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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No, I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.
While I’m sure that you believe your anecdote is evidence, that’s not the view of epidemiologists.
Not all “skeeters” are the vector for malaria or dengue. Only mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles can transmit malaria, and only about one species in four of that genus can. And less than half of those transmit parasites of the genus Plasmodium, which causes malaria in endemic areas.
Canada, has no vector for Malaria. Your scalp must have been bitten by the wrong type of “skeeter”.
Dengue has only two known vectors. Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Aegypti is not in Canada. Albopictus is not in Canada yet to my knowledge. It can be found in the Eastern United States though.
In any case, it’s not just the presence of some bug the spreads these diseases. That parasite infects specific hosts.
No it doesn’t.
Published papers on a CV has great value to its possessor.
Volunteering for the IPCC shows the employer that the scientist is community minded, but that doesn’t get jobs. In the current publish or perish environment that a lot of academic scientists find themselves in, it doesn’t even hold on to their current job.
Climate change is causing and has caused deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea.
While Global food production is up from climate change to date, and is expected to keep climbing until somewhere between 2°C and 3°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature, this misses the point.
The increase is not in the right place, and the decrease is killing people now.
“A significant increase in the clear-sky longwave downward flux was found to be due to an enhanced greenhouse effect after combining the measurements with model calculations to estimate the contribution from increases in temperature and humidity.”
I see you’ve avoided the passage I randomly selected, and wanted to discuss your own cheery picked passage:
“A significant increase in the clear-sky longwave downward flux was found to be due to an enhanced greenhouse effect after combining the measurements with model calculations to estimate the contribution from increases in temperature and humidity.”
If that’s the best you can do, I see no evidence of this emotive language, nor of passages meant to deceive.
You seem to have a personal problem with models. It looks like the passage is discussing GCM. You claim that they are not tested against real world data is crazy.
GCMs are run over historical inputs to see if they produce historical temperature histories. The process is called hindcasting, and it is an important part of the development of a GCM.
That aside, there is no emotive or manipulative language in your passage.
If you have to resort to name calling, I think it is clear to everyone that you don’t have an argument.
Is that your argument?
The ASA ruling on whether the Oxfam poster, which referenced four WHO publications, at least one of which I have encountered in the peer reviewed literature, (NATURE, no less) doesn’t count because it isn’t a ruling, its a vague opinion.
Read the papers, if you want. People are dying from climate change. Our best estimates on numbers are about 100,000 or 150,000 per year.
I assume from your views that you don’t read a lot of science, and that’s fine too. But don’t try to feed me “people aren’t dying because ASA only gave an opinion”. It’s not true and it doesn’t follow.
Then it doesn’t matter that they’re social scientists. Your problem is with the work of working group one. Who are physical scientists, generally.
Some of them singularly good ones. List of WG1 authors.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 2:55 pm
bubbagyro says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:12 am
[…]
Focus on the criminal Trenberth and his self-admissions of guilt, and his fellow-travelers and kingpins of criminal Climategate fame, and the whitewashing “inquiries” by his peer-group “investigators”.
The conspiracy theory. Unscientific by being unfalsifyable.
I suggest you read the recent threads about the Oxburgh and Russell ‘Inquiries’ on climate audit before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.
Sticking your head in the sand is supposed to be a trait of ostriches, not wombats.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Climate change is causing and has caused deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea.
While Global food production is up from climate change to date, and is expected to keep climbing until somewhere between 2°C and 3°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature, this misses the point.
The increase is not in the right place, and the decrease is killing people now.
On any fair assessment, the malnutrition and sanitation problems of the third world people are more due to the monocropping agricultural policies imposed on their governments by the world bank and the IMF than any change in climate.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:27 pm
But the more serious still is the 40% drop in phytoplankton population, at is attributed to rises in sea surface temperatures.
Fish and plankton populations vary cyclicly, along with the positive and negative phases of the oceans. The colder oceanic regime we are moving into should see an increase in fish stocks (notwithstanding rampant overfishing with small hole nets) which will be an indicator of increasing food availability.
Sea surface temperatures are currently dropping very rapidly, as is the underlying ocean heat content, since 2003. This was when the sun’s output dropped below the long term average. According to the model I’ve constructed, Global temperature will stabilise and then fall for the next ten to twenty years at least.
