Post by Dr. Ryan N. Maue
Dr. Trenberth delivered his highly-anticipated presentation at the American Meteorological Society 91st Annual Meeting in Seattle on Wednesday. The talk was titled “Promoting climate information and communication of climate change“, and an overflowing crowd of several hundred listened for about 20-minutes, then scattered. Those that read the preprint online (version 3 now) and expected Trenberth to back off on his rhetoric were sorely disappointed. Dr. Trenberth
- vigorously defended himself against the out-of-context slanderous claims from ClimateGate emails
- cheerfully promoted the science of the IPCC regardless of silly errors [like the Himalayan Glaciers — Telegraph Jan 27 news article]
- threw Phil Jones under the bus for being naive about “keeping papers out”
- doubled-down on the denier vitriol
- trashed the media for insufficiently sympathetic and woefully inaccurate climate change coverage
- attributed a dozen recent extreme weather events to global warming including the Queensland flooding
- and finally suggested that the “null hypothesis” concerning AGW attribution be turned on its head.
All in all, it was the stemwinder that everyone expected from the preprint preview/fiasco. Details from the talk follow…
I sat in the rear-most row of the conference room and took some notes on my laptop during the proceedings. I have quotes that can be confirmed when the AMS publishes their presentations online likely in the next month or so. Otherwise, I am paraphrasing the slides that were presented.
The presentation was dedicated to Dr. Stephen Schneider who passed away last July. Trenberth described the ClimateGate incident as an “illegal email hacking” that spawned viral attacks on scientists. The emails were used to “damn the IPCC and many of us”, and included conversations that were clearly not for human public consumption. The term “ClimateGate” should have been replaced by “swiftboating”. Trenberth himself was not embarrassed per se, just dismayed about the viral nature of the coverage. He went on to explain the “can’t find the heat / travesty” email, and said he was not particularly upset with what was put out in the public domain in terms of his email correspondence. According to him, ClimateGate simply proved that scientists were human. There was “some evidence of a lack of openness” but all following reviews/inquiries found no problems with the science.
Trenberth then discussed the small errors in the IPCC report (Himalayan glaciers), but there were no major changes to the overall IPCC conclusions. He admitted that the IPCC handled the “errors” rather poorly and left some scientists “hung out to dry”. Trenberth had not seen the Phil Jones email (Trenberth was not cc’ed) that said “we are gonna keep these papers out of the IPCC”, but blamed Jones for being naive about the process. Regardless, the papers, which Trenberth snidely commented “weren’t very good anyways” were indeed not excluded. (The system worked.) The “It’s a Travesty” is still accurate, but Trenberth believes that the missing heat is somewhere in the oceans, maybe below 300 – 700 meters depth. It was just a cherry-picked email anyways.
Deniers: in the AMS preprint, which Trenberth described as garnering plenty of “nasty email responses” the term is heavily used. Trenberth defined it in the talk as someone that simply rejects basic information about climate science. There is a difference between skeptics and deniers, though it was not explicitly delved into. Trenberth lamented exasperation with the deniers and suggested that he and everyone else simply not debate nor grant them visibility or a platform by engaging with them. Good advice — with the obligatory quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan about having your own set of facts. Indeed, on the distinction between deniers and skeptics, he said “if the shoe fits, wear it”. The audience chuckled.
Media: same as preprint. Trenberth lamented the trend that blogs and media contaminate the discourse with an increasing trend of uninformed opinions. He has seen his colleagues get burned when they engage with the media often through misquotation or slanted coverage. He suggested that a scientist feed the media a story and exclusively promote your own stuff in order to tell a story or generate news. Some quotes from Thomas Friedman on a Meet the Press from Sept 6, 2009 were read, but I didn’t jot them all down because he reminds me of Paul Krugman.
Nature of climate change: It’s winter he declared, that’s why it is cold and snowy. The audience laughed loudly at that quip. Natural variability is ongoing and when the natural warmth and AGW are in the same direction, as with the recently waned El Nino, then “records will be broken”. He showed the obligatory shifting of the bell-curve to demonstrate changes in extreme events with global warming by moving the entire distribution to the right.
