for the 1990–2100 period is reduced to 1.1–2.8°C. When we adjust the TAR emissions scenarios to include an atmospheric CO2 pathway that is based upon observed CO2 increases during the past 25 yr, we find a warming range of 1.5–2.6°C prior to the adjustments for the new findings. Factoring in these findings along with the adjusted CO2 pathway reduces the range to 1.0–1.6°C. And thirdly, a simple empirical adjustment to the average of a large family of models, based upon observed changes in temperature, yields a warming range of 1.3–3.0°C, with a central value of 1.9°C.
We thus concluded:
Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0°C, with a central value that averages 1.8°C across our analyses.
Little did we know at the time, but behind the scenes, our paper, the review process that resulted in its publication, the editor in charge of our submission, and the journal itself, were being derided by the sleazy crowd that revealed themselves in the notorious “Climategate” emails, first released in November, 2009. In fact, the publication of our paper was to serve as one of the central pillars that this goon squad used to attack on the integrity of the journal Climate Research and one of its editors, Chris de Freitas.
The initial complaint about our paper was raised back in 2003 shortly after its publication by Tom Wigley, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Toronto’s L. D. Danny Harvey, who served as supposedly “anonymous” reviewers of the paper and who apparently had a less than favorable opinion about our work that they weren’t shy about spreading around. According to Australian climate scientist Barrie Pittock:
I heard second hand that Tom Wigley was very annoyed about a paper which gave very low projections of future warmings (I forget which paper, but it was in a recent issue [of Climate Research]) got through despite strong criticism from him as a reviewer.
So much for being anonymous.
The nature of Wigley and Harvey’s dissatisfaction was later made clear in a letter they sent to Chris de Freitas (the editor at Climate Research who oversaw our submission) and demanded to know the details of the review process that led to the publication of our paper over their recommendation for its rejection. Here is an excerpt from that letter:
Your decision that a paper judged totally unacceptable for publication should not require re-review is unprecedented in our experience. We therefore request that you forward to us copies of the authors responses to our criticisms, together with: (1) your reason for not sending these responses or the revised manuscript to us; (2) an explanation for your judgment that the revised paper should be published in the absence of our re-review; and (3) your reason for failing to follow accepted editorial procedures.
Wigley asked Harvey to distribute a copy of their letter of inquiry/complaint to a large number of individuals who were organizing some type of punitive action against Climate Research for publishing what they considered to be “bad” papers. Apparently, Dr. de Freitas responded to Wigley and Harvey’s demands with the following perfectly reasonable explanation:
The [Michaels et al. manuscript] was reviewed initially by five referees. … The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the [manuscript] back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual.
This did little to appease to those wanting to discredit Climate Research (and prevent the publication of “skeptic” research) as evidenced by this email from Mike Mann to Tom Wigley and a long list of other influential climate scientists:
Dear Tom et al,
Thanks for comments–I see we’ve built up an impressive distribution list here!
…
Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit.
This should be justified not on the basis of the publication of science we may not like of course, but based on the evidence (e.g. as provided by Tom and Danny Harvey and I’m sure there is much more) that a legitimate peer-review process has not been followed by at least one particular editor.
Mann went on to add “it was easy to make sure that the worst papers, perhaps including certain ones Tom refers to, didn’t see the light of the day at J. Climate.” This was because Mann was serving as an editor of the Journal of Climate and was indicating that he could control the content of accepted papers. But since Climate Research was beyond their direct control, it required a different route to content control. Thus pressure was brought to bear on the editors as well as on the publisher of the journal. And, they were willing to make things personal. For a more complete telling of the type and timeline of the pressure brought upon Chris de Freitas and Climate Research see this story put together from the Climategate emails by Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That.
Now, let’s turn the wheels of time ahead 10 years, to January 10, 2012. Just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper with this provocative title: “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” by Nathan Gillet and colleagues from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis of Environment Canada (not a group that anyone would confuse with the usual skeptics). An excerpt from the paper’s abstract provides the gist of the analysis:
Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model’s projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851–2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2).
Or, to put it another way, Gillet et al. used the observed character of global temperature increase—an integrator of all processes acting upon it—to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a climate model. Sounds familiar!!
And what did they find? From the Abstract of Gillet et al.:
Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.
The Transient Climate Response is the temperature rise at the time of the doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which will most likely occur sometime in the latter decades of this century. Which means that results of Gillet et al. are in direct accordance with the results of Michaels et al. published 10 years prior and which played a central role in precipitating the wrath of the Climategate scientists upon us, Chris de Freitas and Climate Research.
Both the Gillet et al. (2012) and the Michaels et al. (2002) studies show that climate models are over-predicting the amount of warming that is a result of human changes to the constituents of the atmosphere, and that when they are constrained to conform to actual observations of the earth’s temperature progression, the models project much less future warming (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Dashed lines show the projected course of 21st century global temperature rise as projected by the latest version (CanESM2) of the Canadian coupled ocean‐atmosphere climate model for three different future emission scenarios (RCPs). Colored bars represent the range of model projections when constrained by past 160 years of observations. All uncertainty ranges are 5–95%. (figure adapted from Gillet et al., 2012: note the original figure included additional data not relevant to this discussion).
And a final word of advice to whoever was the editor at GRL that was responsible for overseeing the Gillet et al. publication—watch your back.
References:
Gillet, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.
Michaels, P.J., et al., 2002. Revised 21st century temperature projections. Climate Research, 23, 1-9.
WOW – would like to see NOVA devote an hour to this !
how to make that happen ?
I think it’s Mann that is watching his back.
The Bully boy tactics he was able to employ freely, ten years ago would now be the hard evidence needed to convict him…I wish he was stupid enough to try it!
Patrick ,
you really should submit your manuscript to PBS / NOVA as the outline for a future program – and let the public know how ‘it’s’ open and tax funded media source responds.
PLEASE ? !
First as tragedy, then as farce.
==========
Its sickening to see how so few people can destroy so much of an otherwise beautiful idea. I still love science has to offer, but as an institution it will take many years to recover from this well organized attempt at centralized control of academic freedom.
And to all you warmists out there – How the eff can you NOT call this a conspiracy???
it’s mysterious kooks and daggers stuff…
I always enjoy finding a “wordsmithing gem” in an article or post. WSJ content authors are famously good at this. Patrick Michaels deserves credit for a neat turn of phrase: precipitating the wrath — in a climate related posting. Great!
I should mention the rest of the material is fascinating.
This whole Mann/Wigley saga relating to the resignation of de Freitas reads more and more like a (bad) mafia movie:
“We gotta send a message to the streets dat you don’t mess wid da mob, boys!
It don’t matter if he’s right or wrong, boys, rub him out!”
They are a bit lucky not many people read this blog, eh? 😉 ……
The amazing part is this one: I was the person who recruited Mann to UVa, because I thought our Environmental Scienes Department should be diverse. Silly me.
I can’t send this to NOVA as it would appear self-serving (and it would be). Someone on this listserve has to do it!
The untold parts of this story, nonetheless, need to be told. Like why I am not at UVa after 30 years of faculty service, for example?
PJM
Extremely interesting post. Thanks for sharing this.
Question: You say “Both the Gillet et al. (2012) and the Michaels et al. (2002) studies show that climate models are over-predicting the amount of warming . . . and that when they are constrained to conform to actual observations of the earth’s temperature progression, the models project much less future warming (Figure 1).”
If I’m reading this right, in this particular case it isn’t the models themselves that were the problem, but the fact that the models were not initially “constrained to conform to actual observations”?
Dr. Michaels, if you are following this thread can you share a bit more information about what this means? Are we talking about initial parameterization, or initial input states, or adjustments made after some years of observation to make the models more closely match? What is the exact nature of the constrainment that results in the projection of less future warming (i.e., what, so far, has arguably turned out to be a more accurate result)?
In the journals, recklessly but slowly, with acerbity.
It’s not his back, but his face he should watch. The splashback of this volatility is hazardous.
===========
Audible virgins
Beware vipers at the breasts.
Milk and honey land.
===========
@michaelspj
As I read your comments, I sense a lot of pain and a glimmer of hope that you will be vindicated. However, your motives for getting the truth out are anything but self serving.
Andrew
What does Dr. Weaver think about *this*? I can hardly wait.
Andrew
To admit that it hurt gives them power. But yes I would like the truth to out.
PJM
Eric Anderson says:
“If I’m reading this right, in this particular case it isn’t the models themselves that were the problem, but the fact that the models were not initially “constrained to conform to actual observations”?”
++++++++
That is how I read it too. The thing is, do the models do it ‘blind’ with respect to GCR and Solar UV+EUV? As those are changing, it is likely the response is even lower becaise for over 1/2 of that 160 years the sun was ramping up. If it was based on CO2 and temperatures (mostly) plus ocean heat content (as far as it is known) it will be overestimating future rise as a) the world runs out of carbon-based fuels to burn, peaking well before 2100, and b) the sun simply fails to cooperate.
From the available fuels and what is known about the carbon cycle, it looks as if it will be difficult to get the CO2 above 550 ppm, ever. This ‘doubling’ business is based on an assumption of exponential CO2 emissions without considering the fuels available to do it. Of course if the ocean takes over as a major source of stored CO2, all bets are off, save that the response will not be very robust for the usual logarithmic reasons.
It would seem that there is a consensus emerging amongst top climate scientists that we are not going to get 2degC of “dangerous climate change” this century. Can we all go home now and get on with business as normal? Can we get rid of the IPCC? Can we get rid of all the green taxes now and start to dismantle the wind turbines?
It would seem the answer to all questions should be YES.
OT: I dropped by to see if RC had any comment on this. So far, they do not. I found this and was pleased to see that Gavin corrected a commenter concerning what NASA does and does not say as an agency and a caution to cite sources.
Urgelt says:
7 Jan 2012 at 10:55 AM
NASA warns that there may be a tipping point beyond which an accelerating positive feedback loop scenario might come into play. Under this scenario, most of the clathrate deposits in the arctic (both tundra and shallow continental shelf deposits) could be released into the atmosphere in a fairly short period of time (less than a century), implying a rate of outgassing that makes 100 times present estimated levels a vast underforecast. *That* is the worst case scenario, not an arbitrary 100 times present estimated outgassing rates.
Is there a tipping point? What is it? Nobody knows. We’re flying blind. That notion ought to give us pause.
[Response: ‘NASA’ does not make agency statements on scientific issues. Perhaps some NASA scientists have said such a thing, or perhaps they are researching it, but whether it is credible or not has very little to do with it being ‘NASA’. Please provide cites and references for claims like this, especially on a thread that is precisely about exploring the quantitative consequences of this outgassing. – gavin]
PJM wrote:
Anytime you want to tell it Dr. Michaels.
It happened throughout academia. The earlier generation was willing to admit their rebellious leftist students to the professoriate, feeling an obligation to open the academy to these different ideas but, silly them, they were caught by surprise when the leftists practiced what they preached and slammed the door after themselves. No one who is not a leftist can get in anymore, and the whole enterprise will have to be defunded and abandoned (coming soon to the blue states anyway, as they are all going bankrupt).
Luckily the best educational resources are increasingly online and the signaling function of university admissions and degrees can always be replaced by simple testing for knowledge and intelligence. We no longer need the universities, which is a darned good thing, since they have already been destroyed. They still do some important scientific research (excepting the vast majority of climate science) and they are important for medical research (since the tort revolution made private medical research nearly impossible), but the mis-education of our youth cannot end soon enough.
