The Collapsing ‘Consensus’

 Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Environmental Research Letters ought to have known better than to publish the latest anti-scientific propaganda paper by John Cook of the dubiously-named Skeptical Science website. Here are just a few of the solecisms that should have led any competent editor or reviewer to reject the paper:

  • It did not discuss, still less refute, the principle that the scientific method is not in any way informed by argument from consensus, which thinkers from Aristotle via Alhazen to Huxley and Popper have rejected as logically fallacious.
  • Its definition of the “consensus” it claimed to have found was imprecise: that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current anthropogenic global warming”.
  • It did not put a quantitative value on the term “very likely”, and it did not define what it meant by “current” warming. There has been none for at least 18 years.
  • It cited as authoritative the unscientifically-sampled surveys of “consensus” by Doran & Zimmerman (2009) and Anderegg et al. (2010).
  • It inaccurately represented the views of scientists whose abstracts it analysed.
  • It disregarded two-thirds of the 12,000 abstracts it examined, on the unscientific ground that those abstracts had expressed no opinion on Man’s climatic influence.
  • It declared that the one-third of all papers alleged to have endorsed the “consensus” really amounted to 97% of the sample, not 33%.
  • It suggested that the “consensus” that most recent warming is manmade is equivalent to the distinct and far less widely-supported notion that urgent action to prevent future warming is essential to avert catastrophe. Obama fell for this, twittering that 97% found global warming not only real and manmade but also dangerous.

Yet the most remarkable conclusion to be drawn from Cook’s strange paper is that the “consensus” – far from growing – is actually collapsing.

A little history. Continue reading

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Posted in Consensus | Tagged , , , , , , , | 87 Comments

Global Warming Policy Foundation Invites Royal Society Fellows For Climate Change Discussion

London, 22 May: In response to a suggestion by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited five climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society to discuss the current state of climate science and its wider implications. 

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Posted in Climate News | Tagged | 38 Comments

Model Climate Sensitivity Calculated Directly From Model Results

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

[UPDATE: Steven Mosher pointed out that I have calculated the transient climate response (TCR) rather than the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). For the last half century, the ECS has been about 1.3 times the TCR (see my comment below for the derivation of this value). I have changed the values in the text, with strikeouts indicating the changes, and updated the graphic. My thanks to Steven for the heads up. Additionally, several people pointed out a math error, which I've also corrected, and which led to the results being about 20% lower than they should have been. Kudos to them as well for their attention to the details.]

In a couple of previous posts, Zero Point Three Times the Forcing and Life is Like a Black Box of Chocolates, I’ve shown that regarding global temperature projections, two of the climate models used by the IPCC (the CCSM3 and GISS models) are functionally equivalent to the same simple equation, with slightly different parameters. The kind of analysis I did treats the climate model as a “black box”, where all we know are the inputs (forcings) and the outputs (global mean surface temperatures), and we try to infer what the black box is doing. “Functionally equivalent” in this context means that the contents of the black box representing the model could be replaced by an equation which gives the same results as the climate model itself. In other words, they perform the same function (converting forcings to temperatures) in a different way but they get the same answers, so they are functionally equivalent.

The equation I used has only two parameters. One is the time constant “tau”, which allows for the fact that the world heats and cools slowly rather than instantaneously. The other parameter is the climate sensitivity itself, lambda.

However, although I’ve shown that two of the climate models are functionally equivalent to the same simple equation, until now I’ve not been able to show that is true of the climate models in general. I stumbled across the data necessary to do that while researching the recent Otto et al paper, “Energy budget constraints on climate response”, available here (registration required). Anthony has a discussion of the Otto paper here,  and I’ll return to some curious findings about the Otto paper in a future post.

cmip5 model temperature and forcing changeFigure 1. A figure from Forster 2013 showing the forcings and the resulting global mean surface air temperatures from nineteen climate models used by the IPCC. ORIGINAL CAPTION. The globally averaged surface temperature change since preindustrial times (top) and computed net forcing (bottom). Thin lines are individual model results averaged over their available ensemble members and thick lines represent the multi-model mean. The historical-nonGHG scenario is computed as a residual and approximates the role of aerosols (see Section 2).

In the Otto paper they say they got their forcings from the 2013 paper Evaluating adjusted forcing and model spread for historical and future scenarios in the CMIP5 generation of climate models by Forster et al. (CMIP5 is the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.) Figure 1 shows the Forster 2013 representation of the historical forcings used by the nineteen models studied in Forster 2013, along with the models’ hindcast temperatures. which at least notionally resemble the historical global temperature record.