The null hypothesis has been (prove at 95% confidence level) that “there is no human influence on climate” which required folks to prove otherwise. However, with the IPCC declaration of “unequivocal warming due to humans”, Trenberth implored that we change the null hypothesis to put the onus of proof on the deniers: “There is a human influence on climate.” Therefore, the following events would not have happened or as bad or something (not clear what he meant/implied) without the human influence on climate:
Flooding in Pakistan, Russian drought, heat wave, and wildfires, flooding in the US including the rainstorm in Nashville, the active Atlantic hurricane season, and Snowmageddon.
The key is the 4% increase in moisture or water vapor over the past 4-decades shown in anomalous SSTs. The Queensland flooding is also due to SST increases and “indeed global warming” related, but he also mentioned La Nina. He suggested that we use these events (disasters) as teachable moments to “straighten out the media”, “inform the public and politicians”, and resolve renewed US leadership in climate science.
The two audience questions were brief and ancillary to Trenberth’s thesis.
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This talk is one of the opening salvos in a well-coordinated broadside initiative to redeem and repackage climate science, climate scientists, and climate policy in the eyes of the public. This “re-education” campaign needs a brand name. Together We Thrive and Win the Future are taken
Promoting climate information and communication of climate change
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A lot of this is for setting up praise in the future?
Monbiot our Gav and the rest of the clan will be spouting :-
” The eminent Doctor Trenberth’s made a speech to the AMS , an august body in the field of meteorology. Dr Trenbert (our mate) demonstrated completely that the leaked emails were irrelevant and demonstated unequivocaly that climate change is happening and its happening now”
The speech was very well received with no dissenting voices? The applause was deafening with shouts of come on down.
I think this is all part of a co-ordinated counter-attack by the AGW crowd to try to regain the ground they lost after Climategate. Expect more of the same over the next few months.
Wow! A gem for collectors of cognitive dissonance in action.
From what I read most people know that places like Australia are subject to periods of excessive rainfall and long droughts. Even the BBC has said these events cannot be attributed to global warming, it’s just the weather, e.g. “worst for Brisbane worse since 1893” Well Brisbane was only founded in 1824 so if they had had enormous floods in say 1780, who would have know about them, or cared? There wouldn’t have been that many people to settle on the flood plane of an enormous river.
Take a look on Wikipedia for Drought and flood in Australia” and see the cyclical nature. From the graph it seems Brisbane can expect a major flood every 50 years or so. Now what warming act of man is cyclical every 50 years to cause the warming that brings on these floods?
“John Oxley, early explorer, mentioned evidence of an inundation which he discovered on 19 September 1824 in an area north of the junction of the Bremer with the Brisbane : “the starboard bank an elevated flat of rich land, declining to a point where had evidently by its sandy shore and pebbly surface, been at some time washed by an inundation; a flood would be too weak an expression to use for a collection of water rising to the full height (full fifty feet) which the appearance of the shore here renders possible.” “
In 1820 the industrial revolution in Britain was still in it’s infancy and was just being born in the USA, so what caused the 1824 inundation? Well according to Trenberth it must have been too many people eating food that cause gaseous emissions -AGW. What else could it have been. Natural perhaps?
@John Brookes, January 26, 2011 at 11:10 pm
‘The difference between skeptics and “deniers” is obvious. Skeptics look at new data, and see how it fits with their current ideas, and change their ideas if necessary. “Deniers” try and evaluate new data to see if it confirms their ideas. If it doesn’t, they attack it.‘
I think you’re wrong – again – John. I can just about get it with your ‘skeptics’ definition, but I see deniers as a slanderous construct of fevered minds who are trying very hard to rescue something from what, to them, has become a doctrine having nothing to do with science.
Skeptics – who really ought to be led by the scientific method – can often be found, like Monckton, to be in general agreement that the climate is changing (it always does, don’t you agree?), but have grave doubts that it is because of ‘man’. Let’s face it, even you must agree, surely, that if there is a warming trend, a lot of it must be natural with only a slim possibility that a bit of it is man-made.
Me, being a skeptic, will continue to accept it to be natural unless and until your camp (excluding the idiocies of Al Gore) can show without doubt that there is a man-made component to it. At the moment, without your data, model code and procedures being shared, as they should be, you are failing miserably.
