From IEEE Spectrum – How to Fix the Climate-Change Panel
Questions for climate modeler and IPCC insider Kevin E. Trenberth
New Zealander Kevin E. Trenberth has been a lead author in the last three climate assessments produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he shared in the 2007 Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC. He is head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. IEEE Spectrum Contributing Editor William Sweet interviewed Trenberth about the impact of the theft last year of climate scientists’ e-mails from the University of East Anglia and proposals for reforming the IPCC.
IEEE Spectrum: You were a lead coauthor with Phil Jones of East Anglia of a key chapter in the latest IPCC assessment, and messages of yours were among the hacked e-mails that aroused such consternation.
Kevin E. Trenberth: One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100 000 hits online. But it was quite clear from the context that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in terms of short-term variability.
Spectrum: It seems to me the most damaging thing about the disclosed e-mails was not the issue of fraud or scientific misconduct but the perception of a bunker mentality among climate scientists. If they really know what they’re doing, why do they seem so defensive?
The full interview at IEEE Spectrum
h/t to WUWT reader Mark Hirst
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While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Scientific sources are also a valuable resource.
Yes, foreign aid was given.
But my original point was that they are not helped by the global increase in food production because they are in the Sahel, and the extra food is in Canada or Russia.
With a few dead already, and ten million “in immediate risk of starvation”, my point still stands. Or do you think that they are about to starve, and have enough money to buy food, because of international aid, and simply have chosen not to?
The aid is not sufficient to compensate for the loss of crops in the Sahel. Nor parts of South East Asia. (Nor, generally the Horn of Africa, although they seem to be okay there this year).
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 7:41 am
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 4:17 am
There is 15% more water vapour in the atmosphere on average that there was 50 years ago.
Tallbloke says:
Not according to the NCEP re-analysis. What’s your source please?
Word of mouth.
Ah, that would explain it. You’ve been hanging around disinformation sites like realclimate.org no doubt.
What is the value from the NCEP re-analysis, please?
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
What you will find is that humidity has fallen since 1958, not risen. This is why the ‘fingerprint of global warming’ the ‘tropospheric hotspot’ exists only in models, not in the real world.
This is one of the many things which falsifies the models, and is one of the reasons Trenberth worries about ‘missing heat’.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:17 am
Most species of tree migrate even more slowly that tortoises.
You don’t know what you are talking about. “Most” tree species have some type of bouyant seed dispersal mechanism which can travel many miles per year, even hundreds for some species like cottonwood.
Most tortoises can travel hundreds of kilometres per year, and they don’t have to be cottonwoods.
Thank you for disproving your own point. So you now agree the Earth isn’t “warming faster than species can adapt or migrate”?
I have to say the cottonwood tortoise is a new species I didn’t know about though. 😉
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:43 am
While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Not on the website where you were told humidity had increased 15% however…
My browser gets nothing at that URL
Difficult to believe. The warmer temperature means more specific humidity for the same relative humidity.
And the scientific literature shows increasing humidity:
“The results presented here add to an increasing body of evidence
that atmospheric water vapour has exhibited a significant upward
trend over recent decades
10,12,29,30” – http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/ngillett/PDFS/nature06207.pdf
The citations are:
10. Dai, A. Recent climatology, variability, and trends in global surface humidity.
J. Clim. 19, 3589–3606 (2006).
12. Wentz, F. J., Ricciardulli, L.,Hilburn, K.&Mears, C.Howmuchmore rainwill global
warming bring? Science 317, 233–235 (2007).
29. Santer, B. D. et al. Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric
moisture content. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 15248–15253 (2007).
30. Trenberth, K. E., Fasullo, J. & Smith, L. Trends and variability in column-integrated
atmospheric water vapor. Clim. Dyn. 24, 741–758 (2005).
But perhaps you can help me find the data you were trying to point to?
You think the world’s not been warming?
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual_bar.png
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#figure_7
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2009/global-jan-dec-error-bar.gif
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
It all looks like warming to me.
The hotspot is not apparent because of sparse sampling of the tropical upper troposphere, and variation from the ENSO. I’m told that if you look at just El-Nino years or just La Nina years, you can find it; although I’ve not done it myself.
In any case the fingerprint of the greenhouse effect are present. The stronger warming at the poles and the cooling stratosphere. (As well as the decrease in the diurnal temperature range).
The models reproduce global mean surface temperature remarkably well. So the energy flow aspects are not falsified.
Your inablilty to measure the hotspot does not invalidate the entire sciences of optics and thermodynamics. Science isn’t all in one piece.
Worried. Most of the missing heat is not located in the deeper oceans that Trenberth had measurements for. Nothing to do with the tropical upper troposphere.
I don’t think that that is disproved by measurements of the land-speed of a tortoise.
We know that the current species have survived climate change of one sixth the current rate.
A forest doesn’t leap forward at the rate of the dispersal of cottonwood seeds. A seed in the middle of grassland doesn’t take. The forest moves forward incrementally, with groups of species replacing the grass, and only later the old forest species can move in.
And this can be remarkably fast, but we have no evidence that it can be accomplished and lots of evidence that we are observing a mass extinction.