Is the .7 degree of observed natural temperature rise factored in?
Nevertheless
1. We still need to cover the planet with pretty, unobtrusive, bird loving, reliable, inexpensive, wind turbines.
2. We need to spend at least $50 billion per year on climate research – an excellent way of tackling the looming unemployment problem amongst incompetent and/or dishonest scientists.
3. We need to annually impose hundreds of billions of dollars in extra taxes to further damage western economies and then transfer these funds to the nations of Third World, typically used as efficient processing and transit points to private Swiss bank accounts,
4. We should recognise the efforts of Mann and the rest of the Team for their exceptional……………………… fill with words like ‘integrity’, ‘honesty’ if you are a warmist and ‘deceit’, ‘incompetence’ if you are a sceptic.
The incredible cost we are inflicting on ourselves to solve a non-problem in climate is going to make us the laughing stock of future generations.
The hockey team have completely perverted the peer review process to suit their political agenda and turned peer review into something which more closely resembles the inquisition.
Great (if frightening) post.
I hope Dr. Michaels is allowed and willing to submit testimony to the ‘State Pen’ lawsuit brought by Mann. All evidence of the latters corrosive influence on climate science in the past few years should be in the public eye.
This is great news, vindication, but it took 10 years. I keep writing to Gov’t depts and politicians here in the UK and the reply is always “the concensus” speech. I know that they are politically scared of admitting that the IPCC is flawed, but it really is the job of Polticians to look into these sort of claims and if they doubt the veracity of the claim should really say so. Using old text books is no defense. All I can do is keep writing and making a nuisance of myself and hope the waste of resources stops someday.
Patrick, it must feel good to have your results independently replicated. But just out of interest, was your paper cited in this new work? Or have you been written out of history?
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3406240.htm
This is getting serious folks. No bull. Really. Poor ol’ Al Gore and Tim Wirth and Ban The Moon at the UN must be feeling unloved. (snicker, giggle)
regards, rotfl (only our pointless, activist jackasses at the ABC would present such drivel)
Wheels within wheels. A real den of iniquity.
If you can’t attack the science attack the man.
Keep up the good work!
Unfortunately the politicians, at least here in the UK, unlikely to read articles such as this. Or if they do, they will be assured by their scientific advisors that the conclusions are rubbish. Similarly the MSM will either ignore or trash the work. The scientific case for scepticism will never see the light of day in the land of the great and good, until at least one group of politicians calls for a truly independent review. A very unlikely event.
Re RC and Gavin The team have been given instructions to avoid exaggerating any AGW claims for them to have even the slightest hope of professional survival
Did he actually resign, or was that just the intended outcome?
The title is clever, but this doesn’t feel like “peer pressure” to me. It seems more like string-pulling and libelous manipulation. “the sleazy crowd”, indeed.
At one time I had regretted not going down the academic track and heading into industry instead.
Then I saw how petty some researchers can be, and thought it wasn’t all that bad to have missed out on that. Petty bickering not being one of my preferred things.
Time passed, and the whole “Global Warming” thing started popping. There were hints of ‘cooked books’ in what got published, and the occasional thing that did get out causing way out of proportion responses.
Finally ClimateGate, and an ‘up close and personal’ view of just how backbiting, self serving, mendacious, vicious and downright “aggressively petty” self serving it could be. As noted above, more in keeping with a Mafia culture than polite mutual review.
I am now quite happy that I avoided that nest of vipers….
But… I still have a compulsion to truth and a love of the scientific method. What is clear from Climategate is that formal “professional” scientists have no such “forcings”….
If the goals of the scientific method are to survive ( honest search for truth based on objective evidence) then the whole “Peer Review” process needs to be scrapped. Period.
At one time folks just found things, wrote them up, and published. Sometimes in letters privately circulated. Sometimes in self published manuscripts. Occasionally in letters to journals. Then the “peer review” process developed. It may have had a benefit at one time ( correction of error prior to embarrassment in public, enhancement with added ideas) but that time is clearly past.
The inevitable self serving and power lust of the human condition (at least, SOME human’s conditions) leads to using the system as it stands to browbeat others and practice “occupational birth control” on folks who do not agree with “settled science”. Since the whole idea of “settled science” is an oxymoron, it is clear that the system will inevitably slide into decay, self dealing, and abuse. ANY system where power over others is wielded in secrecy by those with the most to fear from the success of those others will have such a collapse.
What fixes it is public access. The light of day.
We need to go back to the era prior to secret self dealing and blackmail. To an era where folks can simply publish their work as they see fit. The internet clearly lets that happen (as evidence this site…)
But can it be enhanced to do the duties that peer review offered?
Yes, fairly easily. An article can be published to a listed group of individuals who can then comment on it. IMHO, nothing in this process can be anonymous. If folks can’t stand to say “Hey, Jim, I think you have this bit wrong.” as they are afraid of damaging some relationship, then they need to find another line of work. Once that ‘private review’ is done, the article can then be published. Simply by a copy / past to a new thread that does not include the reviewers comments and the revision history. At that point “public review” can commence with any and all folks posting comments and responses. Once that is done, editors can pick articles that particularly stand out and publish them in the archaic paper format (if they feel that is really still of importance.)
In computer programming, we have something called a “desk check”. You go over the code at your desk, often with a fellow programmer, to make sure it looks good. Then we have a “code review”. This is never anonymous. You go into a conference room with your workmates, boss, sometimes the client / customer, and sometimes the odd vendor or others who like to participate and you again go through the code. If someone finds an embarrassing broken bit, you thank them and fix it. Can’t take that? Go get a different job.
Harsh? Maybe. But the product is better and you get used to it pretty quickly.
I see nothing in science that makes the participants “special”. Every cook is given immediate feedback on their work product. If it stinks, they find out fast. (Often loudly). Every hairdresser and every house painter gets a report card every day. Often quite publicly. On the nightly news, when the report makes a flub on stage, it isn’t hidden and it isn’t anonymous. Just look at the various “outtakes” from movies, TV, and even weather reports. A cop who makes a mistake might just wake up dead or beaten, and often with cameras running and a showing on the nightly new.
IMHO, it’s time to take the anonymous back room dealing out of science. Open the windows and doors, turn on the spotlights and cameras, and grow up.
It’s time for “Public Review”.
What “climate science” has shown us is that the “professionals” are more like 5th graders. No, on second thought, more like kinders in their lack of social graces and petty sensitivities. This is exacerbated by secrecy and anonymity. It’s time for them to do things the same way everyone else does them: On stage in full view in a public forum.
Yes, it will take a dramatic cultural shift and a whole lot of folks oxen will be gored. Most likely some journals will go under (though frankly I think I’d be more inclined to read them as the quality would go way up). But the present system clearly isn’t working. So time to toss it out and start over. Pull the fangs of the anonymous power brokers, anonymous reviewers, and anonymous editorial decisions.
****
michaelspj says:
January 10, 2012 at 10:12 pm
The amazing part is this one: I was the person who recruited Mann to UVa, because I thought our Environmental Scienes Department should be diverse. Silly me.
*****
Like the Who said, just don’t be fooled again. Irony is that under the PC-term “diversity”, the desired/achieved result has been the opposite — conformity. Another doublespeak term.
What EM Smith said. Sir, you have shown us the way forward along lines of which I am sure many of us have been thinking.
This needs the non-Team real scientists to lobby the journals and for someone to set up the first public review science forum on the internet: which Anthony has already mooted. Forward, Mr. Watts!
Once started, this review system will leave the charlatans nowhere to hide, governments may cease to heed their doomsaying and the western economies may yet be saved. Meanwhile, the planet and its passengers will trundle along just fine.
For those interested, Mike Mann will be giving a seminar at Penn State on the 23rd.
Jan 23rd Michael Mann, Professor of Meteorology, Penn State, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”
All seminars are held on Mondays at 4:00 pm in 112 Walker Building.
This EarthTalks colloquium series will present a slate of speakers who will address various aspects of how electronic media is changing how we teach and learn and explore the environment, and how this media is changing the research university.
Typically there is a question and answer period afterwards.
I’m looking at the chart and I’m wondering if the estimates are not already too high. It sure appears to me that the estimates for 2012 and 2015 are nearly three quarters of a degree above our current temperatures already. The very lowest bar (I assume that bar represents the range of temperature to include error above and below the actual prediction) goes from 1 degree to 1.3 degrees. I thought our current estimate of temperature anomaly was closer to a half a degree. Unless we have a step change in the next year, we need to drop the whole chart down a notch.
“At one time I had regretted not going down the academic track and heading into industry instead.
Then I saw how petty some researchers can be, and thought it wasn’t all that bad to have missed out on that. ”
I’m still having that internal conflict now, part way through my PhD. I’ve worked in both the private and public sector in various jobs prior to the benchmark (including research roles in both) so I’ve seen both sides of the fence. The scientific idealist in me wants to stay in academia to teach and research but practically it can be, as you put it, a nest of vipers and with the increasing dominance of an ever more irrational populace, media and educational establishment in the UK I don’t see how I’d last. I can’t believe I’ve actually been with academics willing to drop important matters of principle over “a good cause”.
E.M.Smith says:
Hear, hear!
When I left industry, (as in starting alone,) what I missed most was someone to ask, “does this look right?” when writing my code. Lacking that made the process much longer as I had to try much harder to check my own work.
Once you “put it out there”, it’s too late, you take the brickbats from your “customers”.
DaveE.
E.M.Smith says:
January 11, 2012 at 4:04 am
amen very well put get the anonymous out of review and let the light of day kill the parasites that plague climate science.
EM Smith, you are correct. Sunlight… It works best in disinfecting everything, government, science, health problems, etc.
hmm comment disappeared but to E.M. smith perfectly said.
The performance of the AR4 models has been horrible but the public is unaware of this simple fact.
Between 2000 and today the models predicted around .3 ° C warming while actual warming has been ZERO.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/strandwg/CCSM3_AR4_Experiments.html
Unless we get a serious amount of warming soon there models are worthless.
Pat, as the climate farce continues to unravel, you will be vindicated more and more. Most of us remember the storm you weathered. Even before climategate, we were aware of your significant contributions. Here is a heartfelt thank you from a long time skeptic.
EMS (Mike)
Many of us who have been folowing the whole CAGW debate well before Climategate have been saying what you have just stated for years i.e. that the ‘pal review’ process has been broken pretty much from the start and is well past it’s scrap date. I doubt if anyone else could have expressed as well as you have done here Mike.
Public review is the way forward IMO as well and the so called ‘journals’ thanks to the internet age and blogs are now well and truly surplus to requirements.
This is an important paper that might help to further reduce the uncertainty of the transient climate sensitvity. The big caution, and point that really needs to be made is that transient sensitivty is not the “final” temperature at which the system will settle. The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher, but exactly how much higher, no one knows, as a full understanding of all the earth-system feedbacks is no known. Recently Lord Monckton was arguing the point that transient sensitivity is “nearly equal” to equalibrium sensitivity, but this certainty is not known, and can’t possibly be known as all the factors related to slower feedbacks and earth system responses are certainly not known and still the subject of intense research.
