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 It turns out to the surprise of many that the subject of the press release was not peer reviewed, but based on previous cumulative work by the Norwegian Research Council.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…
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People are measuring this. And, yes, the heat content in the oceans is increasing consistent with an ongoing energy imbalance of about 0.5 W/m^2 (over the last decade or two, I believe…Somewhat lower rates if you look over the entire past ~60 years.). You give a detailed description of the processes by which the heat is absorbed, transferred, and re-radiated…but your net claim comes down to this: You are claiming that over long timescales (years to decades), the amount of the ocean participating in the warming process is such that the effective heat capacity of the Earth system is very small. This is simply not what is observed to be true.
Actually, what I generally claim on this list is that the heat capacity of the land is generally small so its time scales are not terribly important on a decadal scale, with the exception of persistent changes in albedo due to anthropogenic or other causes. The heat capacity of the ocean is enormous, as it its capacity as a CO_2 source/sink, and it is rife with climate interactive timescales ranging from hours to centuries. It is a vast thermal buffer that moderates all of the climate “noise” at its surface, but it is also a highly stratified buffer where almost all of its volume is at 4K (damn cold, in other words) with only a thin skin of gradually warmer water and only a few meters of water that are at temperatures close the main air temperature above it. This top layer — the sea surface — is the only part that actually has temperature fluctuations in response to diurnal insolation and direct interaction with the air above it.
Now we don’t have to go too far to see how global SSTs have varied over the thirty three years of good observational data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/01/tisdales-september-2012-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
SSTs, like LTTs, appear to be flat until 1997-1998, jump discretely in response to the super El Nino, and then remain flat from then until the present. Across the entire range they increase by perhaps 0.2 to 0.3, a rate of 0.1 C per decade or 1 C per century. The actual pattern of temperature variation does not strongly support a correlation with CO_2 concentration — it supports a strong correlation with discrete global oscillation phenomena, specifically with El Nino rapidly making a significant global change in oceanic heat content when conditions are right. But you might argue that the direction and probability of this sort of shift may be functional on CO_2 concentration and I wouldn’t argue. However, CO_2 levels significantly increased across the 30 years plotted — much more than they did over the thirty years preceding this — and yet the temperature change is modest and localized.
The ocean is, of course, 70% of the Earth’s surface, so this does an excellent job of setting the baseline surface temperature trend for the entire planet. Its strong correspondence with lower troposphere temperatures suggests that this trend isn’t spurious, it is robust.
What I usually do now is point out that a lot of what happens to our current climate is determined by heat absorbed or not absorbed by the ocean ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years ago. The ocean is a vast non-Markovian “memory” of past climate with many loops on many time scales. This memory isn’t just of temperature — oceanic water has persistent historic chemistry that also circulates, so that upwelling water can all by itself liberate CO_2 and other greenhouse gases absorbed hundreds of years ago or produced by decay thousands of years ago (or longer) as it warms. We do not really know how to account for the effect of this on climate — we cannot, for example, predict the future time evolution of ENSO, and there is strong evidence to suggest that until we can, we can’t even pretend to predict the short term climate, let alone the long term climate.
But this time I think I’ll just point out that you have just acknowledged, if you look at your own words above, that the oceanic heat buffer will almost completely ameliorate AGW to the extent that it occurs. You’re arguing, after all, that the “missing heat” is all going into the deep ocean, the ocean underneath the surface later that is manifestly not warming, or at least is warming even slower than predicted by a CO_2-only no feedback analysis. You also argued above, persuasively, that you could dump the missing heat there for a century and warm it by an almost undetectable amount, because it has a really vast heat capacity (nicely explaining why we actually almost can’t detect it now) and even if you manage to warm the waters in the space between the thermocline and the deep ocean by a whole 0.1 degree uniformly, the deep ocean itself still has many times that volume at 4 K as a huge reservoir on the lower boundary.