Furthermore there needs to be somewhere to move to. The last 2 million years have seen the flow from glaciation to interglacial, in approximately the same range every 100,000 years or so. Now we’re moving the other direction. Very rapid warming from nearly the peak of an interglacial.
This is why animals are going extinct at the top of mountains and the pole end of islands and continents, this is why we are seeing the destruction of diverse and unique ecological communities as temperate predators invade, and this is why at any speed this climate change is dangerous. Nearly no species alive today has had to exist in the coming climate
While I’m bracing to concede that point, I haven’t yet. The argument that humidity has dropped seems counter-physical, and not in line with the papers I found when I was looking for the 15% figure.
But the quote, I think was from the “Science Weekly” podcast. It’s generally pretty good.
RE: Wombat: (November 1, 2010 at 5:07 am)
I’ve never heard of such radiation. [from multi-molecular H2O clumps] Is it measured in the Lab?
Except for one or two papers on ‘bimolecular’ water, I have found very little on this subject on the internet. For that matter, public data on ‘water vapor’ is usually confined to its absorption spectra. I suspect that the complex nature of H2O absorption, when compared with the simple spectrum of CO2 absorption, might be due, in part, to a transient population of fused H2O molecules that are continually being created and destroyed.
It is the very fact that the potential radiative cooling from small clumps of fused H2O molecules is never mentioned, even in passing, which makes me suspicious that we may be missing something here.
“”””” Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:43 am
What I hope Anthony will green-light, if it is possible, is to give editorial privileges to a select group of WUWTers to go through the archives and select by “consensus” (!) the best 10%. Then that material should be either highlighted in-place in yellow, flagged with a star, and/or copied to a boiled-down mini-WUWT that could be read in three days (full time). This place shouldn’t be just a chat-room; it should be a reference-source.
While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Scientific sources are also a valuable resource. “””””
Sounds like a form of censorship to me. I know that I for one, would not want to be handed the tools or opportunity with which to sort the writings of others and rule on their “merit”.
Certainly I sometimes see totally nutty stuff here at WUWT (from reader/posters). Sometimes it is simply ignorance (which is NOT a disease; and is eminently correctable); and sometimes it is total idiocy; well maybe they do it for the comedy effect.
Consider the America’s Got Talent; and similar T&V talent shows. I bet that if Dietrich Fischer Dieskau got up on those shows, and sang from some Schubert or Mahler Lieder; he would get Gonged off the stage; specially by that Brit ignoramus; who thinks he’s a great arbiter of talent. Some people wouldn’t recognize real talent if it ran them down in the street.
Same thing with science forae; encouraging the concensus approach is not the way forward.
Wombat says: November 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
And the scientific literature shows increasing humidity:
“The results presented here add to an increasing body of evidence
that atmospheric water vapour has exhibited a significant upward
trend over recent decades
10,12,29,30″ – http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/ngillett/PDFS/nature06207.pdf
That paper uses surface observations only. Increasing specific humidity at the upper tropopause falls as increased precipitation. See the dropping temperature of the troposphere.
Wombat says: November 1, 2010 at 9:42 am
A forest doesn’t leap forward at the rate of the dispersal of cottonwood seeds. A seed in the middle of grassland doesn’t take. The forest moves forward incrementally, with groups of species replacing the grass, and only later the old forest species can move in.
Last time I checked cottonwood is in a group of species called Salix. And that group can move north with increasing temps. And they are collectively one of the fastest growing tree species around. And they sequester a dispropotionate amount of CO2. And you could forest the entire tundra under CAGW if you add in birches. There is a thread here a while back that indicated birches used to grow in Canada. You just can’t stomach man’s influence on the environment. Admit your reasoning is based upon your religious belief paradigm that man is ruining everything.
And provide the evidence for mass extinctions.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
My browser gets nothing at that URL
What you will find is that humidity has fallen since 1958, not risen.
Difficult to believe. The warmer temperature means more specific humidity for the same relative humidity.
NOAA have been shuffling things around. I might go to the trouble of finding the data for you if you show any signs of debating reasonably.
Let me show something about specific humidity since 1948 (my mistake earlier) at the tropopause which might surprise you Wombat. It correlates with solar activity a lot better than with co2.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png?w=614
[Note: the first link now has this message: “PSD web servers will be unavailable Wednesday 11/3 from 1600-2100 approx. (GMT-6) for UPS repair.” ~dbs, mod.]
It depends who you are.
Science by its nature doesn’t encourage consensus. Highest honours are to those that overturn a paradigm, and because of the personal investment in the work, one regularly finds heavily clashing egos. Which, I agree, is good. But suggestions of a global conspiracy are laughable.
On the other hand, an autodidact would do well to consider the scientific consensus. If they find that their belief is different from 97% of the experts in the field, then an useful line of thought would be “What is it that I’ve missed”. A hilarious line of thought is “Look the experts have all missed this”. More crazy still is “experts such as Trenberth must be being dishonest”.
Do you have a citation?
Wrong meaning of group.
What I mean is when a forest claims new land, or reclaims after a burn-off, you get a different species profile initially.