Finally, you still haven’t come back with an answer to a question that greens always seem to duck. It is this:
If you think the climate is changing – catastrophically, as now seems to be the mot de jour – what do you think should be the ideal climate; how shall you achieve it (at what cost); and how in hell do you think you are going to sustain it?Oh, and do you think you will achieve it in this lifetime, or the next?
John Brookes says:
January 26, 2011 at 11:10 pm
The difference between skeptics and “deniers” is obvious. Skeptics look at new data, and see how it fits with their current ideas, and change their ideas if necessary. “Deniers” try and evaluate new data to see if it confirms their ideas. If it doesn’t, they attack it.
Do you mean Trenberth is a denier because of his attack on ARGO OHC data?
“Although Lyman and colleagues’ paper reinforces the overall view that the ocean has been warming at a rate consistent with radiative imbalance estimates from anthropogenic climate change, the slowdown since 2003 is at odds with top-of-atmosphere radiation measurements. This discrepancy suggests that further problems may be hidden within the ocean observations and their processing.”
Thanks Ryan.
This “re-education” campaign needs a brand name.
How about:
“And travesty marches on”
“the “null hypothesis” concerning AGW attribution be turned on its head.”
Doesn’t that mean that any religion, be it CAGW or any other, must be accepted as truth and incorporated into law until there is proof to the contrary? What defence is there when even the establishment agrees with and enforces such an insane travesty of the most axiomatic scientific principle?
From January 2010 Trenberth wrote in Nature: More knowledge, less certainty
“The climate scientists that comprise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) don’t do predictions, or at least they haven’t up until now1. Instead the scientists of the IPCC have, in the past, made projections of how the future climate could change for a range of ‘what-if’ emissions scenarios.”
“In previous IPCC assessments[1], changes in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouses gases and aerosols over time were gauged using ‘idealized emissions scenarios’, which are informed estimates of what might happen in the future under various sets of assumptions related to population, lifestyle, standard of living, carbon intensity and the like. Then the changes in future climate were simulated for each of these scenarios. The output of such modelling is usually referred to as a projection, rather than a prediction or a forecast. Unlike a weather prediction, the models in this case are not initialized with the current or past state of the climate system, as derived from observations. Instead, they begin with arbitrary climatic conditions and examine only the change in projected climate, thereby removing any bias that could be associated with trying to realistically simulate the current climate as a starting point. This technique works quite well for examining how the climate could respond to various emissions scenarios in the long term.”
This seems at odds with Trenberth’s more recent view that the case for AGW is proven. All that has been achieved is a gaggle of scientists from disparate fields working through the consequences of some yet to be validated computer projections.
Prove the reverse Null hypothesis that CO2 is safe?
Sure we can do that, just give us the billions of dollars in funding, university chairs and departments and 20 years and we’ll let you know.
It irritates me when Trenberth and Jones say that the Climategate e-mails are taken out of context. The answer to that is simple. Download the entire server and put its entire contents in the public domain. Then people can see the true and proper context in which the allegedly out of context e-mails truely sit.
Come on Trenberth release all the e-mails that you have on your server and lets see whether there is any justification to your clain that the Climategate e-mails are sitting out of context. I dare you Trenberth to put your money where your mount is.
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with Richard Hill when he says:
January 27, 2011 at 2:37 am
“The tone of the comments on this topic seem a bit smug. The facts on the ground are that the AMS itself, the APS, the NAS, the Royal Society, etc, etc,, are all committed to promoting urgent CO2 reductions. The MSM and the politicians follow these Authorities. You get the feeling that the commenters at WUWT think they are winning the battle. Perhaps skeptics have landed an odd lucky shot, but the IPCC is still winning the war. Lets see a body like the AMS modify its official statement on the issue.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////
There is not a quick game changer on the horizon. What we need is a decade of cooling temperatures. If global temperatures can be seen to actually be cooling, in one or more of the official temperature records, for a prolonged period, even though CO2 emissions are increasing, it will become increasingly more difficult to persuade the public for the need for change and the need for them to dig deep into their pockets.
The tide may already have changed (since there are many factors which appear to be coming together suggesting cooler times ahead) but we need that tide to fully ebb to take with it the AGW scam.