Ah, sez I when I saw that graph, just what I’ve been looking for to complete my analysis of the models.

Continue reading

Posted in Climate sensitivity | Tagged , , , | 127 Comments

Stop global warming, get paid $12-13 per hour

…plus benefits if you work more than 350 hours…

Spotted on the Orange County Craigslist by WUWT reader “Roy”, you’d think with a €236.9 million (2011) budget, they could afford something other than Craigslist.

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Posted in NGOs | Tagged , , | 33 Comments

Senator Whitehouse apologizes for inciteful tornado remarks

Recall this story from yesterday: US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse From Rhode Island Provides Erroneous Information To American Public in Global Warming Rant

Foxnews reports on the apology. Note that about the same time, Barbara Boxer was making similar claims.  Later, you get to decide with a poll:

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has apologized for remarks Monday in which he linked Oklahoma “cyclones” to climate change while berating Republicans for their stance on the issue — around the time a massive tornado killed dozens in that state.

A Whitehouse spokesman said Tuesday the politically charged remarks were pre-written as part of the senator’s weekly Senate floor speech on climate change.

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Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | 84 Comments

Widespread evidence of cosmic impact documented – likely cause of the Younger Dryas cool climate episode

From the University of California – Santa Barbara some paleoclimatology without the need to see hockey sticks.

Comprehensive analysis of impact spherules supports theory of cosmic impact 12,800 years ago

(Santa Barbara, California) –– About 12,800 years ago when the Earth was warming and emerging from the last ice age, a dramatic and anomalous event occurred that abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. According to James Kennett, UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor in earth sciences, this climate switch fundamentally –– and remarkably –– occurred in only one year, heralding the onset of the Younger Dryas cool episode.

The researchers studied the impact spherules in 18 sites in nine countries on four continents for this study. Credit: YDB Research Group

The cause of this cooling has been much debated, especially because it closely coincided with the abrupt extinction of the majority of the large animals then inhabiting the Americas, as well as the disappearance of the prehistoric Clovis culture, known for its big game hunting.

“What then did cause the extinction of most of these big animals, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, American camel and horse, and saber- toothed cats?” asked Kennett, pointing to Charles Darwin’s 1845 assessment of the significance of climate change. “Did these extinctions result from human overkill, climatic change or some catastrophic event?” The long debate that has followed, Kennett noted, has recently been stimulated by a growing body of evidence in support of a theory that a major cosmic impact event was involved, a theory proposed by the scientific team that includes Kennett himself.

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Posted in Paleoclimatology | Tagged , , | 72 Comments

Oklahoma tornado officially an EF5 – wind speeds still less than 1999 Moore tornado

The map below shows ‘Tornado Tracks Streak Across Oklahoma’ as measured by doppler radar.

The rotation of tornadoes creates a distinctive signature in radar data, and can be used to estimate the track that the system takes over land. This image shows the rotational velocity of the systems that passed over Oklahoma on the afternoon of May 20, 2013. A single cohesive structure can be seen to cut across seven counties, with Moore directly in the middle.

The rotational velocity data, being run experimentally by the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory, is helping to identify potential tornado structures and increase lead-time for severe weather warnings.

1352v1_20130521-Moore_Tornado-Rotation[1]

Here is an excerpt from the public information statement just released by NWS where they designate EF5 from damage surveys.  Continue reading

Posted in tornadoes, Weather | Tagged , , , , , , , | 31 Comments

Stunning ignorance on display from Senator Barbara Boxer over Oklahoma tornado outbreak

Via POLITICO’s Morning Energy – May 21, 2013:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif. – Chair of Senate Environment & Public Works Committee) took to the Senate floor and invoked the Oklahoma tornadoes in her speech on global warming.

“This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather. Not just hot weather. But extreme weather. When I had my hearings, when I had the gavel years ago. -It’s been a while – the scientists all agreed that what we’d start to see was extreme weather. And people looked at one another and said ‘what do you mean? It’s gonna get hot?’ Yeah, it’s gonna get hot. But you’re also going to see snow in the summer in some places. You’re gonna have terrible storms. You’re going to have tornados and all the rest. We need to protect our people. That’s our number one obligation and we have to deal with this threat that is upon us and that is gonna get worse and worse though the years.”

[Boxer] also plugged her own bill, cosponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would put a tax on carbon. “Carbon could cost us the planet,” she said. “The least we could do is put a little charge on it so people move to clean energy.”

