UPDATE: Annan now suggests the IPCC “is in a bit of a pickle”, see below.
UPDATE2: Title has been changed to reflect Annan’s new essay, suggesting lying for political purposes inside the IPCC. Also added some updates about Aldrin et al and other notes for accuracy. See below.
Readers may recall there has been a bit of a hullabaloo at Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth of the New York Times over the press release I first carried at WUWT, saying that I had “seized on it”.
Purveyors of climate doubt have seized on a news release from the Research Council of Norway with this provocative title: “Global warming less extreme than feared?”
I beg to differ with Andy’s characterization, as I simply repeated the press release verbatim without any embellishments. My only contribution was the title: Yet another study shows lower climate sensitivity. It turns out to the surprise of many that the subject of the press release was not peer reviewed, but based on previous cumulative work by the Norwegian Research Council. That revelation set Andy off again, in a good way with this: When Publicity Precedes Peer Review in Climate Science (Part One), and I followed up with this story demonstrating a lack of and a need for standards in climate science press releases by the worlds largest purveyor of Science PR, Eurekalert: Eurekalert’s lack of press release standards – a systemic problem with science and the media
It turns out that all of this discussion was tremendously fortuitous.
Surprisingly, although the press release was not about a new peer reviewed paper (Update: it appears to be a rehash and translation of a release about Aldrin et al from October), it has caused at least one scientist to consider it. Last night I was cc’d an exceptional email from Andrew Revkin forwarding an email (Update: Andy says of a comment from Dot Earth) quoting climate scientist James Annan, who one could call a member of the “hockey team” based on his strong past opinions related to AGW and paleoclimatology.
Andrew Revkin published the email today at the NYT Dot Earth blog as a comment in that thread, so now I am free to reproduce it here where I was not last night.
Below is the comment left by Andy, quoting Annan’s email, bolding added:
The climate scientist James Annan sent these thoughts by email:
‘Well, the press release is a bit strange, because it sounds like it is talking about the Aldrin et al paper which was published some time ago, to no great fanfare. I don’t know if they have a further update to that.
Anyway, there have now been several recent papers showing much the same – numerous factors including: the increase in positive forcing (CO2 and the recent work on black carbon), decrease in estimated negative forcing (aerosols), combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2 is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5.’
And this is what many have been saying now and for some time, that the climate sensitivity has been overestimated. Kudos to Annan for realizing the likelihood of a lower climate sensitivity.
The leader of the “hockey team”, Dr. Michael Mann will likely pan it, but that’s “Mikey, he hates everything”. I do wonder though, if he’ll start calling James Annan a “denier” as he has done in other instances where some scientist suggests a lower climate sensitivity?
UPDATE: over at Annans’ blog, now there is this new essay expounding on the issue titled: A sensitive matter, and this paragraph in it caught my eye because it speaks to a recent “leak” done here at WUWT:
But the point stands, that the IPCC’s sensitivity estimate cannot readily be reconciled with forcing estimates and observational data. All the recent literature that approaches the question from this angle comes up with similar answers, including the papers I mentioned above. By failing to meet this problem head-on, the IPCC authors now find themselves in a bit of a pickle. I expect them to brazen it out, on the grounds that they are the experts and are quite capable of squaring the circle before breakfast if need be. But in doing so, they risk being seen as not so much summarising scientific progress, but obstructing it.
Readers may recall this now famous graph from the IPCC leak, animated and annotated by Dr. Ira Glickstein in this essay here:
Yes, the IPCC is “in a bit of a pickle” to say the least, since as Annan said in his comment/email to Revkin:
…combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable.
UPDATE 2: Annan also speaks about lying as a political motivator within the IPCC, I’ve repeated this extraordinary paragraph in full. Bold mine.