Bear in mind that I don’t “deny” the GHE. I argue with people on list who do. My argument is that the climate models suck, and that we really can’t help the fact that they suck — yet — because we don’t understand the dynamics of the system well enough to build ones that don’t suck. This is just one of many places where that is true. The earth’s climate isn’t one giant Navier-Stokes problem for the atmosphere coupled to all sorts of radiative chemistry, solar and orbital dynamics, and physics. It is at least two giant coupled Navier-Stokess problems for the atmosphere and the ocean coupled to all of the external drivers, located on a rapidly spinning deformed not-quite-spherical ball with nontrivial surface structure that itself is moving. I could even add a third coupled Navier-Stokes problem to the list — the flow of liquid rock underneath the thin crust of “solid” surface that is responsible for a lot of the movement of the surface, a small part of the heat budget globally, and a lot of heat and interesting atmospheric chemistry in highly localized and moderately unpredictable places and times. Or a fourth, although I don’t know that magnetohydrodynamics in the sun can properly be reduced to “just” a Navier-Stokes equation.
Mathematicians cannot even prove that the plain old boring NS equation always has solutions, and the solutions we have discovered or numerically evaluated are marvelously complex, with all sorts of self-organized activity and multiple persistent timescales. They exhibit almost excruciating sensitivity to initial conditions (are chaotic) — tiny changes can result in entirely different structures evolving with entirely different future histories. They are equally sensitive to changes in the model assumptions, especially in or near critical regimes, and where they are chaotic everything is a critical regime.
By the end of the century we might have worked all this out. At the moment, we don’t know enough TO work it out. That is what this entire discussion is all about. The models used to generate the IPCC resort that is being discussed “robustly” predicted warming if CO_2 trends continued. They not only continued, they exceeded the predicted trends. However, nature perversely failed to observably warm over the entire 15 or so years from then until now. Those same models ruled this observed behavior out at a very high probability. Specifically, since many of them are basically running ensembles of initial conditions to get a phase space of possible outcomes, what the IPCC report is stating is that very, very few of their runs exhibited zero temperature trends longer than 10 years. Precisely what fraction this is is difficult to tell, as they don’t say, they only say that the rule out trends as long as 15 years at the 95% level. This really doesn’t mean much, but if I were to take it at face value it means that 95% of the runs that they extended out to 15 years exhibited signficant warming.
There are then multiple possibilities, since this report summarizes multiple models and runs by different groups. One group might have actually “gotten it right” and their model might have consistently exhibited zero trends a lot more often than only 5% of the time. Some groups may have gotten it very wrong, getting zero trends of 15 years 0% of the time. Presumably model runs with high sensitivity would have done the latter, ones with more modest sensitivity would have had a higher probability of the former.
Or, they may have all consistently failed at the same 5% rate. It is difficult to know without going back to the literature and/or talking to the indvidual modelers or looking at their outcome data (if it still exists — data management in this field has been terrible). One would assume that any group that actually DID succeed in beating 5% with their model would be crowing about it (assuming that everybody is honest and that there is no conspiracy to only publish the results of models that show extreme warming). One is also absolutely certain that any model that was successful in this regard has far less climate sensitivity than the extreme values that have been bandied about.
We can leave the rampant confirmation bias associated with shifting the climate sensitivity down just enough to keep the current zero trend from being too unbelievable while maintaining a strong warming prediction, instead of simply fitting the sensitivity to the zero trend climate data or the entire temperature trend over the last 30 years aside, because that is a self-healing problem as models are eventually self-consistently iterated to keep from being too unbelievable. Bayesian reasoning will heal all errors, given time. But if we simply view the zero trend actual data compared to the model hypothesis using ordinary hypothesis testing methodology, it is reasonable to believe that there are some problems with the model hypotheses.
That is, the specific meaning is that there is only a 5% — or at this point, more like 3% or 2% — chance of observing the data if the model hypotheses were all true. That doesn’t falsify the hypotheses — 1 in 20 chances happen 1 in 20 trials, on average, and any trial could be the one. 1 in 50 chances happen too. Trust me on this — I’m a bloody expert on hypothesis testing. To quote a far greater light, George Marsaglia, “p happens”.