And then there’s the shameful rant from US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse yesterday.

Here’s a germane question for these geniuses.  Continue reading

Posted in Climate ugliness, extreme weather, Politics | Tagged , , | 150 Comments

Cook’s 97% consensus study falsely classifies scientists’ papers according to the scientists that published them

UPDATE: More inconsistency:

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When asked about the categorizations of Cook et al, – “It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming”

Guest essay by Andrew of Popular Technology

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature‘ searched the Web of Science for the phrases “global warming” and “global climate change” then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists’ papers as “endorsing AGW”, apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors.

Continue reading

Posted in 97% consensus | Tagged , | 164 Comments

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse From Rhode Island Provides Erroneous Information To American Public in Global Warming Rant

sen_whitehouse_Capture

Video Credit: Daily Caller/C-SPAN – click for video

By WUWT Regular Just The Facts

First, I’m sure I speak for everyone at WUWT when I say that our hearts go out to all the families in Oklahoma affected by the weather tragedy there today.

In the video above US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse states that:

“When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas.”

Read more: Daily Caller

If Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did more reading and less ranting, he might know that Continental US Temperature Lower Troposphere (TLT) – 1979 to Present;

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Posted in Climate ugliness, extreme weather | Tagged , , , | 110 Comments

Timelapse video of 2013 Nenana Ice Classic breakup

This is a 5 frames per second timelapse taken from the webcam at 30 second intervals of the Nenana Ice Classic on May 20th, 2013 from 4PM to 5PM PDT (15:00-16:00 AKDT). Breakup started about 15:43 AKDT (about 16 seconds in this video) in and went very quickly. Notice the ice stopped flowing in the river at the end, suggesting an ice jam formed downstream.

Watch the video:  Continue reading

Posted in Fun_stuff | Tagged , , , | 51 Comments

Monckton challenges the IPCC – suggests fraud – and gets a response

The IPCC fraud case (but not the planet) hots up

Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Two weeks ago I reported the central error in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) to its secretariat. After the contributing scientists had submitted their final draft report, the bureaucrats and politicians had tampered with the HadCRUt3 graph of global instrumental temperatures since 1850 by adding four trend-lines to the anomaly curve and drawing from their relative slopes the unjustifiable and statistically indefensible conclusion, stated twice in the published report, that global warming was “accelerating” and that the “acceleration” was our fault.

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Posted in IPCC | Tagged , , , , | 133 Comments

Nenana Ice Classic sets new record for latest ice-out, and the record is still growing 

UPDATE: Breakup has occurred! See below, for my timelapse video

Here is the webcam closeup – when it was still standing as of 14:18 AKDT:

nenana_new_record

Alaska Dispatch confirms what we already knew in this thread on WUWT:

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Posted in Arctic, Fun_stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , | 95 Comments

Heat-related deaths in Manhattan projected to rise – except reality shows them going down in the USA

Only one problem, an NIH study shows that thanks to air conditioning and other factors, including better education programs about heat waves, heat related deaths are actually going down in the USA.

From Davis et al, Changing Heat-Related Mortality in the United States published at National Institutes of Health:

In general, over the past 35 years, the U.S.populace has become systematically less affected by hot and humid weather condi-tions. All-causes mortality during heat stress events has declined despite increasingly stress-ful weather conditions in many urban and suburban areas. This relative “desensitization”of the U.S. metropolitan populace to weather-related heat stress can be attributed to a varietyof factors, including improved medical care, infiltration of air conditioning, better publicawareness programs relating the potential dangers of heat stress, and both human biophysi-cal and infrastructural adaptations.

And today, in the TIME article mentioning this study, they say:

Chicago in particular learned after the deadly 1995 heat wave—which is one reason why heat-related deaths in the city actually went down over the second half of the 20th century, even as temperatures increased.

From the The Earth Institute at Columbia University,

Killing season may push into spring and fall, says study

Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die. Researchers say deaths linked to warming climate may rise some 20 percent by the 2020s, and, in some worst-case scenarios, 90 percent or more by the 2080s. Continue reading

Posted in Economy-health, heat wave, UHI | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

WUWT upgrade, phase 3 – announcing our free WUWT toolbar

Readers may recall that I announced in early April that I have been working to make WUWT more accessible as well as more community oriented. Improvements so far have included enhanced commenting speed with less moderation and improvements to the Submit a Story system.

