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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——————
Steven Mosher,
I enjoyed the book by Tom Fuller and you when it first came out. Lately, I have enjoyed Montford’s book.
A question for you. What predisposed them toward a defensive mode (bunker mentality)? Why, when faced with their situation, didn’t they pursue a positive openness mode instead? Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?
Thanks.
John
Its like putting lipstick on a pig then asking folks to kiss her.
Phil Wrote:
/startquote
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’.
/endquote
No Phil, it’s called understanding error bars and dealing appropriately with them.
The data stays the same, the designers confidence in their accuracy is what is being displayed when they “over-engineer” a design. Climate scientists would do well to gain the same understanding before making pronouncements about the outcomes of their models.
John Whitman says:
October 29, 2010 at 2:43 pm
“Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?”
It was an enormous fear that the public would find out about how flakey the science is.
What annoys me is that Trenberth seems to think it is us who are “uninitiated” i.e. ignorant of how science works.
” Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded. When they talk about error bars, referring to uncertainty limits, it sounds to the general public like they’re just talking about errors. ”
If any credible scientist, at any credible univerist or research center publicly admitted this, they would lose their funding, and possibly their job.
Unfortunatly, in this case, the university in question here was probably activeley encouraging “massaging”.
For Trenberth and rest of the CRU Team, there will be no “happy ending” with this massage.
The tacoma narrows bridge was perfectly adequate for the expected static loads. It was however, flexible and the designers had not taken aerodynamic flutter(resonance) into account.
Nice to see the [trimmed], Trenberth, get a hammering in the comments to the article.
Phil dot and the bridge,
Good thing those engineers weren’t climate scientists. After the bridge collapsed, they would have just said their plan was only a “scenario” and told us all the uncertainty bars were wide enough to include catastrophic failure as a “normal” part of the scenario.
Trenberth is the second most cited scientist on climate science papers that contributed to the IPCC working group one report in 2007.
You should be proud that someone originally from NZ has achieved such a height in his profession.
It has never occurred to me to draw a parallel between IPCC and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It’s the following section of the whole article that made the connection:
‘The chairman exercises influence and authority mainly in the initial selection of the lead contributors for each of the three reports’
One major problem I see in this dynamics is the control over the message by the power of nomination. Just like in the IOC, it’s the IPCC chairman who decides who gets to be part of the group. As membership in this group gives gratification (part of the community, trips to Bali, Nobel Prize…) the temptation is enormous to adhere to the dogma. You agree, you’re in, you disagree, forget the next trip, event… Identically, members of the IOC, nominated by the Chairman, get to be part of the biggest sporting and show business event on the planet, get to travel to countries for candidate assessment and final selection etc… How can anyone expect any of the chosen to be against the group and against the Chairman and against the dogma?
As a result, both IPCC and IOC are amongst the most obscure, corrupt groups with everlasting Chairmen and bunker mentalities.
What if only each country or government had the power to nominate the people representing it, and subject that nomination to a public debate in each country?
@Ian W
“Of course there should be adjustments for issues like that.”
Then it’s a bit silly to take a quote from a scientist about adjustments and present it as a bad thing when he’s actually completely right isn’t it? Judgements about the data and adjustments are absolutely necessary.
“But they should be fully documented and overt with the reasons and how they were done and the effect on the results,. Ideally for each site with reasoning for each site’s adjustments.”
The adjustments are documented. They’re not necessarily written in plain non-technical English and tagged to each individual station but they are documented. Just because you see various articles from people who don’t know why data was adjusted at a particular site doesn’t mean that it isn’t known why it was adjusted (or that the adjustments were either incorrect or nefarious).
A number of people have reconstructed GISS and found the effect of the adjustments is basically zero. No effect on the recorded global warming trends. Sure if you go down to a particular station or a particular region you’ll find some that come out differently after adjustment but that’s to be expected.
“But that is NOT what happened – the ‘decline’ of the proxies was hidden as it would reduce their validity if it was shown that they had no relation to temperatures actually measured.”
I don’t know how this fits into anything. You’re not talking about an adjustment but whether a particular graph properly represented proxy versus recorded temperature.
“This is subterfuge not science. How do we know what other issues are being hidden that were not in the email release?”
Well to take your proxy example the “divergence problem” was a matter of published research before the email was even written. It would be therefore tough to say the email revealed anything that wasn’t known on that issue.
“”””” Phil. says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:50 pm
RockyRoad says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:47 am
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Really… Well, let me run this one by you and see how it sits:
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’. “””””
Unless I am completely mistaken; which has happened before; exactly the same thing happened to the “Second Narrows Bridge” across the harbor at Vancouver BC. That seems to be one of the few things about Vancouver that sticks in my mind; but I could be wrong on that; but you certainly heare of the Tacoma bridge more. Maybe there’s no video of the Second Narrows Bridge.