However, it sure as hell isn’t strong evidence for the hypotheses!
If I were the author of one of the models that produced zero trends only 0.5% of the time, I’d pretty much be going back to the drawing board. If I were the author of a model that got something that resembled the actual data only 5% of the time, I’d be very worried indeed — almost certain that something is wrong and looking for what it could be.
This uncertainty is clearly reflected in the current AR process. Papers are appearing that put increasingly small upper bounds on climate sensitivity, and median claims are coming down as well, as they are fairly positively ruled out by the data. New measurements suggest that soot is more important than believed, so that CO_2 is suddenly less important because soot was not correctly treated in the models (so neither was CO_2). These are all highly nonlinear models, and tweaking these things really means “back to the drawing board” to try again from scratch. We have new data on atmospheric chemistry. The stratosphere has done unexpected things in association — possibly — with the current weak solar cycle.
Even the search for the “missing heat” is in a sense bogus, because you are once again following your hypothesis in the search, not being led by the data. Your science is precisely backwards, in other words. You are certain their is missing heat because you believe your hypothesis more than the data, so you set out to find it. This is one of the most dangerous processes one can engage in in statistics and science because you almost always can find something if you look for it hard enough in a noisy system.
You also have to worry about the quality and quantity of data, especially where the oceans are concerned. ARGO is great, but it is woefully inadequate and will be for decades yet. Even with its inadequate coverage, one has only years of data — not enough to even establish a baseline (if a “baseline” exists for this dynamic planet).
If you can digest all of the above — including the part where if the missing heat is going into the deeper ocean that is good, because then we can pretty much forget about it for the next century — then we can talk about how likely it is that the ocean is warming between more or less fixed boundary conditions at the bottom and the surface, given the SST data referenced above. I don’t say it cannot be so, but it is, you will have to admit, not what one expects. Rather, one expects to see deeper warming only as part of a smooth gradient down from the surface, on average, so deeper warming should reflect SSTs with a suitable series of lags. This makes looking there for the extra heat a bit odd and unlikely, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you look on the surface first?
rgb
We do know that all the Climate-treat talk is nonsense! First of all I take it that you haven’t studied Oceanography nor Geology within any of your subjects? If you had, you would have known a bit more about the real factor which all your named sea talks is the seamounts, more than 30.000 many of which are active or earlier active submarine vulcanos. It’s estmated that 500 of them are more or less constantly active. They are responsible for more than 90% of all magma that comes out in air, over land or in water around the world and also most CO2. Not only that, their activity is due to tectonical plates movements, which I guess you and other understand is more due to ‘Mother Nature’ than us humans.
If you want to see for yourself all the activity due to tectonical plates’ movement please look at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
There you have the main factor apart from the real Environmental Human caused problem Clean Water. Or rather the lack of Clean Water due to all chemical and medical (including hormone) vasts that goes from us humans all the way out to the Oceans.
As for waterlevels. Please look at two of the maps from my D-essay 1995
Ostergotland Bronze Age, Norah4you file February 6th 2013 and compare that map’s waterlevels (black dots=settlement of any kind) with Forts up to 1000 AD along seaways towards Roxen, Norah4you file February 6th 2013
That’s the waterlevels I had to write a program going thru more than 40 main factors to establish the Sealevels in Ocean from Stone Age up to 1000 AD Landrise around the world due to last Ice Age Icemelting. If I hadn’t done that, as well as compared my results with geological and archaeological estimation (almost identical with the former, the later had forgotten landrise) I would have had correct waterlevels in the Baltic Sea which I needed in order to do the wor needed for my D-level essay (D-level is needed for a Magister Exam.)