The upshot of all this, it could very well be that transient sensitivity is around 1.5C for a doubling of CO2 (though some hard-core skeptics will even recoil at this suggestion, as they doubt CO2 has any effect at all), but even, in the the unlikely scenario that CO2 levels could be kept at 560ppm, temperatures would continue to rise until the equalibrium sensitivity temperature were reached, considering all earth system responses with slower feedbacks, and this process could take many decades, even up to a century, after the transient sensitivity temperature was reached. 3C (+ or – 1C) for a final equalibrium sensitivity is still quite a reasonable estimate as certainly equalibrium sensitivity will be higher.
@ E.M. Smith
You’re basically right about academics — at least the badly behaved ones (I know many exemplary ones, however) — but consider that the system promoting their ascendency is designed to select for the aggressive and argumentative ones. The competition for their jobs requires political skills and attaching to the right mentors in order to acquire tenure and get attached to the grant-funding sequence of projects that is the lifeblood of their work. This is not an excuse for unethical and boorish behavior, but rather an explanation of why we find more than the expected number of louts in climate science. Notice too that one or two pivotal actors (you know who they are) are enough to drive the herd into places where they might not go under the influence of more enlightened leadership. It’s another symptom of an incestuous system trying to consolidate its strength.
The other interesting development is that greater numbers of scientists seem to want to become journalists (people who are less informed, subject to different demands, and less careful about precision than most scientists are trained to be). I think it started with Carl Sagan, the first really big populizer of science, who made science communication grudgingly acceptable among fellow academic scientists. Before that it was pretty much distained. Now, it gets you the perks.
E.M.Smith says:
January 11, 2012 at 4:04 am
It’s time for “Public Review”.
Peer Review = Secret Review,
Secrecy breeds Contempt
I agree with Smith. We hold software code reviews in the open for very good reason. People do not learn from their successes, they learn from their mistakes.
Anonymous peer review hides the mistakes of science, preventing science from fixing mistakes in the methodology.
Dr. Michaels,
As a UVA grad (CLAS 78, Biol & Chem), and a fellow scientist (and Journal Editor!) interested in maintaining the integrity of the research endeavor, I have followed your story and that of Dr. Mann closely. It is lovely to see your work supported. More importantly, it has been horrifying to view the petty nonsense that transpired around your paper uncovered by the Climategate emails. I don’t know what the answer is, but agenda-driven “science” has to be carefully monitored and discouraged wherever possible. This is the principal problem, in my view: shaping the outcome of studies to fit a pre-conceived desire. Chiefio (above) may have the answer: public review, but in my field at least, there isn’t enough incentive for the vast majority of work to receive enough scrutiny via that mechanism. Peer review has its flaws, but like most human endeavors, it relies on people acting with good character and ethically. It, like the conduct of research itself, is highly vulnerable to unethical behavior.
A short anecdote: Shortly before he stepped down, the past president of UVA made a visit to my neck of the woods to address alumni. I managed to grab his attention for a few moments, and asked whether he was glad to be rid of that embarrassing Michael Mann (this was pretty soon after the release of Climategate email batch 1). He expressed some shock that I would view Mann this way, and mumbled something about also being rid of you. My wife was one of the first graduates of the Environmental Sciences department at UVA. I hope they’re getting their act back together after what was clearly a very contentious time. All the best.
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:10 am
The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher, but exactly how much higher, no one knows, as a full understanding of all the earth-system feedbacks is no known.
No. The equilibrium sensitivity may be higher, it may be lower. It depends of the shape of the unknown.
Think of a playground swing. Give the swing a good hard push. It will have a very high transient response, but the equilibrium response will be insignificant.
The problem is linear thinking. Someone pushes you, you fall. More likely in the past few billion years the earth has learned Climate Kung Fu. It uses the force of its opponent to block the opponent, and thus stay balanced on its feet. This balance gave rise to life.
Where is the evidence? 10 thousand years ago the earth was warmer than now, for a period of a couple of thousand years. According to climate science this should have lead to a catastrophic release of CO2 and methane, which should have permanently raised temperatures.
But it didn’t happen. Climate Kung Fu kicked in and defeated the evil transient response, leading to a lower equilibrium. Rest easy glasshopper.
@E. M. Smith
Standard for any engineering design review. For PCB design, there isn’t typically a “desk review” other than you and the other engineers that are on the project (if any are) trading slides/notes in preparation for the review. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same. I’ve stood in front of 100 people reviewing my work, sometimes with a video conference as well (semi-anonymous critics in the background). Not all are engineers, some are business development/marketing, some are finance, some are simply program management, all with their own vested interest in the project. Each has his own key points they want to make sure get addressed, i.e., you have to wear many hats during your review, considering all possible criticisms, constructive or otherwise (budgets are often at the end, with the engineer standing around referring to his own program managers and/or team leads).
If you aren’t prepared, or just did poor work, they can be downright hostile and embarrassing. Sometimes they’re simply hostile because there are agendas in the room that are in opposition to what you are doing (competing ideas from another team, budget masters that view the project as frivolous, etc.). The first review an engineer does is truly trial by fire, a learning experience we all must go through. Some cannot take the heat and find other ways to apply their skills.
From personal experience, I’ve always found board (PCBs) reviews to be more difficult since there are often more caveats due to the wider range of technologies that may be represented by the design. A digital design often incorporates analog circuitry, power supplies, etc., and will likely have mechanical constraints (heat dissipation, size, weight, power) plus complex interface requirements. Each of those specialties will be represented among the reviewers, particularly so for projects that are large. It can get pretty intense and you won’t always have the answers so follow-up efforts may be required (complete re-designs are not unheard ofafter a preliminary, and sometimes “critical” design review, if the budget is flexible enough).
Mark
This post is a dishonest disgrace. The figure deletes essentially half of the Gillett (which is the correct spelling, by the way – two ‘t’s) results, calling them “not relevant”. More like not convenient, because they show Gillett’s second possible climate response, which is one with significantly higher warming. The full figure can be seen here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/GilletteProjections.png
I don’t think Gillette et al. would appreciate their figures being tampered with and their results misrepresented. This smacks of Michaels’ deletion of Hansen’s scenarios B and C in his Congressional testimony.
REPLY: Oh please. Way to ignore the issue. Dana, you think everything on WUWT is a disgrace, so your view is right in line with your M.O., yet you ignore your own problems with SkS and the editing of posts, comments, and response post facto. Get your OWN HOUSE IN ORDER before criticizing others. Sadly, I expect you’ll be posting yet another SkS smear in the near future. I’ll make sure Pat Michaels sees your rant though. – Anthony
While the detailed info on some of the climate-science review process was interesting, the results of the two papers mentioned in this post should not be a surprise to anyone with an open mind on the subject. Use the full HadCRUT temperature data set and estimate the amount of warming we’ll see with a doubling of CO2 then extrapolate the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere to estimate the amount of warming we’ll see between 2000 and 2100…it’s something around 1.4 C. Heck, you can use the rate of warming found in Tamino’s recent paper and get a similar number even though that number is only based on post-1978 data where the highest warming rate is observed. These types of measurements are real results using Earth as a lab, and only a fool would disregard them.
It is true that equilibrium climate sensitivity could be higher than the above numbers, but it could also be lower. Additionally, the transient climate sensitivity used above could also be lower or higher if there are other factors affecting the trend we don’t know about (including instrumental/measurement factors). However, using models that are constrained to the observed records by necessity will have to agree with the above analysis if the models are to remain stable. One has to assume behaviors that have never been measured to get CAGW and not just AGW. Amazing that few seem to realize this and very straightforward papers coming to these conclusions are shunned so roughly by the field. In fact, the first paragraph in my comment basically sums up my main arguments against CAGW.
-Scott
Steptoe Fan says:
January 10, 2012 at 9:54 pm
WOW – would like to see NOVA devote an hour to this !
how to make that happen ?
______________________________
(Completely + Hopelessly)Politicised = (Fat)Chance
Is dana1981 perhaps the dana of Wiki?
Anthony – “my house” is irrelevant here, please stop trying to change the subject. Michaels has posted a modified figure on your website which deletes half of the results from a published study. Conveniently, it deletes the results which project future warming in line with model simulations. Basically Michaels is claiming that this paper supports his research by deleting the results which potentially contradict his research.
This is a gross distortion of Gillett’s results, and if you don’t have a problem with deleting the inconvenient results from his figure, well, that’s your problem. Now you’re aware of the distortion and can respond however you see fit. My main intent was to bring the distortion to your attention, as the main fault is Michaels’, not yours.
But yes, my response will very likely involve a blog post showing *all* of the results from Gillett’s research.
REPLY: Hey you changed the subject, ignoring Mann’s pressure on the journal and editors, focusing instead on one graph and a spelling error. Will you have the courage to point Mann’s unsavory actions out to your readers at SkS? I doubt it.
Oh also, the commenter above this one asks you a question. – Anthony
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:10 am
“…The upshot of all this, it could very well be that transient sensitivity is around 1.5C for a doubling of CO2…”
Mr. Gates, does it not give you any pause at all to think that if we go from 1 ppm CO2 to 2 ppm we have the same effect as going from 280 to 560. How does 1 molecule to the equal “work” of 280? Especially since it has to deliver the same W/m^2. That one lone molecule must get real hot. HMMM.
@R. Gates says: 7:10 am – certainly equalibrium sensitivity will be higher [than transient sensitivity].
Perhaps you have never heard of an underdamped system response.
As you point out, our ignorance of the magitude of the feedbacks is high. So your use of the word “certainly” is quite out of place.
ferd berple says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:59 am
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:10 am
The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher, but exactly how much higher, no one knows, as a full understanding of all the earth-system feedbacks is no known.
No. The equilibrium sensitivity may be higher, it may be lower. It depends of the shape of the unknown.
________
Not by the current understanding of physics it couldn’t, but you are right, our understanding does have the element of the unknown. This is probably why the study of paleoclimate is so critical in my estimation, as we an see what the equalibrium sensitivity might be given certain inputs. We don’t have to know the details of all the feedbacks that led to a certain temperature regime, just the final regime. The closest analog is currently the mid-Pliocene, but even then, the rate at which CO2 levels (and methane and N2O as well) were changing back then were no where close to now. This rate of change could aslo be a factor in the final difference between transient and equilibrium sensitivity as the rate of force applied to any system can alter the trajectory of that system and its final equilibium point.
mkelly says:
January 11, 2012 at 8:56 am
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:10 am
“…The upshot of all this, it could very well be that transient sensitivity is around 1.5C for a doubling of CO2…”
Mr. Gates, does it not give you any pause at all to think that if we go from 1 ppm CO2 to 2 ppm we have the same effect as going from 280 to 560. How does 1 molecule to the equal “work” of 280? Especially since it has to deliver the same W/m^2. That one lone molecule must get real hot. HMMM.
______
It gives me pause to consider how someone might believe that 1ppm of CO2 could have the same effect as 280ppm, which is in effect what you are suggesting. Adding 280ppm on top of 280 ppm will not have the same effect as adding 1 ppm on top of 1 ppm. Don’t know what kind of physics textbooks on atmospheric radiation you are reading (or is it just skeptical blogs?), but throw them out…or better yet, recycle them.
I’m focusing on one graph which is the entire premise of Michaels’ argument that Gillett supports his results, and which is a blatant distortion. The rest of the post is a rehash of complaints related to a paper from over 9 years ago, based on information obtained from stolen emails. Moreover, Mann’s comments are unquestionably true – Climate Research was publishing terrible research, which subsequently lead to many of their editors resigning in protest.
http://www.arp.harvard.edu/sci/climate/journalclub/ChronicleEd.pdf
Bu who cares? I live in 2012. The part of the post relevant to today is Gillett’s research, which Michaels has grossly distorted.
