Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel
Simon from Australian Climate Madness reports:
The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to [address] the panel of six.
Here is the press release, which somehow escaped everyone’s a number of climate skeptic bloggers notice until now.
APS to Review Statement on Climate Change
February 20, 2014
A subcommittee of POPA is reviewing the APS statement on climate change in accordance with the policy to review official statements every five years.
Preparations are under way by the APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) to review and possibly update the society’s statement on climate change. In the coming months, the APS membership will have a chance to weigh in on any proposed revisions before the society adopts a final draft.
“We intend to keep the membership informed at every stage in this process,” said Robert Jaffe a physicist at MIT and Chair of POPA. “We’re quite eager to make sure that the revision of the climate change statement is done in the most open and orderly way.”
The subcommittee of POPA that is conducting the review posted its background and research materials to the APS website, along with its charge. The research materials include the transcripts of the subcommittee’s January workshop, biographical information on outside climate experts who participated in the workshop, and their slide presentations. These materials are now available online.
The standing policy of the society is to review its statements every five years. The society first adopted the climate change statement seven years ago, but appended an addendum in 2010. The review also coincides with the release of the latest report on the physical science basis of climate change from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The months-long process started last year with the formation of the subcommittee and a steering committee, which is guiding the statement review subcommittee through the review process. In addition to weighing the opinions of experts from its workshop, the review subcommittee is researching information related to climate change and reviewing the roughly 1,500-page climate change report by the IPCC.
If a new statement is drafted, it will be submitted to the full POPA committee in June. Once approved by POPA, it will go to the APS executive board for a vote. If approved there, the proposed statement will be posted on the society’s website for members to read and comment on, likely sometime later in 2014.
Once all of the comments have been collected, POPA will again review the statement and may revise it further based on members’ input. It will then go to the executive board and the full council for a vote on whether the statement should be officially adopted in its final form.
“We’re not rushing this. Climate science and climate change will be around a long time and we want to get this right before sending it out to the membership for review and comment,” Jaffe said.
Source: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/updates/statementreview.cfm
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Yea, I just read about this over at Joanne’s blog. I did not realize however that those 3 (Cook,, nuccy, & Romm) were so anti science! Will wonders never cease.
However, while I am hopeful, I am not very hopeful. The cause of the original prognostication was not science, but politics. And the politics have not changed since it was originally issued.
The tide is turning
I just wonder whether any of the APS panel are willing to go all the way to pointing out that the really bad error** in Climate Alchemy has been as fundamental as was Phlogiston in the 18th Century.
**It was to assume that the Earth’s surface emits to the atmosphere net real IR energy at the same rate as an isolated black body to a sink at absolute zero. All process engineers like me, and competent physicists, know this not to be true. However, tell died-in-the-wool Climate Alchemists that for >= 31 deg C, the oceans emit no net IR, all the energy being lost as latent heat, i.e. the operational emissivity is zero, and they throw a wobbly then react, saying ‘We’re going to put you deniers in the camps, matey!’.
There are 12 other physics’ errors, some so elementary as to be embarrassing.
I hope the APS will address the basic issue. Skeptics are ordinary people who are simply asking for proof that rising CO2 is causing dangerous global warming. The proofs that have been offered are not convincing.
Claim: “The climate models show CO2 drives warming.”
Answer: Models are not proof; they are built on the modellers’ assumptions, which require proving.
Claim: “The models can not explain warming from 1978 to 1998 unless CO2 is included as a driver.”
Answer: Arguing from ignorance is not proof of anything.
Claim: “The models show that the globe will warm by 1.5 to 4.5C this century.”
Answer: The models are all running hot compared to the datasets, even those with unexplained “adjustments”. If this is proof, it goes against the models.
Then there are the supposed proofs of the GHG atmospheric warming effect.
Claim: “CO2 radiates heat back to the surface, making it warmer.”
Answer: Both the surface and the air have kinetic energy, so there is an infrared flux between them. But, on balance, the direction of warming is from the surface to the air, not the other way around.
Claim: “CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere, delaying the cooling of the surface, resulting in warming.”
Answer: CO2 is IR active and unable to store energy it absorbs. The energy is either instantly shared with O2 and N2 molecules, or is reemitted. O2 and N2 are not IR active and do slow the surface cooling.
Claim: “CO2 raises the emission level, causing the troposphere to warm all the way down to the surface, and the stratosphere to cool.”
Answer: Analysis of radiosonde data shows no effect from increasing CO2 on the temperature profile of the atmosphere.
As Patrick Moore said, if there were an actual proof of man-made global warming, you would see it everywhere.
And, Anthony, that’s why I’m still and APS (and ACS) member…
Here is the press release, which somehow escaped everyone’s notice until now.
Really?
Feb 19: http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/19/aps-reviews-its-climate-change-statement/
Feb. 21: http://rabett.blogspot.ca/2014/02/like-lambs-to-slaughter.html
ok this is funny.
just as I opened wuwt page and headline showed to me I heard a few loud bangs.
timing is everything 🙂
now to go see what the kitten broke….
This is fantastic news. Finally, some balance is achieved.
Judith Curry covered it in http://judithcurry.com/2014/02/19/aps-reviews-its-climate-change-statement/, Statements made in the transcript prompted me to ask this (as yet unanswered question) on twitter:
In http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf American Physical Society’s transcript of discussions relating to their upcoming revision of the paper on Anthropogenic Climate Change, Dr. Collins states:
“12 So, we build climate models.
13 we assume when we construct those
14 models that the net energy balance of
15 the planet was identically zero or
16 effectively zero at the start of
17 industrialization.”