Purakanui says:
January 27, 2011 at 12:25 am
This is … a man who sees his position crumbling around him and who is desperately fearful that his mana is blowing away in the cold wind of the real world.
With a tag like that and a word like that you declare yourself to be a Kiwi. (Real or adopted.) The unfortunate thing is no one outside NZ understands the word “mana” (it is not biblical), which is a real shame as it is a fantastic way to express the concept and I find my UK colleagues looking very blank when I use it.
Mana 1. (noun) prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power, charisma
so Dr Treberth attributes Queensland flooding to global warming. Could be right, I mean what’s the chance of heavy rain in Queensland during the Wet?
“This talk is one of the opening salvos in a well-coordinated broadside initiative to redeem and repackage climate science, climate scientists, and climate policy in the eyes of the public. This “re-education” campaign needs a brand name. Together We Thrive and Win the Future are taken”
Hmm, given that politicians start thinking about their campaigns way ahead of the election date – years ahead – I think this is the start of the campaign for the next IPCC report. By the time the actual report is published we will all have been brainwashed into accepting the reversal of the null hypothesis and no-one will bat an eyelid at it. As a lead author, Trenberth has already flagged up from which angle he will be coming.
Watch out.
Sounds like Trenberth was arrogant and combative, which is par for the course with these CAGW people.
“This “re-education” campaign needs a brand name. ”
How about…
Climate Re-education for All People
or
Foundation for Advancing and Renewing Climate Education
******
Promoting climate information and communication of climate change
******
Jeesh, this has to be the most blatant piece of %@ur momisugly#!. You’d think after the last 30 yrs of taking control of almost all means of communication except radio and the internet, hijacked the entire “peer-review” system, infiltrated practically every gov agency & university, & evaporated tens of billions of $$s, that they’d already have total control of “climate information & communication”. That’s the problem, everybody on earth already “knows” their propaganda, & many have outright rejected it!
Give me a frakkin’ break.
I truly wonder about the math literacy of these people. They already own 100% of the world’s governments, 100% of the world’s schools and colleges, 100% of the formerly Christian churches, 100% of television and newspapers, and 80% of radio and the web. Nobody has EVER questioned Gaian doctrine on a mass-market medium. No religion or ideology or cult or scam or king or empire has EVER owned so much of the world, and still they want 150% or 255969068482734673% or Forty-leven giga-mega-pazillion Exa-percent of everything.
Purakanui, I agree with Murray Grainger that some Maori words and phrases that resonate very strongly with us Kiwis of whatever extraction just earn us odd looks from our cousins in the UK and in other parts of the world. Your comment is beautifully written and very powerful to a Kiwi, but here in the UK where most have a fairly superficial knowledge of New Zealand or its culture, the nearest translation for ‘Mana’ is the biblical ‘bread of heaven’, which is quite incorrect. Mana is meangful to Welsh Rugby supporters but for the wrong reason as they associate the word with the title of a Welsh hymn and sing it as a battle cry, a lament and a victory song at Rugby matches when the Welsh team is playing.
I guess i am not a denier because i believe that UHI is definitely a human influence and that the mesurement of temperature data as done by GISS/CRU etc prove that the temperature of airports in urban areas has increased due to construction, increased traffic and types of airplanes used.
Alexander K says:
January 27, 2011 at 2:24 am
> I am more than a little surprised and disapointed that the AMS gave Trenberth time, space and a venue for his alarmist and dishonest nonsense.
After talking with a Joe D’Aleo and a few others about what the AMS board has become, I figured they sought out Trenberth and encouraged as much publicity as they could about it.
[Ryan wrote:] > This “re-education” campaign needs a brand name.
The Trenberth Imbalance?
Scratch that – I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking it. 🙂
I recorded all three presentations…the first (by David Karoly) is interesting…I particularly enjoyed him pointing to a spike in the numbers of climate-related editorials and letters-to-the-editor at the end of 2009 and explaining it was related to the Copenhagen meeting. I’m sure he searched and searched and could not find a better explanation.
Trenberth’s presentation starts about 23:15…
http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=6xbk80SldX5n
My vote goes to “Consensus Uber Alles”
HAS…hits…bullseye