I don’t know what “the dana of Wiki” is, and again, this is irrelevant to the topic at hand – Michaels’ distortions.
REPLY: We all live in 2012, you aren’t special… and Mann’s unsavory pressure, which you refuse to even acknowledge in my queries to you, irrelevant too? Take that graph away, assume Michaels didn’t use it. Shall you ignore the remainder?
RE Wiki Dana: I think the broader question is: are you editing Wikipedia articles? – Anthony
GeneDoc,
I was down at UVa in October and I can tell you that the Envi Sci Department people (even my few friends there) are convinced that Mann is a persecuted saint. Ironic.
At the last faculty meeting I attended, several of the ecologists were going on and on about the “loss” of Mann to the department and how we could never let that happen again.
The truth is that Mann left because UVa refused to give in to his demand that they hire his fiance as a reseacher in the Med School. Penn State obviously was more compliant.
dana1981 says:
January 11, 2012 at 8:14 am
I don’t think Gillette et al. would appreciate their figures being tampered with and their results misrepresented. This smacks of Michaels’ deletion of Hansen’s scenarios B and C in his Congressional testimony.
=====================================================
lol, so you think scenario C is relevant? Has our carbon emissions been halted? What color is the sky in your world?
Gates, wrong as always. Look at these charts. Try and draw a correct conclusion for once:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0115707ce438970b-pi
http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/GlobalTroposphereTemperaturesAverage.jpg
The issue always has been, how much will temperatures rise with a doubling of CO2? The issue is not whether CO2 will increase temperatures, they will, but this may cause little net harm. That is why Mann and Wigley have to character assassinate even people who agree that CO2 will warm things, if those people make scientific findings that don’t induce panic. Now the chickens come home to roost — there is now good modeling evidence, to go along with real world evidence (little temperature change in the last 14 years), to suggest that Michaels was right.
It is dispicable to character assassinate and isolate those whose views you think are harming a crucial world effort. [If] you were in the end correct, e.g. we need to stop CO2 growth RIGHT NOW, or alligators will again be swimming at the north pole, things would be probably forgiven or forgotten. Sorry to say that, but this is the way the world works.
But when you are wrong, and are caught out trying to bully the world into huge monetary commitments to combat a non-scary future, then there could be hell to pay — this is for Michael and Tom. to consider. Apologizing now might be best for those two.
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 9:20 am
mkelly says:
January 11, 2012 at 8:56 am
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 7:10 am
“…The upshot of all this, it could very well be that transient sensitivity is around 1.5C for a doubling of CO2…”
Mr. Gates, does it not give you any pause at all to think that if we go from 1 ppm CO2 to 2 ppm we have the same effect as going from 280 to 560. How does 1 molecule to the equal “work” of 280? Especially since it has to deliver the same W/m^2. That one lone molecule must get real hot. HMMM.
______
Mr. Gates says:”It gives me pause to consider how someone might believe that 1ppm of CO2 could have the same effect as 280ppm, which is in effect what you are suggesting. Adding 280ppm on top of 280 ppm will not have the same effect as adding 1 ppm on top of 1 ppm. Don’t know what kind of physics textbooks on atmospheric radiation you are reading (or is it just skeptical blogs?), but throw them out…or better yet, recycle them.”
———————-
Mr. Gates your quote uses the term “doubling of CO2” and you also use 560 as a number, so 280 must have been half to accomplish a doubling. Going from 1 to 2 is doubling. So per your statement a doubling of CO2 from 1 to 2 caused an increase of 1.5C. ln(2/1)= ln(560/280)
So I ask again does it give you pause to say a doubling of CO2 will lead to a sensitivity of 1.5C?
Anthony, the entire post is utter nonsense. As I said, the criticisms of Climate Research were entirely valid, and based primarily on Soon and Baliunas’ horrid paper, not Michaels’. I mean honestly, exactly what do you object to in Mann’s email? Everything he said was accurate and reasonable. Michaels’ entire post here is an utter distortion.
No, I don’t edit Wikipedia articles.
I suggest you take your own advice and remove the distorted graphic in question, and indeed the entire distorted discussion of Gillett’s research. I have notified Dr. Gillett of Michaels’ post, and will gladly inform you of his reaction, if you would like.
dana1981,
The primary result and scientific advancement of the Gillett et al. analysis is using the data from 1851-2010. Thus, that is the result that we highlighted in the Figure. Gillett et al. did indeed also include the results from using the data from 1901-2000, however, they did so in order to see show how using the new longer and more updated data impacted the analysis compared with one relying on a shorter and older dataset—that was a primary novelty of the Gillett et al. work. In our article, we were not interested in the old results, but rather, the new results being forwarded by Gillett et al. Thus, for clarity sake, I removed those results from the Figure that had to do with the old data set (and which bore no relevance to our discussion)–and I made mention of this in the Figure’s caption.
-Chip Knappenberger
World Climate Report
Dana, are you familiar with the concept of abstracts? Gillett et al’s abstract mentions only one temperature range: 1.3 – 1.8. Ergo, this is their primary/main conclusion. Any complaints about PJM ignoring secondary results in order to clearly express a point (which is the difference in reaction to similar conclusions) is merely the kettle calling the pot black.
Alec Rawls says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:32 am
“They still do some important scientific research (excepting the vast majority of climate science) and they are important for medical research (since the tort revolution made private medical research nearly impossible), but the mis-education of our youth cannot end soon enough.”
Yes. The best medical schools have management that is totally independent of the academics who manage the remainder of the university.
Dr. Michaels
Like GeneDoc, I am a UVA grad (GEAS -’82). Somehow, I managed to learn a scientific method there that is very different from the one the hockey team uses. You lay all your results (and how you got there) bare and hope your compadres can find any mistakes you made, ending up with a better product that you still get credit for. Possessiveness is one human trait, among others, that this method is intended to minimize. If science is not done this way, one is setting oneself up for a fall, which I am afraid the team is about to deservedly endure.
On another note, I remember when you were the State Climatologist of Virginia. Then all of a sudden you weren’t, I never found out what happened or what administration was responsible. Warner, maybe? I would like to hear your story sometime, if you can bear to tell it.
Chip, there is a reason Gillett et al. included both results in their figures. There are two different results when applying the regression to two different timeframes. There is nothing new about HadCRUT data from 1851-1900, and previous attribution/sensitivity studies have also used this timeframe. Your interpretation of Gillette et al.’s reason for focusing on the 1851-2010 regression is simply wrong.
Frankly, there are several good reasons to think the results based on the 1901-2000 regression are more accurate, though Gillette et al. chose to focus on the results based on the 1851-2010 regression (which I think was a mistake, personally). I will discuss these reasons in my own blog post on SkS, which will include results from *both* regressions.
To delete results from the figure just because they weren’t highlighted (but were discussed) in the paper is a misrepresentation and distortion. The paper also had a number of other caveats, for example:
“We therefore recommend caution in interpreting the scaled projections derived from this single model, since our uncertainty estimates account only for possible errors in the magnitude of the simulated responses to the forcings, and not for possible errors in the observations, in the forcings, or in the spatio-temporal patterns of response to those forcings. We suggest that a similar analysis be carried out using multiple models once the necessary simulations are available, which will allow the effects of model uncertainty to be better accounted for.”
Of course none of these caveats are mentioned in the Michaels (or Chip, whoever wrote it) post above. But more important is the distortion of deleting the inconvenient results from the figure.
dana1981 says:
“Anthony, the entire post is utter nonsense.” <– [a sure sign of a closed mind.]
It's tough being a Mann apologist here, because most of us are familiar with the Climategate emails. Further reading is in order if you want to understand just how much of a climate charlatan Michael Mann is. Begin with A.W. Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion for a very well documented reference of the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes. For a taste of Montford’s work, see:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
The corruption in climate pal review is endemic, and Mann is the central instigator. If you are so blind that you cannot see scientific misconduct throughout the emails and other references, you’re just carrying water for the Mann/Jones clique. The question then becomes: what do you personally get out of being their water boy? Is the false comfort of True Belief enough? Because in case you haven’t noticed, the planet is not doing what the alarmist crowd wants.
And if Gillett wants to submit his own article to Anthony for posting, we will see how lame his actual climate science really is. Not many folks really care about Gillett’s drama queen “reaction”. Tell him to defend his conjectures with a real article. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
mkelly says:
January 11, 2012 at 9:44 am
“.. does it not give you any pause at all to think that if we go from 1 ppm CO2 to 2 ppm we have the same effect as going from 280 to 560. How does 1 molecule to the equal “work” of 280? ”
Well, it doesn’t.
At the current concentrations of CO2, the effect of adding more CO2 is logarithmic, That is why we talk about climate sensitivity as being the temperature rise in response to a doubling of CO2. It doesn’t matter if this doubling is from 280ppm to 560ppm or doubling from 400ppm to 800ppm. Over this range the response is logarithmic, and the temperature rise will be the same. This logarithmic response is valid up to concentrations of about 1,000 ppm. But at very low CO2 concentrations, such as 1 or 2 ppm, as you suggest, the response is not logarithmic. The effect of doubling CO2 from 1ppm to 2ppm is quite dramatic. See…http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/#more-17114
Alec Rawls says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:32 am
PJM wrote:
The untold parts of this story, nonetheless, need to be told. Like why I am not at UVa after 30 years of faculty service, for example?
Anytime you want to tell it Dr. Michaels.
I was the person who recruited Mann to UVa, because I thought our Environmental Scienes Department should be diverse. Silly me.
It happened throughout academia. The earlier generation was willing to admit their rebellious leftist students to the professoriate, feeling an obligation to open the academy to these different ideas but, silly them, they were caught by surprise when the leftists practiced what they preached and slammed the door after themselves. No one who is not a leftist can get in anymore…
—————-
Thankfully, you are wrong about this. I was hired at a very left-wing university in the early 2000s. The thing is, those who are open-minded are fair, and those who are hard-line lefties assume that everyone else who is enlightened enough to make it through the hiring process thinks like they do. One just has to keep one’s opinions to oneself until tenure. The problem is that this becomes habitual. The good new is that among younger academics here, while most are left-wing, there is a smattering of diversity, and there are enough fellow-travellors of moderate views including various strains of conservativism that we do not feel isolated.
Dana1981 links to an article that’s supposed to prove that 1) “Mann’s comments are unquestionably true – Climate Research was publishing terrible research..” and 2) “which subsequently lead to many of their editors resigning in protest.” ((http://www.arp.harvard.edu/sci/climate/journalclub/ChronicleEd.pdf)
It does no such thing. The 2003 paper, by Richard Monestersky is devoid of any meaningful facts about the case, and reads more like a gossip mag for teens, with all the stock hero-worshipping and cheap shots at the villains. Mann’s “unquestionably true” comments are in fact more of his familiar blustering and bluffing, captured during Sem. Inhofe’s hearing: “I believe it is the mainstream view of just about every scientist in my field that I have talked to that there is little that is valid in that paper…They got just about everything wrong.” No details needed, as Mann’s reputation makes fclear that everything he says is “unquestionably true.”