Note for the avoidance of any doubt I am not quoting directly from the unquotable IPCC draft, but only repeating my own comment on it. However, those who have read the second draft of Chapter 12 will realise why I previously said I thought the report was improved 🙂 Of course there is no guarantee as to what will remain in the final report, which for all the talk of extensive reviews, is not even seen by the proletariat, let alone opened to their comments, prior to its final publication. The paper I refer to as a “small private opinion poll” is of course the Zickfeld et al PNAS paper. The list of pollees in the Zickfeld paper are largely the self-same people responsible for the largely bogus analyses that I’ve criticised over recent years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly outdated now. Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action. Of course, there may be others who lie in the other direction, which is why it seems bizarre that the IPCC appeared to rely so heavily on this paper to justify their choice, rather than relying on published quantitative analyses of observational data. Since the IPCC can no longer defend their old analyses in any meaningful manner, it seems they have to resort to an unsupported “this is what we think, because we asked our pals”. It’s essentially the Lindzen strategy in reverse: having firmly wedded themselves to their politically convenient long tail of high values, their response to new evidence is little more than sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la I can’t hear you”.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear…
joeldshore
(2) If you adopt my interpretation, there is no real ambiguity in the statement.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
NASA has had ample time to clarify the statement and any number of NASA researchers have been active in various threads in this forum. To my knowledge, none of them proposed your interpretation. Their defense of the statement in fact was consistent with the most obvious reading of it which richardscourtney has used. If the statement meant as you suggest, it is only logical they would have said so while defending it.
joeldshore;
We are not talking about what happens once one is back in equilibrium.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Maybe you should take a break for a day or two. After your TOA comment from which you are now furiously back pedaling on multiple fronts, you throw out a comment that deserves no response beyond LOL.
davidmhoffer says:
February 3, 2013 at 11:48 am
No sorry that’s not what I done, I am comparing a SB calculation with a different way for calculating doubling of CO2. The change in w/m2 has nothing to do with SB as this is a separate calculation entirely.
Temperature of the Earth gives 279k.
Similarly we can calculate the effective temperature of the Earth TE by equating the energy received from the Sun and the energy radiated by the Earth, under the black-body approximation. The amount of power, ES, emitted by the Sun is given by:
E_S = 4\pi r_S^2 \sigma T_S^4
At Earth, this energy is passing through a sphere with a radius of a0, the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and the energy passing through each square metre of the sphere is given by
E_{a_0} = \frac{E_S}{4\pi a_0^2}
The Earth has a radius of rE, and therefore has a cross-section of \pi r_E^2. The amount of solar power absorbed by the Earth is thus given by:
E_{abs} = \pi r_E^2 \times E_{a_0} :
The amount of energy emitted must equal the amount of energy absorbed, and so:
\begin{align} 4\pi r_E^2 \sigma T_E^4 &= \pi r_E^2 \times E_{a_0} \\ &= \pi r_E^2 \times \frac{4\pi r_S^2\sigma T_S^4}{4\pi a_0^2} \\ \end{align}
TE can then be found:
\begin{align} T_E^4 &= \frac{r_S^2 T_S^4}{4 a_0^2} \\ T_E &= T_S \times \sqrt\frac{r_S}{2 a_0} \\ & = 5780 \; {\rm K} \times \sqrt{696 \times 10^{6} \; {\rm m} \over 2 \times 149.598 \times 10^{9} \; {\rm m} } \\ & \approx 279 \; {\rm K} \end{align}
This value from SB is 9k off the planet Earth observed.
My original post has nothing to do with SB and using only observed w/m2 back ground radiation compared with same component, 3.7w/m2 from a doubling of CO2.
“The 3.7W/m2 is claimed for a doubling of CO2, yet 324 W/m2 is claimed for all greenhouse back radiation. A doubling of CO2 therefore is just 1.1% of the total. If 33c represents the total for greenhouse gases this just represents 0.36c rise per doubling of CO2. This is being generous because most of the warming from greenhouse gases occurs during the first parts with it being logarithmic. This also doesn’t take a water body into account either on the surface.