What you see on maps is the two periods the last 4000 years when the Northern Hemisphere at least was 1-3 degress WARMER then today… Both not exact identical but alike. Changes there along the coast re. waterlevels are mainly due to melting icewater which caused landrise. All according to what Archimedes told so long ago.
richardscourtney at February 2, 2013 at 12:07 pm, in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1214858
is still trying to put forward the flawed argument that there was a “halt in global warming”, because there was a lack of statistical significance for a given x% probability level (i.e., because of the failure to reject the Null-hypothesis of a Zero-trend at this x%-probability level) over a y number of years. However, his reasoning has still no scientific validity. A failure to reject a statistical Null-hypothesis (Zero-trend in this case) does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (presence of a global warming trend in the temperature record), because it can’t be logically excluded the possibility that the non-detection of the trend is only due to a too small data sample, in which the trend is only masked by the fluctuations within the sample.
A failure to reject a statistical Null-hypothesis (Zero-trend in this case) does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (presence of a global warming trend in the temperature record), because it can’t be logically excluded the possibility that the non-detection of the trend is only due to a too small data sample, in which the trend is only masked by the fluctuations within the sample.
Read my comment immediately above, as it presents a statistically precise analysis of the situation. It doesn’t falsify the alternative hypothesis, as you note, but it should damn well make the authors of models that predict it worried about the accuracy of their models. Also, it does not support the alternative hypothesis. If one follows Cox/Jaynes scientific reasoning, one doesn’t verify or falsify, one shifts degree of belief continuously. The past 16 years should — I say should — be causing people to decrease belief in the alternative hypothesis and increase belief in the null hypothesis, or at the very least be thinking about modified alternative hypotheses.
rgb
So, I see. My other comment here, in reply to davidmhoffer, where he made an assertion about my person, has been censored.
REPLY: Noooo, it’s right there. Your should learn some patience, and some tact, Mr. Perlwitz – Anthony
Anthony Watts wrote:
No, it’s not here.
(Snip. take your accusations elsewhere. ~mod)
rgbatduke wrote in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220036
I don’t see any statistically precise analysis of the situation by you in your comment. I see you are asserting the models had “ruled out” with high probability a temperature record how it has been observed in Nature over the recent 15 years or so, which I consider a misrepresentation of what has been published. Or you would have to show where this has been said and provide the exact reference where you are getting this from. You said IPCC Report. Doubtful, that the statement comes from there. Perhaps you mean the NOAA Report, which has been cited by others here. The wording of your claim has some resemblance to what can be read there. Only, the statement in the NOAA report is not about the observed temperature record as is, but about a comparison between model simulations and observed temperature record after adjusting for the contributions to the temperature variability coming from ENSO variability. A requirement for being precise is to not distort something that is being said in scientific publications to make it best fit for one’s own narrative. And to be more precise, the statement in the NOAA report is valid about the model used for the analysis in the paper, which is referenced there, not for all models.
That is correct. The limited data do not allow any conclusions with respect to the validity of either hypothesis. But we don’t have only these limited data. We have more data available. Not just temperature data over a longer record, also other variables. For instance, ice melt has been accelerating both in the Arctic and in the Antarctic over the recent two decades. Also, the global ocean heat content anomaly has been increasing up to a depth of at least 2000 m, which, by the way, dwarfs the atmosphere regarding the amount of energy that has been accumulated there. One can suspect, it is the surface/troposphere temperature record over recent years that has been the statistical outlier within the bigger picture.
That might be warranted, if there was something different about the past 16 years that is not consistent with the current understanding of the climate dynamics. However, I have not seen any solid empirical, statistical evidence yet that there was. Only assertions and conjecture. There are plenty of latter, particularly coming from the “skeptics” as one can study in this blog.
Perlwitz says:
“That might be warranted, if there was something different about the past 16 years that is not consistent with the current understanding of the climate dynamics. However, I have not seen any solid empirical, statistical evidence yet that there was. Only assertions and conjecture.”