The “many” resigning editors Dana1981 refers to are, were 4 (four) people, all seemingly goose-marched away by Hans von Storch, who in his words, tried to take control of the peer review process by directing all submissions to himself first. One of the resigning editors was Clare M. Goodess, a senior research associate at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia .
For some reason, the article’s author, saw fit to “mention” that Soon and Baliunas “also received $53,000 — about 5 percent of their total research dollars — from the American Petroleum Institute.” Five percent. A shocking revelation. Monastersky forgot to mention what the funding sources of the Warmists were, so perhaps Dana1981 can tell us about these?
cui bono says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:33 am
Great (if frightening) post.
I hope Dr. Michaels is allowed and willing to submit testimony to the ‘State Pen’ lawsuit brought by Mann. All evidence of the latters corrosive influence on climate science in the past few years should be in the public eye.
—————
If Dr. Michaels is allowed and willing but money is an issue, I am willing to contribute to getting him to the trial.
Dana,
If you think “the entire post is utter nonsense” (though I don’t believe so), then by the same reasoning, the entire work by Mann and the “team” is utter nonsense. The emails reveal that they’re not trustworthy.
Who died made you dictator? You made your bed, now sleep in it.
I should also point out that the Gillett results highlighted by Michaels/Chip are based on the Gillett estimate that the planet warmed 0.7°C from 1961 to 2010, vs. just 0.6°C from 1851 to 2010. That’s why he gets a lower transient response using the longer timeframe. That’s why it’s important to also include the 1901-2000 regression results (because frankly they underestimate the 1851-2010 warming, which biases their sensitivity and future projections low). If you ignore the latter and focus entirely on the 1851-2010 results, you’re accepting that the planet has warmed 0.7°C since 1961, and that it cooled from 1851 to 1961.
This would of course contradict the surface stations ‘urban heat island’ arguments put forth so often on this site. Whoops.
dana1981,
Thanks for your comments.
Obviously, there are more details, caveats, etc. contained in the full version of the paper than in our article which focused on the primary result. If these additional caveats, details, etc. overwhelmed the main results, then the paper would not have been published in the first place, so I think it is fair of us to place the focus where we did.
Just because the authors chose to show some combination of data in their Figure does not obligate us to show the same combination of data. Perhaps their intensions for their plot were different than ours. Again, for our purposes, we were interested in the main, new, result from Gillett et al., not how the new result differed from a result using older data. While that is perhaps an interesting academic result, it just wasn’t what our article was about.
-Chip Knappenberger
World Climate Report
I just posted this link to the (now) Senior Executive Producer of NOVA, who guided the series
for a couple of decades.
But, I agree with:
(Completely + Hopelessly)Politicised = (Fat)Chance
Maybe Americans for Prosperity would chip in? David Koch is an MIT grad….
…Lady in Red
It`s great that dana1981`s comment were allowed to go through. This is what makes this blog so relevant. She raises a good point, allowing for a counter-response. At the end, I feel I`m a little less stupid… Thank you!
[Moderator’s Note: Dana is a he. -REP]
mkelly said:
“Mr. Gates your quote uses the term “doubling of CO2″ and you also use 560 as a number, so 280 must have been half to accomplish a doubling. Going from 1 to 2 is doubling. So per your statement a doubling of CO2 from 1 to 2 caused an increase of 1.5C. ln(2/1)= ln(560/280)
So I ask again does it give you pause to say a doubling of CO2 will lead to a sensitivity of 1.5C?”
______
I’m really glad you brought this up as it offers a chance to really have a discussion about the issue of the logarithmic effect of CO2 and sensitiy. First, you absolutely cannot put climate sensitvity to varioius amount of CO2 on a log chart, as much as skeptics would love to do this. It is absolutely an incorrect thing to do. The logarithmic response of concentrations of CO2 tells you nothing about the climate sensiviity to those concentrations. Once honest skeptics understand this (I mean really understand it) they stop doing it, and move on to other issues. The logarithmic response to increasing amounts of CO2 is a completely separate issue to climate sensitivity, which involves the response of the climate system to a given concentraion of CO2 in the atmopshere. The climate sensitivity involves not just the logarithmic radiational response of CO2, but all additional feedbacks, both positive and negative to that radiational response. But if gets even worse for those continuing on in their “but it’s logarithmic” theme. There are mutliple levels of climate sensitivity, such that you need to clearly define what kind of sensitivity you are talking about. The main general two are Transient (also called Charney) and Earth System. Transient sensitivity takes into account all immediate and short-term feedbacks to a given level of CO2. Note: Basic Transient or Charney sensitivity to given CO2 concentrations is not at all logarithmic, but rather involves the complexity of the system itself, such that senstivity to any given level is not projectable on a simply log chart as you can’t project the response of a complex dynamical system existing on the edge of chaos on a log chart! It is simply incorrect. The reason being is that at different levels of concentrations a chaotic system such as the climate will jump to an entirely new regime, not predictable from following a simple log chart. But here’s the even worse part. The final Earth system or Equilbrium sensitivity doesn’t happen right away, but can take decades to finally settle out due to longer term slow feedbacks. If it was wrong to put transient sensitivty on a log chart, it is infinitely even more incorrect to put equilibrium sensitivt there, and Lord Monckton’s proclamation that they are “nearly equal” is absolutely not founded on anything scientific, as we don’t even know for certain what the transient sensitivity is, how can we possibly know that the even much more difficult to know, equalibrium sensitivity is “nearly equa”. You can’t, and Lord Monckton can’t. But what you especially can’t do, is put either transient or equilibrium sensitiity on a log chart.
dana1981
“To delete results from the figure just because they weren’t highlighted (but were discussed) in the paper is a misrepresentation and distortion. The paper also had a number of other caveats, for example”
Kinda like hide the decline.
the defense of hide the decline was that the decline wasnt hidden because
1. it was shown elsewhere
2. it was discussed elsewhere
So, if you apply that defense here dana..
Or rather, if you insist that deleting results here is misleading, then you also must condemn mikes nature trick and hide the decline
Looks like dana1981 has been caught out. He/she barged in with the claim that Pat and Chip were dishonestly hiding the half of Gillett’s paper that contradict their interpretation. Chip’s explanation shows that the omitted results (which the posts informs us are being omitted as not to the point) simply reinforce their interpretation of the paper. The omitted data shows how much Gillett’s estimated climate sensitivity range lowers when models are fit to the longer temperature record (bringing it close to what Dr. Michaels estimated 10 years ago).
Now dana is left sputtering about how he/she prefers the shorter temperature record (you know, because throwing away information is the new “scientific method”). But the suggestion that Gillett will agree with her is ludicrous. Did dana not see the title of Gillett’s paper: “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations”? IMPROVED. That’s the key word. So keep on digging diva dana.
It will be richly ironic that if the down fall of the ‘the Team’ comes about in the end not becasue ‘science’ in general calls out their poor behavior, but that their arrogance leads them to stuff themselves up in the eyes of the public .
dana1981 and yet you can’t apply the same logic to a person , in one instance , that not only used data he knew to be rubbish but actual used in upside too, such is the ‘quality ‘ of Mann’s work.
But then again anything in the name of ‘the cause ‘ most it good in the eyes of the faithful.
Dana.
“based on the 1901-2000 regression are more accurate, though Gillette et al. chose to focus on the results based on the 1851-2010 regression”
OF COURSE the warmist bletheren would prefer an analysis that leaves out the last 10 years or so.
“This post is a dishonest disgrace. The figure deletes essentially half of the Gillett (which is the correct spelling, by the way – two ‘t’s) results, calling them “not relevant”. More like not convenient, because they show Gillett’s second possible climate response, which is one with significantly higher warming. The full figure can be seen here”
Yup, kinda like hiding the decline dana.
When SkS defended hiding the decline, they appealed to two arguments.
1. it was discussed in the text
2. it was shown in other texts.
The WMO hide the decline was defended on the basis that the publication was not as important as IPCC.
It appears that
1. this blog post is not as important as the IPCC
2. the fact that the graphic has been changed is mentioned in the legend
3. the graphic is shown in other places.
using the defenses you used for hide the decline, this graph passes muster
On the other hand, if you call this graph misleading and raise a stink about a blog post,
then you should reconsider your defense of hide the decline. because here you are holding a blog to higher standard than the IPCC
Climate research and medical/pharmaceutical research are very different animals. It is amusing for me to watch. Reading about climatology and climastrology has been a hobby of mine for the last 7 years or so. Keeping up with the medical literature is a part of my livelihood. The statistical analyses employed in medical/pharmaceutical research are generally pretty straightforward. They’re not obscure or arcane and can usually be readily understood by those with a fundamental understanding of statistics. The statistical analyses employed in climate science make my eyes glaze over.
There are all kinds of other differences. The fields of medicine and pharmacology are much, much larger than climatology. Most medical and pharmaceutical research is funded by the private sector and is subjected to intense review and analysis both before and after publication. Apparently this doesn’t happen in the field of climatology. Then again, nobody dies if climatologists screw up.
About 25 years ago some of the pharmaceutical industries played a nasty little game. They would fund university based research (which were often Phase III clinical trials or post-marketing studies). This ain’t cheap. Some pharmaceutical companies forked over the research funds but stipulated that they had the final decision if the study would be published. In essence they were a position to stop publication of results they didn’t like. What’s the point of conducting research if you cannot communicate the results? In very short order the ship hit the sand. Grant applications were restructured so that all the pharmaceutical industry could do is write a check. The researchers were free to publish whatever results they got. In medicine negative results are just as interesting as positive results. Then again, their funding doesn’t depend on achieving results that serve a political agenda.
I’ve served as a reviewer before. I can corroborate the rumor that it is a tedious chore and basically a pain in the ass. But I was truly dispassionate. I didn’t care about the results, my job was to examine the study design and analysis. Beyond that I didn’t care. The rest was up to the journal editor. Climate science seems to be quite different. The results are the most important factor, the validity of the study design and subsequent analysis are secondary.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I glorify medical research. The manner in which they report results are still very much in accordance with the desires of the funding entity. It’s just harder to tell bald faced lies. I have several examples but I won’t bore WUWT readers with more than just one. A rather famous study found that using (at the time proprietary) clopidogrel at $3 or more per day reduced the risk of subsequent stroke by 50% over using aspirin (at about 2 cents per day). This is absolutely true. What they prefer not to mention is that they’re looking at a relative risk difference of 1.6% vs. 0.8%….at a cost of over $1,000 per year per patient. To MAYBE prevent one subsequent stroke event a huge number of patients have to be treated with the expensive drugs for several years. Is is statistically significant? Yeah. Is it clinically significant? Not really. Is it worth it? Nope.
Chip, I agree that your intentions are clearly different. Gillett et al. intended to show that their results depend on the timeframe used in the regression. You and Michaels intended to leave out the data that undermine your argument. I already explained that your claim about ‘new’ and ‘old’ data is utterly nonsensical. The difference between the two results is merely the difference between using the regressions over different timeframes, as the paper clearly discusses. To delete the 1901-2000 regression is simply to delete the results you don’t like. And it is quite obvious why you don’t like them.
Mosher – ‘hide the decline’ and ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ aren’t even the same thing. I suggest you research the subject before commenting on it. No, the two examples are not even remotely similar.
Yes, I am a ‘he’, thank you for clarifying, moderator.