WUWT_Toolbar

I’m pleased to announce the WUWT toolbar. Now, I know some people aren’t fans of toolbars, and others love them. I was on the fence until I saw that it could actually provide some useful tools. One of the biggest is an improved search engine for the now 8000 WUWT posts online. The WordPress search engine is rather limited, some might call it “lame”, and it makes it difficult to find stories you remember and want to reference. Since WordPress still has no plans to upgrade it, I decided this would serve the community better.

Other improvements include:  Continue reading

Posted in Announcements | 41 Comments

Nenana Ice Classic continues to close on new record, meanwhile, lunar effects have been noted

People send me stuff.

Readers have been watching the Nenana Ice Cam via a post here on WUWT this weekend, waiting to see if a new record will be set for the latest ice-out ever. WUWT reader Geoff Shorten in South Africa has been watching and noted that there seems to be a transient lunar effect observed in the camera photos.

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Posted in Fun_stuff | Tagged , , | 97 Comments

Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors

Yesterday, WUWT was honored to have a guest essay by co-author Nic Lewis on the new Otto et al paper that pegs Transient Climate Response (TCR) at 1.3°C along with Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity at 2.0°C. Lewis , who had previously published a solo paper on his ECS estimate was roundly panned as a “single study” by the advocates over at “Skeptical Science” in a scathing post by Dana Nuccitelli, who will now have a hard time honestly reconciling the Otto et al paper, because it is co-authored by several IPCC authors who previously had considered higher climate sensitivity values to be likely.

While this isn’t an end-game paper for the overblown threat of AGW, this paper represents a sea-change in thinking of some prominent IPCC authors that will be hard to ignore, and even harder to criticize. Its timing is especially good since Cook and Nuccitelli just published a ginned up claim about “97% consensus” of climate science papers. With the broad author spectrum of the Otto et al, paper it seems the consensus is slipping at bit when you see authors of this caliber revising their thinking. I suspect this graph from the leaked AR5 draft also figures into some of this change of thinking:

IPCC_AR5_draft_fig1-4_without

Here are some comments from around the web:  Continue reading

Posted in Climate sensitivity | Tagged , , | 44 Comments

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup

SEPP_logo_ross
The Week That Was: 2013-05-18 (May 18, 2013) Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org) The Science and Environmental Policy Project

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Quote of the Week: The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen [H/t Tom Sheehan]

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Number of the Week: 76%

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THIS WEEK:

By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Assessing Climate Science: On her web site, Judith Curry posted sections of a March essay by Lennart Bengtsson suggesting that the Climate Establishment, those supporting the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its assertion that human (anthropogenic) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing unprecedented and dangerous global warming (carbon based AGW), should take the current pause in warming to reassess the climate science. Global warming has not occurred as projected by the models. For example, Bengtsson states that about 25 years ago the MPI model in Hamburg projected the warming since the end of the 19th century should be about 1.25º C; but, it has been only about 0.75º C. Since the theory of greenhouse warming asserts that doubling of CO2 will cause a warming of about 1.1º C, the models used by the IPCC include an amplification of the warming by a positive feedback mechanism. With no atmospheric warming for a decade and no surface warming (according to the IPCC) for 17 years, there are significant problems with the models, which, according to Bengtsson, from 1979 to 2012 forecast an atmospheric warming about three times greater than observations.

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Posted in Climate News Roundup | Tagged | 5 Comments

New paper shows transient climate response less than 2°C

See also: Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors

New energy-budget-derived estimates of climate sensitivity and transient response in Nature Geoscience

Guest post by Nic Lewis

Readers may recall that last December I published an informal climate sensitivity study at WUWT, here. The study adopted a heat-balance (energy budget) approach and used recent data, including satellite-observation-derived aerosol forcing estimates. I would like now to draw attention to a new peer-reviewed climate sensitivity study published as a Letter in Nature Geoscience, “Energy budget constraints on climate response”, here. This study uses the same approach as mine, based on changes in global mean temperature, forcing and heat uptake over 100+ year periods, with aerosol forcing adjusted to reflect satellite observations. Headline best estimates of 2.0°C for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and 1.3°C for the – arguably more policy-relevant – transient climate response (TCR) are obtained, based on changes to the decade 2000–09, which provide the best constrained, and probably most reliable, estimates.

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Posted in Climate sensitivity | Tagged , , , , , , , | 183 Comments

New paper from Otto et al and Nic lewis shows transient climate sensitivity less than 2C

UPDATE: this post has been superseded by the new guest essay from Nic Lewis which you can see here: New paper shows transient climate response less than 2°C

Posted in Climate sensitivity | Tagged | 1 Comment