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 The term “ClimateGate” should have been replaced by “swiftboating”.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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Joel Shore said
‘The fact is that authorities in science are authorities for a reason” . . . . . You got that right Joel . . . and on this subject it is because they were a bunch of boot lickin “huckster” kissin jack asses . . . . No two ways about it . . .
Sorry, fella . . .
Joel Shore,
“There is now also strong empirical evidence from the satellite record that the water vapor feedback is happening in the way that the models predict (as found by Dessler and by Soden et al., for instance).”
That was hardly a point in dispute, there is also empirical evidence that the negative feedback from precipitation is perhaps twice as strong as the models represent in the recent warming, and this is before the incredible model temperature projections. The crux of the issue is whether NET feedbacks are positive or negative, and current climate models lack credibility when it comes to a basic part of the water cycle, i.e., precipitation, much less clouds.
Climate sensitivities from glacial/interglacial transitions are not relevant to the sensitivity of the current climate over the next couple centuries, unless there is evidence we are close to one of those tipping points.
Martin Lewitt:
I don’t see how precipitation is a negative feedback. It just redistributes energy between the surface and the rest of the troposphere. I agree that clouds are a source of uncertainty but the evidence for a negative cloud feedback miraculously saving us from a pretty sizeable climate sensitivity is based mainly on wishful thinking.
So, you are assuming that basically the climate is insensitive except for tipping points and furthermore assuming that there are no tipping points that we need to be concerned about? Sounds like a lot of wishful thinking again. There is little reason to believe that the climate system behaves miraculously differently between the glacial and interglacial climates than it does for a warming from the interglacial, especially when you consider that the estimates of the climate sensitivity from the last glacial maximum to now take the ice albedo effects to be part of the forcing. If you consider them as being feedbacks (as any such changes would be in the current “experiment” we are carrying out), the implied sensitivity, as Hansen has noted, is about twice is large. There are some good reasons to be hopeful that the effects will indeed be smaller (and on a slow enough timescale) for a warming from the interglacial climate…But saying that just says that 6 C per CO2 doubling is probably an overestimate and hopefully ~3 C per CO2 doubling is not a significant underestimate.
Joel Shore,
“I don’t see how precipitation is a negative feedback. It just redistributes energy between the surface and the rest of the troposphere.”
Precipitation is part of what that “positive feedback” water vapor is doing in the atmosphere. It evaporatively cools the surface and releases that latent heat higher in the atmosphere above most of the CO2 and water vapor where the heat can be radiated into space. A couple extra turns of the water cycle and the net impact is negative rather than positive feedback.
“So, you are assuming that basically the climate is insensitive except for tipping points and furthermore assuming that there are no tipping points that we need to be concerned about?”
Essentially, yes about the tipping points and doubly yes about the need to be concerned, considering that so far there is not any evidence that the sensitiveity to CO2 in the current regime rises above a mere warming perturbation of natural variability, i.e., a sensitivity on the order of its direct effects. Actually, we might want to be concerned about the transition into an ice age, since that is the tipping point we know about. The greenland and antarctic ice sheets have survived much longer and warmer periods of warming, and analysis the glacial outlets for Greenland’s ice sheet show that there would have to be continuous flows out of all the outlets at rate seen for only hours at a time at any one outlet in order for there to be any significant impact, and even that would not be a significant positive feedback to the warming, but just a meter or so sea level rise. A few hours on individual outlets once or twice a year doesn’t cut it. It needs to be happening continuously on all outlets and even then we have a century to adapt.
If there is a tipping point there it might be cooling brought on by fresh water fluxes disrupting Atlantic currents. But not even these models have shown that we are close to that.
Martin Lewitt says:
What you are describing is basically the lapse rate feedback, a negative feedback that is already in all of the climate models. If you want to argue that this feedback is being underestimated, that would be mean that the warming of the upper troposphere relative to the surface would be underestimated. However, this is exactly the opposite of what many skeptics have argued…i.e., the “missing hot spot” in the tropical troposphere would mean that the transport of heat from the surface into the troposphere is being overestimated, not underestimated. (Although, I think a more likely problem is some residual artifacts in the data sets that contaminate the long term trends.)
As for the rest of your post, it again sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else. It basically amounts to: “The climate system is sensitive to perturbations when I want it to be (because I invoke tipping points) but insensitive when I don’t want it to be.” It is the sort of argument that people come up with when they start from the notion that they don’t want any regulation of CO2 emissions and work backwards to desperately try to find science to justify what they want to believe.
Actually, the paleoclimate data shows that the sensitivity of sea level to temperature seems to be much greater than what the IPCC is forecasting, suggesting that the Greenland ice sheet and part of the Antarctica ice sheet are very sensitive to temperature changes. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that we are hopeful that some of the melting processes are slow enough that they won’t happen over the timescale of a century or so…but that is not clear. (Clearly, part of the Antarctic ice sheet is in very cold locations that will not experience significant melting for the envisioned temperature rises, but there is plenty enough ice sheet to cause several meters of rise that is not so stable.)
Joel Shore,
The precipitation deficit in the models documented by Wentz in the journal science, was not just in the tropics. It isn’t in the models, hot spot or not.
You don’t seem to understand the basic asymmetry of tipping points, they are called tipping points for a reason. If you move closer to the tipping point you risk going over and having far more dramatic change, going away from the tipping point is just business as usual. The sensitivity would be great in one direction and not in the other. The basic point that sensitivity across a glacial/inter-glacial transition is just not relevant, unless you think the climate is cooling.
We are not just “hopeful that some of the melting processes are slow enough”, we know they are slow right now in greenland, and would have to be much faster to amount to a meter or so sea level rise, and we know that Antarctica is no where near warm enough to start melting, except for the peninsula which is in a different climate zone. To the extent that warming increases precipitation, Antarctica will actually add mass.