Alec Rawls says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Absolutely! I suspect Dana1981 is too young (31?) or inexperienced to understand that care in thought is required before writing. Chips’ explanation makes sense to me too.
R Gates – “The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher, but exactly how much higher, no one knows, as a full understanding of all the earth-system feedbacks is no known.”
The equilibrium sensitivity to doubling CO2 is precisely zero.
CO2* + N2 CO2 + N2⁺
In equilibrium, CO2 does not heat the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is heated via convection/conduction from the surface.
Kinda reminds me of Svensmark.
Seconded. I suspect it’s part of the evidence that ought to come out. Thank you for visiting, Dr Michaels.
Hmm the equation in my last post needs ↔, greater than, less than symbols.
Pat Michaels – any chance you can email me on the address you last used ?
Thanks.
Warwick Hughes
The Abstract of the Gillett et al article is actually more clearly in support of Michaels’ points than are the portions of it Michaels quotes above. Here is what the full Abstract says, using all caps to isolate the part the Michaels left out, and which demolishes what Dana has suggested is bias on Michaels’ part:
“Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model’s projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851–2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2). Consistent with previous studies, we detect the influence of greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings in the observed temperature record. OUR ESTIMATE OF GREENHOUSE-GAS-ATTRIBUTABLE WARMING IS LOWER THAN THAT DERIVED USING ONLY 1900-1999 OBSERVATIONS. Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways. Repeating our attribution analysis with a second model (CNRM-CM5) gives consistent results, albeit with somewhat larger uncertainties.”
Dana, when the authors themselves say, in the abstract summarizing the article, that “Our estimate of greenhouse-gas-attributable warming is lower than that derived using only 1900–1999 observations,” then the authors mean for readers to understand that the longer observations are preferable. When they use the diminutive term “only,” they mean to say that the shorter time period is insufficient.
Therefore, when you “alert” Gillett to what Michaels has done, I doubt very much he will think Michaels has distorted anything, or taken anything out of context. Please do “alert” Gillett, and make sure to report back in full.
Until now, I had not known how intellectually dishonest you are, Dana. You are trying to trick people who haven’t actually read the full Abstract into thinking that Michaels is hiding from WUWT readership that Gillett et al actually came to different conclusions than Michaels says they do. Nice try.
dana1981,
I think it is pretty clear which timeframe that Gillet et al. preferred in their article “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations.”
-Chip Knappenberger
@ John
“they mean to say that the shorter time period is insufficient. ”
As is nearly always the case.
Now if we had decent accurate data to add in the MWP and RWP, then I suggest that the result would show even less sensitivity to CO2.. like nearly ZERO !!!!
Unfortunately we have to rely on only the very small time span of 150 years of data (approx), which means that predictions are probably limited to 5-10 years, even then with large errors expected.
It really is time for the warmist bletheren to realise this and stop making moronic predictions for the end of the century.
Genghis says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:49 pm
R Gates – “The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher, but exactly how much higher, no one knows, as a full understanding of all the earth-system feedbacks is no known.”
The equilibrium sensitivity to doubling CO2 is precisely zero.
CO2* + N2 CO2 + N2⁺
In equilibrium, CO2 does not heat the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is heated via convection/conduction from the surface.
_______
Whatever book, pamplet, or website you got this from, recycle, discard, and unlink, and try taking a real physics class.
John, I read it the same way. The “Key Points” further express preference for the 1851-2010 time period as “Using 1851-2010 observations gives lower AND LESS UNCERTAIN projected warming”
dana1981 your outrage and hysteria seem uncorrelated to and out of scale with this article. It is confusing.
Lady in Red:
I have just submitted feedback to NOVA essentially trying to do what I suggested earlier.
If you have an email address you can share, I authorize WUWT to release my email addr to you so that you can contact me and share a better way to get the message driven home.
Getting NOVA to program this story, without leftist distortions, should be the highest priority work, in my opinion. After the years of pushing the agenda, it is PAST time that NOVA start practicing a little balance.
thanks for your efforts, Steve
[DONE. -REP]
dana1981,
Just visited your favourite haunts, the SkS site. My experience is best defined by the word “slumming.” The stench of panic and desperation there are palpable. The aggressive approach and cheesy mockery are reminiscent of the “scientific socialism” magazines which went into over-drive to pump out their venom in the last days before the communism’s collapse.
To wit, skepticism…I mean real skepticism, not SkS’s embarrassing attempt to hijack the term…is described as an “anti-science campaign” which is “well-funded” by “narrow financial interests,” and skeptics are described as Bible-thumping, evolution denying low-brows. That’s rich, coming from a well-funded, glitzy site like SkS. When one casts stones from glass houses, one needs to be more careful, as the old adage goes. In the real world, of course, skeptical climate science can claim barely a fraction of what you Warmistas have been grabbing. Care to reveal the financial interests behind AGW (or is it “climate change” or “climate disruption” now). Never mind just the “small change,” from the usual foundations, university grants and even oil interests, but the trillions in the collapsing “green” and “renewable” scams, the dead carbon tax indulgences, the billions in government funding and hidden tax breaks.
What cheered me, though, is that the rhetoric, the mendacious content with its banal appeal to authority and the funny attempts to appear cool and up-to-date are all geared to the thinning left and the smelly OWS crowd. So, here’s my advice: Keep it up guys, you’re doing a great job. Give us more cackling, more Mike Mann defenses, compare us to Neanderthals and keep up the cry of “the science is settled, the science is settled!”
Chip – I certainly agree that Gillett et al. seem to prefer the results from the 1851-2010 timeframe. I disagree with that preference for a number of reasons, some of which I have discussed here (i.e.it relies on more warming from 1961 to 2010 than 1851 to 2010, which I haven’t seen anybody comment on – inconvenient facts once again, I presume).
Nevertheless, Gillett et al. also made it clear that their results are highly sensitive to the regression period used, both in the abstract and in the body of the text:
“By contrast, when regression coefficients calculated over the shorter 1901–2000 period following [Stott et al., 2006] are used to scale projections, projected warming is larger and consistent with that directly simulated, illustrating the sensitivity of the results to the regression period used.”
Those last 11 words are key to their findings – the projections are very sensitive to the regression period. That’s why they showed both. That’s why deleting one of those sets of projections is a distortion of their results. Frankly it’s a denial of inconvenient results.
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Thank you. That is what I was getting at. You made a blanket statement with no caveats.
So I assume you disagree with the IPCC dF= 5.35 ln(C/Co) in that they put it on a log basis?
Oh it’s also worth noting that Gillett et al. attribute greater than 100% of the observed warming from 1851-2010 to human effects (well over 100% to greenhouse gases). So there are a lot of reasons why “skeptics” should really be careful what they’re getting themselves into when endorsing this paper. Be careful what you wish for.
dana
Im well aware of the differences between mike trick and hide the decline.
So, you called this graph misleading
Ar4 and wmo presentations are no less misleading
Dana,
Your gish gallop away from my question to a diversion about the differences between Mike nature trick and hide the decline is a classic [SNIP: c’mon, Steve, you know the policy. -REP] tactic.
I repeat what I wrote below. Now, dana you’ve made mistakes before on SkS, I look forward
to how you treat this chart that Pat did especially in the context of SkS arguments about proper chartsmanship
#####################
“This post is a dishonest disgrace. The figure deletes essentially half of the Gillett (which is the correct spelling, by the way – two ‘t’s) results, calling them “not relevant”. More like not convenient, because they show Gillett’s second possible climate response, which is one with significantly higher warming. The full figure can be seen here”
Yup, kinda like hiding the decline dana.
When SkS defended hiding the decline, they appealed to two arguments.
1. it was discussed in the text
2. it was shown in other texts.
The WMO hide the decline was defended on the basis that the publication was not as important as IPCC.
It appears that
1. this blog post is not as important as the IPCC
2. the fact that the graphic has been changed is mentioned in the legend
3. the graphic is shown in other places.
using the defenses you used for hide the decline, this graph passes muster
On the other hand, if you call this graph misleading and raise a stink about a blog post,
then you should reconsider your defense of hide the decline. because here you are holding a blog to higher standard than the IPCC
E. M. Smith says (January 11, 2012 at 4:04 am….. “occupational birth control” on folks who do not agree with “settled science”. …………..”IMHO, it’s time to take the anonymous back room dealing out of science. Open the windows and doors, turn on the spotlights and cameras, and grow up.”
I concur that what Dr. Michaels shared with us is some feedback on the process-peer review- that failed in it’s primary objective: to expand or improve the state of our understanding- knowledge. Back in the days before the electronic revolution- when the current peer review process was put in place- it likely made some sense to have the give and take of review be anonymous. The danger of this closed approach to communication was shown by Dr. Michaels: if the gate keepers (editors, reviewers, publishers) act more like Machiavelli than Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc. the intent of the process (adding to our knowledge base) is circumvented.
Can the process be fixed to keep Machiavellian traits, actions, etc. in check? I can’t answer this as my personal experience is from the use of the scientific method in the private world of product and process development. Our design reviews (what I will equate to the peer review process) had a lot more transparency then the academic peer review process does. We did have a process in place that allowed peers to submit questions, comments and or concerns on a paper, report, etc. anonymously, but this method was rarely used. Having been the process owner for a few formal design reviews it was rather easy to include the anonymous questions/comments into the design history files and require that the design team address them in the open and formally before the review was signed off as completed. The world is a competitive place so how to keep the trade secrets in the academic world confidential I don’t know…………….
Finding a why to get some checks and balances into the peer review process to reduce the probability of Machiavellian behavior seems like a good idea to me. How to do it……………. ?
By the way dana
your description of Mike’s trick on your site is wrong as Jean S has pointed out.
will you correct it or continue to mislead people:
You might know Jean S. from climate audit ( the rest of us know him from his stats work )
Here’s Jean’s comment correcting your mistake.
“This is incorrect. It’s “Mike’s Nature trick”. Mike (=Michael Mann) did not truncate any tree ring data in his publications (not specifically in his infamous 1998 Nature paper). Instead the “trick” is to add instrumental temperature series to the end of the reconstruction (to the truncated reconstruction in the case of Briffa’s series) prior to smoothing. This should be clear as the sentence continues “of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s”. Finally, the effect of this “trick” is to turn the end of the smoothed series upwards (instead of downwards as they would without adding in the instrumental series), and thus “to hide the decline”.
dana1981 says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Oh my goodness! That sounds a bit weird – I wasn’t aware one could attrribute OVER 100% of warming to CO2 ??
Good luck, Steptoe! I’m not optimistic — even if they did it, they’d probably slant it.
You can write to
NOVA@WGBH.org
or call
617.300.5400
I wrote to someone who was a NOVA production assistant — yesh! — now, long-time exec prod (but hardly a friend). Patrick Michaels is a neighbor of mine, now, and Judith Curry’s mentor/friend, Peter Webster, was a colleague of my husband’s. I’d facilitate, if possible, but I’m not optimistic.
(BTW, I handled the natl publicity for NOVA for its first four seasons, had to guide it beyond the kiss-of-death, talking-heads-from-MIT image. Frankly, dubbing it “Science Adventures for Curious Grown-ups” didn’t make me popular among the ‘gbh cognescenti. smile…. But, it worked.) ….Lady in Red
Genghis says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Hmm the equation in my last post needs ↔, greater than, less than symbols.
_______
Wouldn’t make any difference to the general inaccuracy of your contentions.
mkelly says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:57 pm
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Thank you. That is what I was getting at. You made a blanket statement with no caveats.