I’m not familiar with WB and IMF policies and how it affects what crops can be planted. I certainly agree that is it, at this stage, only a few percent of deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea that can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
So I have no problem to accepting that there are other more significant causes. Perhaps the ones that you say.
However, AGW is killing, and the argument that global food production is increasing, misses the point.
The paper mentions “satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends.”
But it says that this decline is over top of that: “Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.”
So yes, the populations do vary cyclicly, but the 40% decline is not part of that cycle.
Not very rapidly. HadCru
Certainly only about a tenth of how rapidly its been rising since 2006. (That statement based on the Monthly global ocean temperature anomalies from the csiro, which you can download from the NOAA webpages here..
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise. Which as you can see, has been increasing steadily throughout this, the warmest decade on record.
Wombat says:
October 31, 2010 at 3:40 am
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise. Which as you can see, has been increasing steadily throughout this, the warmest decade on record.
Look at the latest and most accurate satellite observed sst’s
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/10/bottom-falling-out-of-global-ocean-surface-temperatures/
If you look at this page on my blog, you’ll see that sea level rise has been tapering off since 2003 and ocean heat content has been falling since then too.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/sea-level-rise-levelling-off/
SST has remained high because since the sun went quiet the ocean is using the chance to belch out heat forced into it by a more than averagely active sun from ~1935 to 2003.
The cold is coming. The breaking of the drought in Eastern Australia is a clue.
This exchange started with the following:
To which you replied:
Which implied that there was nothing predetermined or odd about catastrophic outcomes being in the cards (and thus no indication of bias by the IPCC in filling in the details, as Smith implied). Therefore your reply …:
… Is a diversion. My “problem,” and Smith’s, is not with the findings of WG1, but with the personnel-selection and agenda-setting of the IPCC higher-ups, who set a group in motion in parallel with WG1 to flesh out the full horror of WG1’s catastrophic findings before the findings had been found.
Actually, I personally don’t think it was all THAT dodgy of them. They’d have been familiar with the literature and realized in a general way what WG1 was going to conclude. What I was objecting to was your implication that it was and had been uncontroversial for a century that the greenhouse effect would cause catastrophes. That was the sole point of my comment.
The “dodginess” in the IPCC’s presuming what WG1 would find is not something that can be inferred from that act alone, which could be defended on its own as mere common sense foresight. It’s mostly because it fits an overall pattern of bias and finagling that Smith is suspicious of it.
(Incidentally, Arrhenius’s original finding was strongly objected to by subsequent scientists and greatly toned down by Arrhenius himself in a follow-up paper. Probably Wikipedia soft-pedals these points.)
Those who think that humans have devolved into a pathetic and fragle lifeform that can only continue to exist if the omnipotent and omniesient “UN” and Big Brother manage the climate of this planet within +/- xC (and everything else as well) are speaking only for themselves; and the “UN” & Big Brother, of course. Last I looked, the former was a totally incompetent managery of political backbiters and the latter didn’t exist. The real argument is not between real scientists over bits of real data, it is not between real scientists and the educated masses over reasonable conclusions, it is between the Chicken Littles of the World, the Opportunists of the World, the Anarchists of the World, AND THE WORLD. (I have no idea when or how these idiots got so many politicians on their side, but Tuesday is another day;-)
At a minimum it shows that he’s not a nobody, unlike 75% of the people in the field. His IPCC affiliation reflects credit on his employer, and makes it desirable to employ him. More than that–much more–it shows that he’s “connected,” “a team player,” and thus a potential “rain-maker” (grant getter). Publish-or-perish is for the little people. I doubt that any erstwhile IPCC bigshot will have trouble finding a cozy niche in his field.
They can and do thanks to foreign aid.
PS: Or so I’ve heard.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:27 pm
“This is a most fascinating perspective, Wombat. I will not trouble you for a more thorough explanation but I would ask you, since you have most excellent answers for all questions, what is the ideal temperature for the Earth’s atmosphere, measured at 1.5 metres above grade and averaged over all latitudes, all seasons and all times of the day?”
It is the rate of change that is problematic to biodiversity.
In terms of human infrastructure, we’re getting a bit out of my field of knowledge. Some areas, such as the Sahel, the rainfall is sensitive to global (or Atlantic surface temperature, I think I recall). It’s pretty hard to make a call, because although the droughts are probably attributable to anthropogenic climate change, we don’t know that more warming won’t swing it back again.