There is obviously some disagreement here compared with the theoretical 1.2c per doubling CO2. The reason is obviously because this is partly derived from ideas over land not the ocean. The 324 W/m2 claimed for all greenhouse gases doesn’t warm a bucket of water in the shade during one day, so 1.1 percent of this even if atmospheric levels in future were reached are so miniscule. No wonder we can’t measure the difference from zero now with many decades until the possibility for a doubling of CO2 is reached.
Since the 1960′s CO2 levels have raised 80ppm until now so a doubling of CO2 won’t occur until it hits 630ppm. That means we are 25.4% of the target for a doubling of CO2. Therefore CO2 should have since the 1960′s only warmed the planet by 0.09c. The planet since then has risen 0.4c so only 25 percent at the most has come from CO2.
Therefore the Earth’s radiative physics not in a laboratory, shows the basic doubling of CO2 is 0.36c. This is how it should be when claiming a non feedback or not taking into account any feedback”
I am showing overall that the SB law doesn’t agree with the doubling of CO2 using observed back-ground radiation from satellite data.
davidmhoffer says:
What are you talking about? What NASA researchers involved in that climate report are active here? I am one of the few left around here anymore who is representing the position of the consensus of the scientific community. I thought of proposing that we contact the authors there but I decided against it simply because I am quite confident that it would do no good: Richard and Monckton would just claim that the scientists are altering their criterion in retrospect.
If Richard and Monckton want to resort to this sort of sophistry in support of their arguments, far be it from me to stop them. It just confirms what is already becoming obvious, which is that they are not even attempting to make arguments that actual scientists would find compelling. They know they have lost the scientific argument and are just trying to make arguments to convince those who don’t know enough to see through them.
[And, by the way, I see you have no actual arguments to rebut why Richard and Monckton’s interpretation makes no sense.]
You aren’t aware, or chose to turn a blind eye, to the fact that Annan is one of the top-50 warmist scientists, an IPCC insider, one who has co-authored with lots of other bigshot warmists over the years. He’s not just “one individual.”
And he wasn’t just accusing the IPCC of having a problem. He was also suggesting that they would attempt to brush this problem under the rug, because they would rather obstruct science and facilitate it. IOW< he was accusing them of operating in bad faith. Even Judith Curry, the only previous notable apostate, hasn't gone this far, AFAIK.
I made those two points clear and explicit in my comment, but you've misrepresented them with your strawman. You, too, would rather brush this problem under the rug,
You’ve also got the SB temperature of the planet wrong, it is 253K, not 279.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Idiot that I am. 255K. I really shouldn’t blog while playing poker, writing a proposal and watching TV. Oh and I’ve got something on the grill too.
joeldshore:
I am replying to your post at February 3, 2013 at 10:48 am.
It contains only two comments worthy of response and they are each risible.
To save others going back through the thread, I recap what your comments are about.
You made a comment at February 2, 2013 at 11:18 am and at February 2, 2013 at 12:07 pm I asked you to clarify that comment by asking you
You responded to that at February 2, 2013 at 6:19 pm.
Your response was to evade the question, to falsely claim the “very phrasing biases the question”, and to pose a different question instead. You then pretended the answer to that different question is other than it is.
So, at February 3, 2013 at 3:23 am I replied and my reply included this.
Your post that I am answering says
How could you possibly know!? How could you possibly know!?
If you don’t know then how could you possibly make the assertion which my question asked you to clarify. It was
You made the assertion that the present period of lack of warming is one of “similar periods between 1975 and now where the slope of the trend is not positive”.
I asked you how long such a period would need to be for it to differ from those periods and so be an indication that CO2-induced global warming was insignificant.
And you now say you don’t know how to determine that.
In other words, you now admit you were telling a lie when you made the assertion I asked you to clarify because you now admit you don’t know and you don’t know how to know!
Not content with that, you again attempt to misrepresent the NOAA falsification criterion for climate models. The recent period of more than 15 years of (at 95% confidence) no global warming falsifies the models according to that criterion (which I quote verbatim at February 3, 2013 at 3:23 am).