So I assume you disagree with the IPCC dF= 5.35 ln(C/Co) in that they put it on a log basis?
_______
Not familiar with this but there is no ratio that the log function of CO2 concentration can be muliplied by to give you an accurate measurement of either transient or equilibrium sentivity over all CO2 concentration levels– that is…a ratio will exist for any single concentration, but that ratio will change for other concentrations, and the jump in that ratio wil be non-linear such that the ratio will jump between levels, much as electrons jump between energy levels.
Steven Mosher,
your point would be cogent except that in the supposed instances of “hide the decline” the general nature of the missing information was indicated in text, and the graphs where original productions.
In this instance the text indicating missing information is downright misleading. That application of the same technique by the same team to 1901-2000 data results in a transient response of 1.7-2.5 C is clearly not “not relevant” to a discussion of transient climate response.
In this case, Anthony (or somebody working for Anthony) has clearly used a graphics program to manually remove the information about the the 1901-2000 result from the graphic displayed, a fact clearly indicated by the occasional additional mark next to the blue dashed line where the 1901-2000 data was not completely removed.
Anthony has gone to a lot of trouble to not reveal the caveats on the paper’s headline result. This is particularly troubling as the pre-1880 temperature data suffers from such limited geographical extent, particularly overland as to render it of dubious merit as a global temperature index, a problem that inevitably effects the quality of the papers result.
Of course, he has not revealed the equally embarrassing (for him) result in the attribution study in the paper, which shows that the GHG contribution to warming is greater than the net warming in all time periods examined. Arguably, of course, that is not relevant to the results he discussed, but neither did it require the physical removal of data.
[MODERATOR’S NOTE: Check your eyeglass prescription. -REP]
“Frankly it’s a denial of inconvenient results.”
lol.. like the last 12 or so years temps !
Dana: “…the criticisms of Climate Research were entirely valid, and based primarily on Soon and Baliunas’ horrid paper…”
You mean the paper that the AR5 Zero Draft vindicates?
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/06/climategate-2-0-an-ar5-perspective/
dana1981:
Duh. Thanks to The Team’s control over climate science publishing (the subject of this post) EVERY paper has to nod religiously to the orthodoxy, or it never sees the light of day. An example is the research result announced earlier this week: “Global warming caused by greenhouse gases delays natural patterns of glaciation, researchers say.” What? Driving cars might avert the next glacial period? Don’t worry Team, the authors have your back:
Channell’s whole stupid report is based on the assumption that recent warming was caused by CO2, making it little more than a PR attempt to dismiss the perfectly rational fears of serious global cooling that REAL scientists are worried about, now that the sun has gone quiet.
Take into account the likely role of solar magnetic activity in the temperature history of the last 150 years and there is very little warming left to attribute to CO2, making the implied sensitivity very small, probably less than one (where net-negative feedbacks dampen rather than amplify climate forcings). So don’t worry dana, we know how to compensate for sensitivity estimates that assume that 20th century warming was CO2 driven. They provide an upper bound that is unrealistically high by a large margin. But thanks for your concern.
Upshot: no, CO2 will NOT have any significant delaying effect on the next glaciation, not unless we happen to happen to experience a Little Ice Age whose natural bottom puts us right on the very cusp of falling into Dr. Brown “cold attractor,” where CO2’s butterfly wing can make the difference. Vanishingly unlikely. Just the fact of another Little Ice Age will prove that CO2’s ability to stop natural cooling is like a paper-clip to a freight train. It is not going to stop anything.
Moderator, your response to my last post is deceptive either deliberately or from misinformation. If Anthony Watts does not publicly confirm that the graph was physically manipulated by deleting the data for the 1901-2000 transient response as I have claimed, I will publish a post proving the deletion and showing the original graph on my blog.
[Moderator’s Note: The following is from a subsequent comment which I have combined with this one. -REP]
slight addendum to my previous comment. As Patrick Michaels is the author of this blog, it is likely he rather than Anthony Watts responsible for doctoring the final graph, and the deceitful claim that the censored information was not relevant.
[REPLY: As you have already noted, Anthony posted this article as a guest post. Oddly enough, he has been criticized for posting “alarmist” articles without comment as well. You will also note, if you go through the comments, that Dr. Michaels, as well as other commenters, pro and con, have addressed the issues you’ve raised. No deception is intended and no one, skeptic or otherwise is deceived. -REP]
Anthony’s REPLY: My moderation team alerted me at work that Tom was going on a rampage, and I come back here dumbfounded how Tom could miss right at the top of the post these two important pieces of information
1. “by Dr. Pat Michaels”
2. The Link to World Climate report where the original essay was published, including the graph.
Further, the issue of the graph has been addressed in comments, by Michaels, Knappenberger, and others. You really should read all these before pronouncing me to be evil.
I think Tom owes an apology for his failure to read before pronouncing sentence and make threats to publish an “expose” rooted in confusion.
– Anthony Watts
Dana, that is a load of rubbish. Clearly the Gillett paper sets out to redo estimates using newly available data and presents the results as an improvement. In doing so it shows the previous results in order to highlight the improvement. Michaels rightly compares the new results with his previous work. The older results are completely irrelevant unless you can show good reason why a more limited timespan and data set should be chosen to analyse data which has intrinsically long time-dependent cycles.
If you can, publish a new paper critiquing Gillett et al. Good luck with that. Otherwise retract your head. In either case your criticisms of Michaels merely show your own prejudices.
R. Gates – “Whatever book, pamplet, or website you got this from, recycle, discard, and unlink, and try taking a real physics class.”
Can you point out what is wrong with this equation in equilibrium?
CO2* + N2 ↔ CO2 + N2⁺
The symbols * and ⁺ “are for the excited states to differentiate the energy modes – vibrational (*) for CO2 and translational (⁺) for N2.”
Warwick–what’s you email address.
[Moderator’s Note: Check your e-mail. -REP]
dana1981,
I just paid a your favourite haunts, the SkS site. That depressing experience is best defined by the word “slumming.” The reek of panic and desperation there are palpable. Such aggressive approach and cheesy mockery, kind of like the old “scientific Marxism” mags which went into over-drive pumping out their venom in the last days before the communism’s collapse.
To wit, skepticism…I mean real skepticism, not your SkS’s pitiful try at hijacking the word…is described as an “anti-science campaign” which is “well-funded” by “narrow financial interests,” and skeptics are smeared as Bible-thumping, evolution-denying low-brows. That’s rich, coming from a well-funded, glitzy site like SkS. When one casts stones from glass houses, one needs to be more careful, as the old adage goes. In the real world, of course, skeptical climate science can claim barely a fraction of what you Warmistas have been grabbing. Care to reveal the financial interests behind AGW (or is it “climate change” or “climate disruption” now?). Never mind the “small change,” from the usual foundations, university grants and even oil interests, but the trillions in the collapsing “green” and “renewable” scams, the dead carbon tax indulgences.
What cheered me, though, is that the rhetoric, the mendacious content with its banal appeal to authority and the funny attempts to appear cool and clever are all geared to the thinning left and the smelly OWS crowd. So, here’s my advice: Keep it up guys, you’re doing a great job. Give us more cackling, more censorship, beatify Mike Mann, compare us all to Neanderthals and keep up the cry of “the science is settled, the science is settled!”
Genghis says:
January 11, 2012 at 3:30 pm
R. Gates – “Whatever book, pamplet, or website you got this from, recycle, discard, and unlink, and try taking a real physics class.”
Can you point out what is wrong with this equation in equilibrium?
CO2* + N2 ↔ CO2 + N2⁺
The symbols * and ⁺ “are for the excited states to differentiate the energy modes – vibrational (*) for CO2 and translational (⁺) for N2.”
________
It’s not the equation itself, but the context with which you present it, as the context was supposed to be related to climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2, with all fast (Charney/transient) and slow (earth system) feedbacks included. Your equation has nothing to do with either of these, and if you think it does, my suggestion was that you take a physics class, or two, or three.
@Dunno
“This would of course contradict the surface stations ‘urban heat island’ arguments put forth so often on this site. Whoops.”
roflmao.. man, you have warped logic.
The UHI effect on the calculated “Globull Average Land Temp” slowed the cooling that would normally have occured in the natural cycle between 1940-1970 (ish) And then the massive increase in urbanisation, swallowing many stations that used to be “rural”, plus the accidental (yeah right) loss of many many remote rural stations contributes a significant amount (probably most) to the calculated “Globull Land temp” rise in the 1976-1998 period..
Then people got wise to what was happening because the SST didn’t match, and it became impossible to fudge the figures any more.
dana1981,
How does the graph you link to change the conclusion of the paper?
“Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0°C, with a central value that averages 1.8°C across our analyses.”
or this statement from the paper?
“Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.”
kakatoa says:
January 11, 2012 at 2:19 pm
I concur that what Dr. Michaels shared with us is some feedback on the process-peer review- that failed in it’s primary objective: to expand or improve the state of our understanding- knowledge. Back in the days before the electronic revolution- when the current peer review process was put in place- it likely made some sense to have the give and take of review be anonymous. The danger of this closed approach to communication was shown by Dr. Michaels: if the gate keepers (editors, reviewers, publishers) act more like Machiavelli than Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc. the intent of the process (adding to our knowledge base) is circumvented.
====================
Er, Newton would have been quite at home with such machiavellian machinations –
It looks now that all consensus climate science is reduced to stagnantion worldwide as effectively as Newton imposed on mathematics in England for a hundred years..
Where’s prince charming to wake them all up with a kiss?
I don’t know how anyone could examine the experience of the last 160 years and not come to the conclusion that the transient warming is far lower than expected. One would have to be very poor at basic math.
Obviously dana1981 has published many different versions of the temperature change to date so he might fully believe it is consistent with the climate model forecasts and with 3.0C per doubling, …
But it certainly isn’t.
I note the chart that dana1981 is complaining about is provided on the GRL website publishing the paper (I’m assuming they will NOT try to get the GRL editor fired now but who knows).
REP, clearly Mosher, to whom I was responding was deceived. What is more, burying the acknowledgement that relevant information was removed deep in the comments, and then only after being directly challenged is hardly proper acknowledgement.
[REPLY: Tom, Mosher is seldom deceived. Meet him in open, honorable dispute and see what falls out. Review the comments and see if your concerns have been addressed. You may not agree, but Anthony tries to provide a fair and open forum. Your comments have not been suppressed or altered, so go with it. -REP]
R. Gates – “It’s not the equation itself, but the context with which you present it, as the context was supposed to be related to climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2, with all fast (Charney/transient) and slow (earth system) feedbacks included. Your equation has nothing to do with either of these, and if you think it does, my suggestion was that you take a physics class, or two, or three.”
You left out, “The equalibrium sensitivity will be higher”. You are talking about a system in equilibrium. I didn’t claim that the equation had anything to do with anything except the doubling of CO2 in equilibrium. What it clearly demonstrates is that doubling CO2 doesn’t change the equilibrium temperature.
What CO2 does is help the system establish equilibrium by either putting more energy into the system if the equilibrium temperature is higher than the current value or by taking energy out of the system if the temperature is higher than equilibrium. At equilibrium CO2’s net effect is neutral and C02’s net effect on temperature excursions is also neutral.
