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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Smokey says:
November 2, 2010 at 7:53 pm
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.’
Best to engage brain before typing Smokey, remedying that deficiency would be difficult before the present! Dr T pointed out that in the absence of present data, assessment of the effect of geoengineering could not be determined even if future data became available. Reading comprehension is required not psychic abilities.
Nice try Phil, me boi. For a presumed psychic. But ‘present data’ is incompatible with the term “never.”☺
Carry on.
[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]
What about this comment -it seems to say otherwise:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/15/my-answer-to-taminos-question/#comment-508816
walt man says:
November 2, 2010 at 9:24 pm
What about this comment -it seems to say otherwise:
Well your dissenting view is here, as is Jonfroide’s.
Phil. says:
November 2, 2010 at 7:43 pm
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 yes, thanks for reminding me. I’ll dig out Trenberth’s “the data doesn’t fit the theory, so the data must be wrong” quote for you.
Lol.
Just for reference, the following well known graphic seems to indicate that the current IPCC accepted state of knowledge in climate science appears to lack the ability to estimate how the upper atmosphere to cools itself.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/model_vs_actual_troposphere_temps_lg.jpg
So far, I have only seen speculation on this happens, including my own suggestion that the process of condensation in a rising column of damp might also generate unique wavelength photons that can escape to outer space. Perhaps that effect is insignificant. So far, however, I have seen many profiles of radiation from the surface, but no public presentation of data on how the atmosphere is radiating the convected ’80W/m² ‘ to outer space.
According to Dr. Roy Spencer and Robert Clemenzi, as I understand it, most of this cooling is via the emission spectra of greenhouse gases as the oxygen and nitrogen components of the atmosphere cannot, on their own, emit more heat than they receive from the sun.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/02/spencer-earths-sans-greenhouse-effect-what-would-it-be-like/
I would suspect that specific humidity would increase with increasing temperature.
The obvious issues that arise from having thought about it for a minute:
Since an increase in CO2 concentration results in an increase in temperature that begins at the time of the increase in CO2 and is 60% complete 25-50 years later, calculating an expected response in the humidity would involve some reasonably complicated filtering.
Humidity data in the troposphere is not simple to extract. In the tropics radiosconde data is sparse, and a daytime dry bias that increases with increasing height has been noted. The explanation for this is a solar radiation-induced error, which obviously is highly correlated to solar radiation.
So we need to be sure of the source of the humidity data, we need to be sure that correlations with solar irradiance aren’t spurious, and, importatly we should have an estimate of the expected error in the humidity data.
In terms of solar irradiance sunspot number is an okay proxy. It isn’t however, solar irradiance. It certianly isn’t solar irradiance at the earth’s distance.
But certainly I would expect solar activity to affect temperature, and CO2 to affect temperature on a longer time-scale. So if you use short term averages of humidity, you would probably get a higher correlation with sunspot number, and if you use longer term averages of humidity, you would get a higher correlation with CO2 concentration.
Does it?
Most of the comments here aren’t scientifically mainstream.
I wonder what the reason for a such a skewed perspective here is.
Also there seems to be a lot of villification of scientists. That can’t be symptomatic of openness to scientific evidence.
And I think that the comment I quoted was a simple objection to a scientific perspective being forwarded. No content, no opinion or analysis offered, just the suggestion that I post less, bundled with the accusation that I don’t have a life. Appart from the obvious; group think, what motivation can there be for that post?
A better reference would be one with a source, a methodology and an estimate of error.
The average temperature state predicted by modelling refers to once the steady state is reached, does it not?
And radiosconde data is thin in the upper tropical troposphere, and subject to error caused by solar radiation.
In the meantime, the planet is warming, and the patterns shows the fingerprints of the greenhouse effect, and carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect.
Which is totally unsurprising since the increase in CO2 due to human activity has been directly measured.
[snip – try again, minus the snark]
I would like to pose a question to Mr. Trenberth myself.
I would be like this.
Dear Mr. Trenberth, for many years now your diagram on global energy flows has been part of IPCC’s assessment reports. I just studied a recent version of it (March 2009) and the number given for surface radiation intrigued me so I read in your comment that it was derived from the application of the Stefan–Boltzmann law. Reading assured me that the method was legitimate but somehow I felt uneasy about it. When discussing at a forum about to distinguish the greenhouse effect on incoming radiation from that on outgoing radiation I tried to use your numbers from this diagram. When considering outgoing radiation I started with your surface radiation and nearly instinctively added thermal and latent heat to it and suddenly halted. Applying the Stefan–Boltzmann law would doubtlessly get a result that represents all energy to leave a body’s surface and leaves no room for additional thermals and latent heat. So I checked again but could not find a notion in your comments that you had taken care of that. Please comment on this subject.