The question is should we be gambling with the lives and cultures of millions of people from the cradle of humanity, without consideration of the value of those lives?
——————
NO, Wombat! The question I asked is the first paragraph, above, in quotes.
Good lord wombat, you’re worse than I thought. It occurs to me we may have mistaken your nomiker for the wrong animal. Are you perhaps a bat, subspecies wom? I think perhaps another subspecies would be more appropriate, may I suggest ding? (Accuse me of ad hominem attack and I feel compelled to demonstrate that when I go that direction the cutting edge of my whit is considerably more sophisticated than the words you attempted to construe as an ad hominem attack by me). But enough of that, on to the science:
Wombat;
No, I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.>>
For starters, there are no starving nations in the “Sahel”. The Sahel is the transition region between the Sahara desert and the African savannah. It is a stripe about 1000 km wide stretching across Africa, running through several countries, but isn’t wide enough for any country to exist “inside” of it. Further, being the transition zone between desert and grassland, it is by definition an area whose crop production capacity is so low than only the desert itself is lower. This stripe across Africa has existed for millenia, sometimes farther north and sometimes farther south demonstrating that it is natural and the changes in latitude are driven by cyclical climate changes that are natural and any recent changes are well within that natural variability. The countries the Sahel cuts through are amongst the most corrupt in the world with tribal warfare a constant disruption, and these factors are the primary drivers of food supply problems. As for the countries in Asia you claim to be starving because of climate change, perhaps you could be more specific.
Wombat;
I assume from your views that you don’t read a lot of science, and that’s fine too. But don’t try to feed me “people aren’t dying because ASA only gave an opinion”. It’s not true and it doesn’t follow.>>
I see. My views differ from yours, therefor you conclude that I’m scientificaly illiterate. Accuse me of being deficient in regard to spelling skills, and you’ll find plenty of evidence. For what its worth, I’m not a scientist. I’m one of those gawdawful slimy disgusting salesmen. I sell technology. My customers include researchers public and private at PhD levels in all major fields of science, military contractors doing R&D on everything from materials to command and control systems, and aerospace companies building anything from fighter jet sub assemblies to simulators for training astronaughts. I need to be sufficiently conversant in the nature of their science to understand their problems and determine if my products can be off assistance to them. So no, I don’t read much science. I’ve lived it every business day for 30 years.
Wombat;
Read the papers, if you want. People are dying from climate change. Our best estimates on numbers are about 100,000 or 150,000 per year.>>
Read ’em. Climate change is natural, it is changing, it has always changed in the past, and it will change in the future. When it changes, it affects people. Attributing any given percentage of deaths globaly amongst a population of billions to climaye change is nearly impossible, to further refine the study to determine what subset of those have died due to the human induced portion of the climate change is absurd.
Wombat;
If that’s the best you can do, I see no evidence of this emotive language, nor of passages meant to deceive.
You seem to have a personal problem with models. It looks like the passage is discussing GCM. You claim that they are not tested against real world data is crazy.
GCMs are run over historical inputs to see if they produce historical temperature histories>>
Models are presented as data, and conclusions drawn from them. Models are not data, and presenting them as such is deceptive. Models are in fact tested via hindcasting, and have considerable difficulty reproducing the MWP and the LIA. They also cannot reproduce natural variability shown in either the historical temperature record or the satellit record, and their forecasting of everything from severe weather events to sea level rises since they started publishing their forecasts some 20 years ago have been so far off as to be laughable.
Wombat;
I see you’ve avoided the passage I randomly selected, and wanted to discuss your own cheery picked passage>>
Good lord, you picked one passage at random, represent it as being indicative of the document as a whole, and then accuse me of cheery picking? I chose that passage and a second one in a later comment as examples. While i was cheerful while picking them, that hardly means they are cherry picked. They are representative of the vague and misleading manner in which science is presented in WG1.
Wombat;
epidemiologists would disagree>>
You said that mosquitos were expanding their range and I pointed out that their range is pretty much the whole planet. You jump into a discussion about epidemiologists and specific species of mosquito. Say what you mean up front. There were a couple of threads a few months back about the specifics of malaria and mosquitos. Several very experienced epidemiologists jumped into the fray and the read would be worth your time.