You are the one who has to demonstrate that CO2 directly warms the atmosphere in equilibrium, since you claimed that it is responsible for apx. 64% of the atmospheres warming.
And please use mathematical proofs in your answer, while I may need to take a physics class or two, or three, I dimly remember enough Physic 300 level courses to get by, barely : )
Dana1981 admits that he undestands perfectly the focus of the paper:
“…though Gillette et al. chose to focus on the results based on the 1851-2010 regression…”
and then tries to take Michaels to task for…uh…focussing on the results based on the 1851-2010 regression.
Dana calls this “distortion”.
Genghis said: (to R. Gates)
“You are the one who has to demonstrate that CO2 directly warms the atmosphere in equilibrium, since you claimed that it is responsible for apx. 64% of the atmospheres warming.”
_______
? I never made any such claim. Either you are confusing me with someone else, or you have misunderstood or are misrepresenting something I said. Please show specifically where I made this claim, as it is not something I believe, and therefore know I would not have said it.
Kim You are funny !!
TSR Laugh !
dana1981 and Tom Curtis, the twisted and strained logic and oh-so-offended tones of your comments would make one think that your whole world was being unmade!
Oh, wait…
R. Gates – “Genghis said: (to R. Gates)
“You are the one who has to demonstrate that CO2 directly warms the atmosphere in equilibrium, since you claimed that it is responsible for apx. 64% of the atmospheres warming.”
_______
? I never made any such claim. Either you are confusing me with someone else, or you have misunderstood or are misrepresenting something I said. Please show specifically where I made this claim, as it is not something I believe, and therefore know I would not have said it.”
———————————–
———————————–
Here is the quote from the weekend thread.
———————-
——————–
R. Gates says:
January 8, 2012 at 12:27 pm
My final comments here on the “Open Weekend Thread” (big sigh of relief for some I’m sure):
Here’s a rough breakdown of where the heat in atmosphere comes from:
Short-wave radiation from the sun……………11.9%
Heat to atmosphere from condensation…………14.4%
Heat to atmosphere from convection/conduction… 4.4%
Long-wave radiation from earth………………69.4%
The atmosphere is hardly “transparent” to radiation (even Sir Hoyle knew that), either SW or LW, but certainly absorbs far more LW than SW as the above percentages indicate. To those who think and can prove that gravity and the ideal gas law explain the whole thing, there is a Nobel Prize in Physics waiting for you, and your name will be as famous as Newton and Einstein. Good luck…
——————–
——————–
You claim that “Long-wave radiation from earth………………69.4%” accounts for 69% of the atmospheric heating. What is your mechanism for heating the atmosphere via “Long-wave radiation from earth” if not through CO2 capturing the radiation?
This isn’t rocket science; in fact it isn’t even climate science. The question is whether or not Tom Wigley’s original cow birthing and Team attack on the journal was warranted. The publication of a paper 10 years later reproducing the original result, even qualified (of course it is, so was the original, all results are), offers strong support that Tom’s minority view at the time was wrong. The existence of the higher sensitivity figure doesn’t negate this fact so it’s not unreasonable to exclude it, in this instance, given what is being argued.
Don,
Good one!
The NOVA producer lady wrote:
“good to hear from you. I will certainly give some thought to the
material you sent. Thanks very much,”
Back to: not likely.
At the same time, this is not a simple, one hour story. It is a decade long evolution, beginning with Steve McIntyre’s curiosity about the funny look of MM’s hockey stick graph. …through Peter Webster and Judith Curry…. the books on two sides of the Atlantic (none of which I’ve read. …sigh… sorry… keeping up with the blogs is almost too much) Climategate 1.0 and 2.0 and
The Released, But Encrypted, Files…. stay tuned.
This is more than a NOVA. It’s a movie. Or, a series, esp. when one factors in stories like those of Patrick Michaels….
…and, frankly, I would be interested in the personal fates, future, of Joe Romm, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt… et al. Who are these men? What happens to them? Do they melt into a pool of stinking liquid in the face of the cross of Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science?
This is not a NOVA. ….Lady in Red
@Alan,
“The older results are completely irrelevant unless you can show good reason why a more limited timespan and data set should be chosen”
The ONLY reason is that the shorter term data gives a result more to his liking.
I’m sure he would be even happier if it the period from 1976 to 1998 was used, and he was stupid enough to fit an extrapolate a linear trend. DOH !!
Thing is…… the LONGER the record use, the less warming is apparent, and if you are able to include proxy data from the MWP and RWP the linear trend (even though all linear trends are meaningless anyway) would be negative.
AndyG55, I couldn’t possibly comment. We shall see if Dana can improve on his previous apoplectic contributions to this thread.
Myrrh says: January 11, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Yes, looks like unpleasant and rude behaviour on the part of Newton. However, it did not distort and gag the whole science.
It does not, therefore, compare with what the Team, egged on by Michael Mann, Bert Bolin, Naomi Oreskes, Bob Ward, etc and amplified by Phil Jones, Al Gore, Wm Connolley, Patchy Pachauri, have done to Climate Science.
Mann asks: “I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?)”
Yes, because 1] “skeptic” is not derisive enough according to Mann’s, et al., anti-scientific “methods”; and, 2] unfortunately, scepticism is at the heart of the practice of real science – and right from the very start when someone observes and thinks about things and then forms their own hypothesis, and therefore should always be thinking, “what’s wrong with what I’m thinking and doing?”
Lady in Red says:
January 12, 2012 at 12:02 am
This is more than a NOVA. It’s a movie. Or, a series, esp. when one factors in stories like those of Patrick Michaels….
…and, frankly, I would be interested in the personal fates, future, of Joe Romm, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt… et al. Who are these men? What happens to them? Do they melt into a pool of stinking liquid in the face of the cross of Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science?
=======================
I agree, the movie it reminds me of is “Hellboy”……… .
Lucy – I was replying to the idea that previous scientists had integrity and Newton was mentioned. What Newton did is exactly what is being done now by those with like lack of integrity, and it’s only because we now have easy communications world wide that this corruption of science is capable of being organised on a world-wide scale. What is really sad is the Royal Society never did live up to its own motto, it’s as complicit now as it was then in destroying the reputations of scientists trying to do real science and squashing any findings against its own vested interest stance.
Which is what can happen when politics allowed to gain the upper hand and I think that’s always been a factor running concurrently with science exploration, sometimes to corruption, sometimes to unbiased encouragement, but political control is only part of the story, this is also aided and abetted by the scientists themselves because of their own personal biases. How many teaching the physics of ‘greenhouse gas warming’, from PhD level down, would be happy to admit they’ve been teaching a load of crock for all these years…?
Genghis said: (to R. Gates)
You claim that “Long-wave radiation from earth………………69.4%” accounts for 69% of the atmospheric heating. What is your mechanism for heating the atmosphere via “Long-wave radiation from earth” if not through CO2 capturing the radiation?
_____
Um, I hope you’ve already figured out how foolish your statement is. CO2 only makes up a part of the 69% of the LW that is absorbed and re-emitted by the greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor makes up a larger percentage of the 69% of the LW greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. But alas, water vapor is a condensing greenhouse gas, and thus, we need the non-condensing CO2 as well, or we go back to an ice planet.
R. Gates says:
January 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm
But alas, water vapor is a condensing greenhouse gas, and thus, we need the non-condensing CO2 as well, or we go back to an ice planet.
For all practical purposes CO2 is condensing – since it and water vapour are irrestistably attracted to each other and so as water vapour condenses it comes down with any carbon dioxide around, all pure clean rainwater is carbonic acid. So we should be in a permanent ice planet…
Are you ever going to explain how exactly such an insignificant trace amount of carbon dioxide can bring the temps up from permanent ice planet to 15°C?
R. Gates – “Genghis said: (to R. Gates)
“You are the one who has to demonstrate that CO2 directly warms the atmosphere in equilibrium, since you claimed that it is responsible for apx. 64% of the atmospheres warming.”
_______
“? I never made any such claim. Either you are confusing me with someone else, or you have misunderstood or are misrepresenting something I said. Please show specifically where I made this claim, as it is not something I believe, and therefore know I would not have said it.”
————
Um, I hope you’ve already figured out how foolish your statement is. CO2 only makes up a part of the 69% of the LW that is absorbed and re-emitted by the greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor makes up a larger percentage of the 69% of the LW greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. But alas, water vapor is a condensing greenhouse gas, and thus, we need the non-condensing CO2 as well, or we go back to an ice planet.”
———
You are hilarious Gates. Let me summarize your apparent positions, LW radiation heats up 69% of the atmosphere through Greenhouse gases. Gates claims he never made the claim that LW radiation via CO2 is responsible for 69% of the warming of the atmosphere. Gates then claims the Greenhouse gas H20 is responsible for that majority of 69% of the warming of the atmosphere. Gates then claims that H2O condenses so the planet is going to freeze!
Gates apparently doesn’t understand that according to the greenhouse theory that the mechanism by which it is claimed that Greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere is identical for CO2 and H2O.
Gates your reasoning and lack of scientific backing is so bad, I can only guess that you are really a skeptic trying to make the warmers look bad. Keep up the good work : )
For those interested, dana1981 has a post up over at Skeptical Science in which he looks at the Gillett et al. study. Interestingly, he omits a portion of the original Gillett et al. Figure 3 in order to better support a point he was trying (in my opinion unsuccessfully) to make.
Hmmm….
-Chip Knappenberger
World Climate Report
I suspect the reason sKs has a policy prohibiting “accusations of deception” is because they get it quite regularly. It’s ironic that he starts with “accusations from the very start”.
The problem dana1981 and SkS have is that they do not understand numbers. They are “emotional thinkers” if one has ever done the Myers Briggs personality profiles.
Let’s take figure 1C; GHG-influenced temperatures are supposed to be +1.5C already. But all we have gotten to is 0.7C, 10 years ago. How do we get to +3.25C by 2100 if we are already 50% off the projected trendline.
SkS sees a line going slightly up and they imagine the theory must be absolutely correct. They cannot objectively see that 50% off means 50% off because there is a line going slightly up.
Of course, it is no longer going up either.
No, it’s not. Taking into account the full data record of previous comments and the contents of SkS, it was directly on the trend line, with very tight error bars.
Lady in Red says:
January 12, 2012 at 12:02 am
It started long before Steve Mc’s interest in the schlockey stick. It may have started for you then, but there is nearly 2 previous decades omitted in your statement.
Chip Knappenberger says
“Just because the authors chose to show some combination of data in their Figure does not obligate us to show the same combination of data”
LOL. You photoshopped the graph!
Chris – there are a lot of people who read WUWT who do not normally post.
Do not be fooled by your cheerleaders here.
Michaels and your reputation is toast.
Readers might like to see a short history of Michaels’ use of other people’s data. In his defense I am sure he thinks he is “clarifying” the information. Unfortunately, taken in the aggregate, a pattern of confirmation bias (at a minimum) is extremely evident. Regardless, this provides a salient counter to the story as told in the OP.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/patrick-michaels-serial-deleter-of-inconvenient-data.html
In every email the discussion is about poor quality of papers and/or dissatisfaction with the corruption of the review process, yet this is spun as if the email authors are trying to reject papers or get them rejected because of the message within them. Follow the links to the various emails cited, and it is very clear that the authors are quite sincere in their belief that the papers they think should be rejected are bad science, and that the peer-review process has been abused They are championing good science as well as anything else.