You again attempt to justify your daft assertion that the NOAA falsification criterion means other than it says. You know how ridiculous that assertion is because you made a complete fool of yourself in the previous thread where you tried to misrepresent the clear and unambiguous words of that criterion.
Joel, at this point the only reasonable thing for you to do is to recover some credibility by apologising.
Richard
Oops: “they would rather obstruct science
andthan facilitate it.”Joeldshore: If they had wanted to say what you obviously wanted them to say, they would have said:
“The simulations (at the 95% level) rule out zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more…”
But they didn’t. End of story. It’s not a question of what you think is logical for them to have said, it’s a question of what they said. If you think of all the other grammatically correct places in that sentence they could have put the parenthetical phrase, nowhere but where they put it could it apply to zero trends AND ONLY zero trends.
It was not until you challenged me to find the best way for them to have said what you wanted them to say that I fully realised how clearly and concisely they had written what they’d written. They could possibly (though I’m not exactly sure how) have written it in such a way that even you would fail to come up with a misinterpretation such as you have; but it would certainly have been far less concise…and completely unnecessary. It says what it says.
What a jungle of confused misinformation here! Guys, please leave this to the scientists. You really don’t know what you’re blathering on about.
REPLY: Oh yes lets silence everyone why don’t we?
Scribe says: stop having your own thoughts and let someone else think them for you.
richardscourtney says:
Sure…We all know that when someone wants to modify something, they invariably put the parenthetical expression before what it is modifying. I can’t help you with your lack of reading comprehension and your complete inability to rationally defend your interpretation as being reasonable. Because it’s not. People can read all the reasons why your interpretation is ridiculous here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1215586
Graham says:
What does “The simulations (at the 95% level)” mean? That phrase has no meaning to me so why on Earth would that be what they would have said if they had wanted to say what I “wanted them to say” (which is Graham-speak for what they actually did say). The rational way for them to say what they said is the way that they said it: They put the modifying phrase in parentheses immediately after what it modifies, which is “rule out”.
I would but Dr. James Hansen and his activism, arrests, the temperature standstill, increased energy costs etc. made me think otherwise.
Please un-confuse us. If you think your drive-by comment is going to influence anyone here then you must be smoking something. Can I have some. 😉
davidmhoffer says:
February 3, 2013 at 1:00 pm
The black body of planet Earth is 279k, albedo of planet earth is 0.3, so 279k becomes 255k with a guess (approximation reduces the temperature by a factor of 0.7^1/4). It is no longer a black body any more and then greenhouse gases supposedly make up the rest to 288k. The science behind this is flimsy to say the least and is all guess work. The SB doesn’t count for greenhouse gases or albedo and the correct value is 279k.
joeldshore:
Our posts crossed.
Your post at February 3, 2013 at 12:46 pm is an outrage.
Why did you NOT quote NOAA falsification criterion when YOU brought it up if you think your ridiculous misinterpretation of it makes sense?
My response was to quote it verbatim because it is the clear and unambiguous.
And you have the brass neck to accuse me of sophistry!
And you say you did not query the authors of the NOAA report because you say Monckton and I would distort their answer! How dare you?! You have neither ability nor right to proclaim what you think he or I would do in some hypothetical situation which you don’t dare to create.
Apologise for that.
The reality is that YOU and ONLY YOU are trying to misrepresent what that clear statement says.
Graham W states the simple truth of the matter in his post at February 3, 2013 at 1:56 pm.
For the benefit of others, I remind that this is what is being debated.
The NOAA falsification criterion is on page S23 of its report at
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
The disputed sentences say
I don’t put any interpretation on those sentences. I quote them. You are trying to say they mean other than they say.
Richard
Scribe
Guys, please leave this to the scientists.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I love it when arguments like this get trotted out. Do you have ANY idea Mr I Can’t Think For Myself So You Shouldn’t Either how many scientists have been active in this thread? I count at least a 1/2 dozen PhD’s in the hard sciences from memory alone, and that’s only the ones I KNOW and that’s just THIS thread. It is one thing to be an ignoramus, another entirely to insist that the rest of us should be too.