Pure projection. The assertions and conjectures are emitted entirely from the keyboards of climate alarmists like Perlwitz. He has the onus of showing that the CO2=CAGW conjecture is valid, and he has completely failed. That is confirmed by the ultimate Authority: Planet Earth.
Who should we believe, a self serving rent-seeker like Perlwitz? Or the planet — and our lying eyes?
I can’t believe I read it all…
thanks Joel…at least it’s nice to know that if global warming stopped completely…forever…..that is an extended trend that the computer games predicted
Jan P Perlw1tz:
I see that at February 8, 2013 at 3:47 am you yet again misrepresent an argument as a method to deflect from the issues discussed.
You say
No. As anybody can see who reads that link, the reality is that Joel Shore had made an assertion and I asked him to justify it by asking him (with supported data) about the recent period of “no discernible warming”.
At February 2, 2013 at 6:19 pm Shore evaded the question and I pressed the matter at February 3, 2013 at 3:23 am. This forced Shore to admit (at February 3, 2013 at 10:48 am) that his assertion was a falsehood because he could not possibly know what he asserted.
At February 3, 2013 at 1:00 pm I pointed out that Shore had lied. He dropped the matter and did not mention it again.
And you say that is my claiming there is “a halt to global warming”.
Even by your standards, that is egregious misrepresentation.
However, it is a simple matter of fact that there has been a cessation of discernible (at 95% confidence) global warming for at least the most recent 17 years (GISS) and possibly 23 years (RSS). This does not mean global warming is known to have stopped but it does mean two important facts; i.e.
1.
If global warming is happening then it is at too small a rate to be discernible over the most recent 17 years despite increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration although it was happening previously at a discernible rate over similar period.
2.
A cessation of discernible global warming over such a period falsifies the climate models according to the falsification criterion stated by NOAA in 2008.
Richard
Jan P Perlw1tz:
In your post at February 8, 2013 at 8:39 am you say
In absolute terms that can only be correct because some models may not yet have been constructed.
However, the model falsification criterion was in NOAA’s report titled ‘The State of The Climate’. Clearly, at the time the report was published in 2008 NOAA considered the criterion to apply to all existing climate models on the basis of the simulations it had assessed from its sample of the existing models.
Your words I quote here misrepresent reality. This is not surprising because misrepresentation of reality is your usual practice when reality does not concur with what you want to believe.
Richard
davidmhoffer says:
February 3, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for the feedback and good interpretation of the diagram.
Unfortunately all back radiation needs to be taken into account because all inputs and greenhouse gases contribute like a team in the LW radiation. If greenhouse gases weren’t amplified by inputs, the back radiation value would be 157 w/m2, not 333 w/m2. Therefore a percentage increase needs to be implemented to the overall back ground. There are up to 20 percent errors here in basic values so knowing how the finer details interact with amplified inputs are not known. At this moment in time don’t know how to improve the calculation without knowing the unknowns and this problem is what the SB can’t calculate.
richardscourtney wrote in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220308
Your conversation with Joel and your assertions about him are not my concern, right now.
As for your second sentence. So, are you saying following statement about a “recent halt in global warming” was not made by you?
“… And the recent halt to global warming indicates that recovery from the LIA has stopped perhaps permanently.”
(richardscourtney in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1214858)
And in previous postings in other threads, it wasn’t you either who said things about a “stop” in global warming, for example?
“The warming stopped 16 years ago and many – including me – hope that warming with all its benefits will resume, but we are worried that cooling may occur.”
(richardscourtney at October 15, 2012 at 1:24 pm in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/13/report-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/#comment-1110294)
“Each stated period was longer than the time since global warming stopped.
…
And the MSM is starting to notice that global warming stopped 16 years ago; the Daily Mail has published about it,…”
(richardscourtney at October 29, 2012 at 10:52 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/28/manns-hockey-stick-disappears-and-crus-briffa-helps-make-the-mwp-live-again-by-pointing-out-bias-in-ther-data/#comment-1127689)
“I see that at October 29, 2012 at 1:47 pm the troll says he has failed to notice global warming stopped 16 years ago.”