Outa time, gotta run.
OK if I call you ding for short?
RE: Wombat says: (October 29, 2010 at 4:37 pm)
“That greenhouse gasses cause the greenhouse effect has not been controversial for over 100 years.”
I believe that dates back to the time before the layered structure of the atmosphere was known. As far as I know, nobody has been able to use the greenhouse gas theory to predict exactly where those layers should be. As it is, I believe it is only one facet of the many factors that govern our environment and it cannot be used in isolation to make meaningful estimates.
I see only one course of action. 2012. Lay the groundwork this Tuesday. It is a one-two punch. Win seats now. Then take this victory into 2012 and win back reasoned sanity!
End climate change funding. End grandiose green technology (and I mean by that the kind that is inefficient, as in wind and solar, at larger scales). Instead channel funds thus: Fund job-building, large scale, cheap energy production without the dirty smokestacks. Which means, rebuild US cheap energy so that manufacturing can be had here at home. And then: think smarter, not harder, when it comes to workers’ compensation packages, so that we can compete with dirty energy, enforced cheap/slave labor manufacturing countries.
There are lots of other ways to lead us back to reasoned sanity but I will only focus on climate related funding. The rest of the long list is off topic.
Bottom line: Every “climate change is caused by humans so we must reduce CO2” advocate should be made to understand that economic recovery will go better if they back out of the conversation. Go back to the Ivory Tower (and I have been there so I know of what I speak) and talk amongst yourselves. And let the rest of the country get back to building your cars, appliances, and pencils needed for your endeavors.
Wingbat;
Volunteering for the IPCC shows the employer that the scientist is community minded, but that doesn’t get jobs.>>
The high profile writers of the IPCC reports are much sought after as professors and consultants as a direct consequence of their notoriety and connections. They are also much sought after as key note speakers, and many of them require substantial fees for appearing.
Fruitbat;
I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.>>
Should Canada and the rest of the world adopt the draconian mitigation strategies suggested to constrain CO2, the cost of producing food will skyrocket as will the cost of transporting it. The number of people who would be exposed to starvation as a consequence would be orders of magnitude larger than the current problems you cite, which as other commentors have pointed out, have different root causes than climate change in any event.
Dingbat;
The question is should we be gambling with the lives and cultures of millions of people from the cradle of humanity, without consideration of the value of those lives?>>
Are you suggesting that lives and cultures from “the cradle of humanity” have different values than the rest of the planet? Is someone born on the edge of the Sahara desert blessed with a value to their life that is greater than mine? Perhaps we should call them all about the same and then consider the condequences of various actions. Mitigation scenario 1 of the IPCC call for reduction of CO2 emissions of 80% if I recall correctly. Do you suppose that this can be accomplished with no impact to cost and transportation of food? Figure say, a 30% drop in total production, which I for one thing is probably pretty conservative. Let’s see, 30% less food, population of earth is about 6 billion = 1.8 BILLION people without food. Which people? The poor ones. Even if there was food being grown right in your prescious Sahel, it would be bought by the wealthy, delivered under force of arms by the despotic regimes that control the area, and the poor of Sahel would starve anyway. Wring your hands about things you think might happen, but give yourself a smack inthe head and consider the consequences of the proposed fix.
Wongbat;
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise.>>
And yet, oddly, ocean heat content has been falling, not rising. Or are you proposing that thermal expansion results from both heating and cooling?
Grimbat;
It’s all pretty grim really.>>
Yes it is. Entirely. That a society with near 100% literacy, instant access to almost the entire collected knowledge and history of humanity, and freedoms unprecedented in history to debate, discuss and understand science have been so mesmerized by alarmist propoganda founded upon shoddy science resulting in cures for the disease that does not exist but kills the patient, is grim indeed. Odd that as far as we have come, the throwing of virgins into volcanoes to prevent them from errupting has simply evolved into throwing the economy into the volcanoe instead, and for no more benefit.
Oh BTW, I’m sure you’re preparing another comment about ad hominem attacks for calling you a dingbat. Sorry, but those are insults. Suggesting that on the basis of my opinions you’ve concluded that I don’t know much about science… that’s an ad hominem attack. Or in your case a bat attack. Sub species fruit.
How many folks here have read Edwards’ “The Vast Machine”?