It is pretty serious. But the greenhouse effect is caused by basic optics. And the increase in it is caused by a well measured and attributed increase in atmospheric CO2.
OMG. You don’t know that there’s a mass extinction underway.
I’m not really sure where to point you first. Are we now living in the Anthropocene? might be a good science based primer.
But it really hasn’t been a secret.
Wombat says:
“The hotspot is not apparent because of…” blah, blah, & etc. Every one of the 20+ GCMs predicted the same hot spot “fingerprint” of AGW. The problem is, it doesn’t exist. [“not apparent”, heh]
Wombat still believes in the same non-existent hotspot – the “AGW Fingerprint” that was trumpeted ad nauseum by the alarmist crowd – until it failed to materialize, once again falsifying the climate scare.
Wombat also believes that the current [entirely natural] temperature rise is too much for species to take. Of course, that is silly. As Phil Jones’ chart makes clear, the current natural rise in temperature is entirely routine.
And the tortoise analogy has a hole big enough to walk an elephant through. Tortoises may be able to move a few hundred kilometers a year. But it’s never in a straight line, and they generally end up about where they started – unlike tree lines, which quickly respond to changing temperatures, as they did during the MWP and the LIA [which the deceitful Michael Mann insisted had hardly happened at all, as he claimed with the straight shaft of his Hokey Stick].
Wombat is one of those jamokes who believes he’s always right, even when he’s flatly contradicted, chapter and verse. It’s Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance on display; just because the flying saucers didn’t arrive on schedule doesn’t mean there are no flying saucers. And just because the planet’s temperature is right in the middle of Holocene normal doesn’t mean runaway global warming and climate catastrophe isn’t right around the corner. My model clearly explains the situation:
CD + P1P2 = W [where C is cognitive, D is dissonance, P1 is psychological, P2 is projection, and W…] ☺
I think Wombat needs to get a job, or a life.
You don’t have a very sound grasp of logical inference.
The chart shows a temperature history, and some short parts of it that have a similar slope.
There is nothing there that shows what a natural or routine rise is, nor is there anything there that shows what an anthropogenic rise is.
And of course there is no analysis of the difference between the two, and why the observed temperature must be one and not the other.
In short, it shows exactly nothing about whether the rise is natural or routine. And yet your conclusion is that it “makes clear” (no less) that “the current natural rise in temperature is entirely routine”.
That’s not evidence based. That is faith based belief. Take your own advice and (I quote) “prove your assertions.”
In the meantime, if anyone is interested in papers that do decompose the current temperature rise to the climatic response to natural forcing, and to anthropogenic forcing, Meehl et al, is a well cited paper.
The attribution of the current warming to anthropogenic forcing in starkly clear.
Is the usual response in here to evidence based input so uninspiring, because the people here just come to groupthink and so lash out at anything that causes them cognitive dissonance, or have I just found a particularly uninspiring crowd?
[REPLY: WUWT entertains and invites comments from both sides of the climate issue, from scientists, professionals, and layman. There is no “group think”. … .bl57~mod]
He showed that the LIA was at different times at different parts of the hemisphere. He didn’t show that a particular forest didn’t experience it, quite the opposite.
And the findings have been supported by a dozen studies since, and so really aren’t controversial, out in the real world.
And “deceitful”? Please!
I don’t think there is any need to take the mick out of Wombat’s sincerely held belief in the efficacy of the AGW theory. If we can be kindly to him and get him to examine the relevant data dispassionately, he will begin to see all is not well with the Team’s marshalling of the ‘facts’. I think he’s more likely to do that if we don’t give him reason to write us off as ad hom merchants.
Now Wombat, do you agree that specific humidity at the tropopause since 1948 correlates better with solar activity than it does with the rise in co2?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png?w=614
Take your time…
[REPLY – Yes. I agree that ad hominems are amiss. In any case, Wombat gets to have his say so long as he cleaves to the limits of blog policy. Regardless of the preponderance of our constituency, under the direction of our gracious host, we run an open intellectual shop here. Unlike some places one could mention! ~ Evan]
Wombat, your first assignment is to demonstrate that what we are experiencing currently is outside the range of natural variability. If you can’t show that, then the rest of it doesn’t matter.
Due to peer pressure I’ve prevailed on my favorite mod to remove my post above. Nice guy that I am and all. Wombat has enough problems.
And Robert Kral is absolutely correct. AGW alarmism is like arguing about the cat under your bed. But when you look, there’s no cat. Show us the AGW, then we’ll have something real to discuss.
tallbloke says:
November 1, 2010 at 6:56 am
I’ll repeat the question:
Trenberth said (without making any data available to the rest of us):
“we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! ”
-Kevin Trenberth- Oct 2009
Trenberth was bemoaning the lack of data (and the absence of the necessary measurement systems), tough to make non-existent data available!
Ah. Phil., the Trenberth mind reader. Psychics are always welcome on the Best Science site.☺
But note that Mr T said “…we will never be able to tell…”.
The “absence of the necessary measurement systems” could be remedied this side of ‘never.’
Carry on.