Geez….,take a look at his CV
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/full_trenberth-cv.pdf
It is astounding that he gets any time to do any actual research with the mind boggling speaking schedule and publication list.
A number of people have reconstructed GISS and found the effect of the adjustments is basically zero.
Of all the howlers in that post, I cannot allow this one to pass.
The effect of GISS adjustments is basically zero. But GISS is not adjusting raw data. It is adjusting ALREADY-ADJUSTED NCDC data!
Raw NCDC data for USHCN stations shows +0.14C per station from 1900 – 2006, fer crissake! Compare THAT with GISS “adjustments”.
Engineers look up material properties. They don’t have to measure them.
If the people making the original measurements of the strengths, hardness, or modulus of a material had just let anomalous measurements through instead of repeating if it didn’t make sense, people would die too.
Happily they weren’t engineers, by your definition.
Note too, (as the Oxfam case has shown), that people are dying from anthropogenic climate change.
“Who’s Who in America
Who’s Who in American Men and Women of Science
Who’s Who in Technology Today
Who’s Who in Technology
Who’s Who in Frontier Science and Technology
Who’s Who in the West
Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders in America
New Zealand Who’s Who
Who’s Who in Australasia Pacific Nations
The International Directory of Distinguished Leadership
Men of Achievement
International Leaders in Achievement
5,000 Personalities of the World
American Men and Women of Science
Dictionary of International Biography
Honored member Strathmore’s Who’s Who Registry
2000 Outstanding Scientists of the 20th Century
The Twentieth Century Award for Achievement
Featured as one of the top ten climate scientists, compiled by the Financial Times of London, 22 Nov 2009”
Someone is rather fond of their celebrity. Vanity has replaced the scientific method.
Wombat says:
“Note too, (as the Oxfam case has shown), that people are dying from anthropogenic climate change.”
Give us a few names of the deceased, please.
ClimateWatcher says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:56 pm
…
As far as I know, Trenberth is making a good faith effort to understand and catalog the various components, but I cannot look at the uncertainty from study to study and still believe that we know that 0.9 W/m^2 is going into the oceans.
Here’s most likely were the missing 0.9 ºC is:
(tongue in cheek, it’s a figment)
1365.2/4 = 341.3 Wm-2 (2009) Dr. Trenberth 1361.6/4 = 340.4 Wm-2 (2010) Dr. Svalgaard ––––- 0.9 Wm-2ref: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
For Trenberth keeps computing the Sun as warmer than it currently is. The energy is not going into, and hiding, in the oceans or anywhere else, the simple fact is there is no ‘missing’ energy.
Are there two-legged wombats?
Species diversification maybe? Therefore biodiversity driven ideological environmentalism has suffered another setback in its infancy as the next apocalyptic agenda.
John
@Evan Jones
“It is adjusting ALREADY-ADJUSTED NCDC data!”
In the case of the United States only. Even if you want to argue that the NCDC adjustments are completely wrong/unnecessary/whatever you’re not going to impact the global trend by any significant amount and it’s the global trend we’re all interested in.
Personally I’m not convinced by graphs of adjusted/unadjusted temperatures for particular stations/cities along with declarations that their unknown or unexplained. All it tells me is the person writing it doesn’t know why they were adjusted. What I do is expect is for someone to tell me why it was adjusted, why the adjustment produces incorrect results and ideally propose either a better adjustment or make a case for simply dropping it. So far it seems to be more the case that some people “like” data which shows particular trends and if they can find that in unadjusted data then they claim the adjustments must therefore be, by definition, wrong.
Trenberth said the they could not find the missing heat. As a New Zealander this is easy to explain.
In New Zealand they have now been found out for adding heat to the temperature record.
John Whitman,
“What predisposed them toward a defensive mode (bunker mentality)? Why, when faced with their situation, didn’t they pursue a positive openness mode instead? Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?”
That is a very good set of questions. My personal take is that they were corrupted (intellectually) by a combination of 1) a common, strongly held left/green political POV and 2) the perception of sufficient power via the IPCC to ‘change the world’ to conform with their ideals. This led them to lose all perspective about the certainty of their scientific work, and to close ranks when they perceived a threat to their science from outside.
Many people outside of climate science were simply appalled by the content of the UEA emails, but those directly involved (to this day!) see absolutely nothing wrong; they are simply blinded. If their funding is substantially cut in the future, then they may begin to see things in a different light, but based on all that has happened in the last year, I honestly doubt it.
I’m thinking that he really needs to define his processes for removing data that should be “best disregarded” as this is the start of a very slippery slope.
The third working group doesn’t look at the physical science basis. That’s what working group one looks at.
That greenhouse gasses cause the greenhouse effect has not been controversial for over 100 years.
Well, in a word, “no”.
Volunteering to the IPCC is a large drain on time. It detracts from your career, because you’re not writing your own papers, and partaking in the long review process is not that interesting for most scientists.
Also, it doesn’t pay any money.