My concern/question relates to:
1. We know that the energy balance of the planet was neither identically nor effectively zero at the start of industrialization.
2. We know that the globe had been warming to a certain number of degrees C/decade ever since the end of the little ice age.
3. I can find nowhere the assumption that natural climate change had stopped at whichever date is chosen as the assumed start of industrialization.
Given the above 3 points, why are the models constructed to explicitly exclude any natural component of warming as of the starting point of the run?
It would seem that this omission by itself would guarantee that the anthropogenic forcings needed to be input would of necessity be larger than required if the model actually included the natural forcings which were necessary pre-industry to produce the data confirmed historic temperatures, trend and energy balance at the start of the assumed industrialization contribution to the forcing.
Performing the calibration or verification runs should, it would seem, produce an end product which, at the start of the industrial era, produce an output which would include not just the temperature which matches data at that time but the same trend in magnitude and sign which match the trend known to exist at that time and the same energy imbalance known to exist.
It would seem that any model which did not produce this known energy imbalance at the start of industrialization would be understating the natural forcings by the amount necessary to produce said energy imbalance.
What I would give to sit in on the meetings of the panel. The alarmists on that panel must be panic stricken. Three people with such impressive scientific credentials to actually put real questions of science and integrity to their blatant and exceedingly flimsy eco-activistic pseudo-scientific constructs. How on earth can they try to maintain their house of cards under those circumstances? The gig is up and they must see it coming like a light in a train tunnel, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do to avoid it. Wow. Break out the popcorn.
The APS most definitely sees the writing on the walls of fact. Public opinion and observations have forced their hand. What a welcome surprise for those in the climate community searching for truth. The door to such is being forced open and the ideology forced out of the equations.
Bravo!
Correction. They were three of six climate experts invited to an input workshop for the APS POPA panel. The other three were warmists Santer, Collins and Held. None of the six are members of the APS review panel that will recommend revisions to the 2007 policy statement. Climate Etc. posted links to the full transcript of the days informational proceedings posted 2/19. Well worth reqding carefully.
From the questions submitted by APS to the experts for comment (also posted by Judith) it would appear that APC is in full, formal climb down mode. For the record, the climate.NASA site supporting “scientific consensus” makes no note of the APS revision process yet. It will be interesting to watch how long NASA takes to correct its information after the June finalization of the new APS position, whatever it is. Especially given the current administrations evident biases.
AT LAST!!! An authorititive and august scientific institution actually using a scientific approach to investigating the merits, or lack thereof, of the CAGW hypothesis. fully balanced and fully in public, without hiding anything. About effin time!
To overtly mangle metaphors, once this domino falls it should creat a crack in the dam of CAGW alarmism which should spread through all the other authorititive and august scientific institutions, including the Royal Society. Once this happens, real science may prevail and we may see a return to sanity in science and politics. It is early days yet, but fingers crossed.
Claim: “The climate models show CO2 drives warming.”
I like this comment from Olaf Dahlsveen: They are the Model Makers, and as long as they put CO2 into their models as being responsible for any earthly temperature rise, then it is quite correct for them to say that “All our models show that CO2 is responsible for the recent warming.” Well, that was back in the ’80s and ’90s. But then the warming stopped…
A panel of six? A panel of three “climate realists” and three “CAGWers” would still lean to the fanatic side.
I think this is interesting in this sense. Half a dozen or so senior physicists who are members of the APS, have been appointed to give their opinions as to whether the APS should change it’s statement on CAGW. None of these people are, so far as I am aware, climate scientists. Yet what they write and recommend could turn this whole issue upside down. What will they say?.
I have read what has been discussed, and on the basis of almost nothing, think that the key person may be Dr. Susan Seestrom, if I have spelt her name correctly. So, it just might be, that she will be the one to “bell the cat”.
The models, as far as I know (and I would appreciate being corrected on this) do not actually model CO2 in the sense of having the various surface sources, industrial and natural, unevenly spread over the spherical surface, unevenly spread over time, doing their things, and ditto for sinks. They do not model the gas rising and dispersing to a well-mixed state in the atmosphere. They do not model thermal and radiative interactions with other gases an route, nor with surfaces. Instead of all that, the presumption that the net effect of an instantaneous (model world) jump in ambient well-mixed CO2 is an instantaneous drop in the rate of IR emissions to space. This is the ‘forcing’. The models then busily readjust themselves, while a typically annual (model world, as far as I know) adjustment to this forcing is made to represented a projected annual increase in CO2.
“If a new statement is drafted, it will be submitted to the full POPA committee in June. Once approved by POPA, it will go to the APS executive board for a vote. If approved there, the proposed statement will be posted on the society’s website for members to read and comment on, likely sometime later in 2014.
Once all of the comments have been collected, POPA will again review the statement and may revise it further based on members’ input. It will then go to the executive board and the full council for a vote on whether the statement should be officially adopted in its final form.”
And the chance that anything with reason gets through this process is what? Default is no change. Sorry for pessimism.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
FD
Looks like common sense might finally be prevailing.
The headline made me smile. ;o)
I just wonder how they’re going to use or misuse the new panelists.
A signal event!
Curiously, in a bit of Cosmic / ‘Gaian’ agreement (?), I am hearing Birdsong, 10 miles north of Boston, for the VERY first time in 2014.
Oh yes.
dmacleo says: “…just as I opened wuwt page and headline showed to me I heard a few loud bangs….”
I heard three insignificant squirts like overripe grapes bursting in the sun.
The ‘Story’ ought to start as follows: “In a desperate bid for credibility . . . .”
If the APS dithers here, it will be bad for it in the long run–very bad.