Run along little troll. Don’t spend too much of your brain power arguing here, you need some left over to remember to breath and you clearly don’t have a surplus.
Scribe says, February 3, 2013 at 1:59 pm: “Guys, please leave this to the scientists.
============================================================
There is a problem with “climate scientists”: they produce a lot of crap and are out of control.
Joel
Jan P Perlwitz of NASA was rather active here for a while, and on that topic. He got spanked. He didn’t bring up the argument that you have. I don’t know that he was directly involved with the paper, but he was certsainly conversant with it and is colleagues with people who were involved. He wasn’t the only one, he’s just a name I recall.
matt g
324 W/m2 is claimed for all greenhouse back radiation.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No it isn’t, neither warmists nor skeptics make such a claim, your math is impossible to follow and you’ve contradicted what you yourself said. There’s no point trying to help you. You clearly don’t want to understand, and hence you shall not.
davidmhoffer says:
February 3, 2013 at 2:57 pm
That was the first value brought out ( Kiehl & Trenberth, 1997.), the recent update brings this value to 333 w/m2.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/BAMSmarTrenberth.pdf
Look at the graphs and tables and you will see 324 W/m2 also with the first 1997 project. A lot of science papers when using Earth’s energy budget refer to these.
Friends:
I draw your attention to the comment of Joel Shore at February 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm.
For those of you not familiar with the other thread, this is funny. But Shore has had the matter explained to him countless times so it is also sad.
Of the sentences from NOAA which are
Joel Shore in his post says
Got that? According to Shore “(at the 95% level)” applies to “rule out” and does not apply to “zero trends”.
Now think about this.
1.
Trends always have a confidence level (or they are meaningless) but Shore says NOAA did not apply a confidence level to “zero trends” although they wrote “(at the 95% level) zero trends”.
2.
Shore says “(at the 95% level)” applies to “The simulations rule out”.
But “rule out” means ‘does not permit’.
“The simulations rule out” can only mean absolute certainty of 100% that it does not happen in the simulations. However, 95% confidence means something happens one in twenty times. Anything that happens that often is not “ruled out” by the simulations: the simulations say it happens one in twenty times.
And why does Shore assert that the sentence says other than it does?
Because the sentence says,
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
And that discrepancy exists because (at the 95% level) a zero trend has existed for more than 15 years.
Richard
The forcing at the tropopause is meaningless anyway since 72% of it is not showing up anyway.
72% is missing or has merely been emitted back to space just as fast as it is accumulating/occurring. Net forcing is 1.7 W/m2 right now but only about 0.5 W/m2 is accumulating/occurring.
What could possibly go wrong that? Well, climate science did not take into account the fact that energy emission from the Earth will increase in proportion to the amount of extra energy that is accumulating/occurring.
Basically, heat something up, and its emissions increase according to the Stephan-Boltzmann equations. A simple mistake in the theory, among others.
matt g;
That was the first value brought out ( Kiehl & Trenberth, 1997.), the recent update brings this value to 333 w/m2.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In that diagram “back radiation” refers to downward LW from all input sources to the atmosphere. they are all on the diagram. The inputs are 78 (direct transmission from sun), 17 (thermals), 80 (latent heat) and 356 (absorption of LW from earth). Since you insist on applying a % to attribute to ghe, you are applying it to an output that has inputs that are not related to ghe (and doing so is still a linear calculation of a non-linear function). So your math is wrong and the number you are calculating against is also wrong. If you want to insist that your math is right, you’ll need to subtract the amount of the 333 shown on that diagram that is a consequence of the other inputs to arrive at a base number to calculate against.
You may want to notice that direct inputs are 161 +78 = 239. Outputs are 169 +30 +40 = 239.
SB Law at 239 = 255K
surface radiance in the diagram shows 396 w/m2.
SB Law at 396 = 289K
Pretty much the numbers I gave you earlier.
….and 396 – 239 = 157.
Also close to the number I have you earlier of 150.