(richardscourtney October 29, 2012 at 2:24 pm in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/28/manns-hockey-stick-disappears-and-crus-briffa-helps-make-the-mwp-live-again-by-pointing-out-bias-in-ther-data/#comment-1128045)
“The discussion was about global warming since 1970 and the fact that it stopped 16 years ago.”
(richardscourtney at October 30, 2012 at 6:51 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/28/manns-hockey-stick-disappears-and-crus-briffa-helps-make-the-mwp-live-again-by-pointing-out-bias-in-ther-data/#comment-1129008
I am quite certain that more examples can be found.
I have to inform you then that someone else must have been posting many comments here under your name, making statements about which you claim now to not have made. Perhaps, you should contact Anthony Watts and ask him to get to the bottom of this.
As for the “recovery from LIA”, as the alleged cause for global warming as asserted by you (and many other “skeptics”). This is nothing more than an empty slogan without any physics in it. One could equally claim global warming must be attributed to the magic doing of pretty fairies.
The use of the word “cessation” implies that it supposedly had been present before, and now it was not anymore. If this is just a statement about that a trend can’t be detected at this significance level for the mentioned number of years, then it is technically correct, and tautological with the statement about a lack of statistical significance at this significance level. It still does not allow any conclusion about absence or presence of a global warming trend in the data, nor does is allow any conclusion about the actual physical process behind it. And even if it was true that a statistically significant trend could be found over a same time period or a shorter one before the recent period, one can’t even conclude that the trend was different. Before one could do this, one would have to establish statistically, that the change is not just random due to fluctuations in the data. A decrease in statistical significance could even occur without a change in the trend slope. It could occur merely by an increase in the magnitude of the variability in the recent time period compared to a previous one, even if the value for the trend staid exactly the same.
Thus, does this mean someone else had written previous comments under your name, saying something else, or have you changed your argument now? Latter would be nothing to be held against you.
Let’s do some fact checking about the “discernible rate” over a previous period of similar length.
What about the period 1980 to 1996 (inclusive)? Here are the trends (in Kelvin/Decade) with the 2-sigma intervals for some data sets (done with http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php):
GISTEMP: 0.083+/-0.134
NOAA: 0.102+/-0.114
HADCRUT4: 0.109+/-0.115
RSS: 0.071+/-0.187
UAH: 0.031+/-0.196
None of those trends over that 17-year period is statistically significant at the 95% probability level. Among those data sets, RSS and UAH took about whole 22 and 24 years, respectively, before the 95% significance level was exceeded. GISS, NOAA, and HadCRUT4 took 19, 18, and 18 years, respectively.
So, what again is supposed to be different about the recent years compared to before?
You obviously are referring to the State of the Climate Report 2008. There is no falsification criterion for climate models in there. The authors are trying to answer the question, “Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions?” (page S22f). Falsification of predictions is not the same as falsification of models. Assuming a conclusion is drawn from a comparison between simulations and observations that predictions made with a model have been falsified, such a conclusion is not sufficient to draw the conclusion that the model itself with which the predictions have been made has been falsified. Such a conclusion would be invalid, because lack of model skill is not the only possible cause for a failed prediction. The model could be the cause, indeed. For instance, the model’s climate sensitivity could be wrong. A discrepancy between simulations and observations could also arise on a shorter or medium time scale from a failure of the model to simulate features of unforced natural climate variability, even if the model’s climate sensitivity was correct and the model was able to correctly predict the average long-term climate trend.
However, another source of a discrepancy between model simulations and observations could be a divergence between the external drivers of climate in the real world and the external drivers prescribed for the model predictions. These drivers are not model features. Thus, a failure here would not falsify the model itself. It would falsify only the predictions. Actually, the likelihood of failure in such a case should be higher for a model with high predictive skills than for one with low skills, since the likelihood for compensating error should be lower for former model than for latter model. A highly skilled model will respond more accurately to the prescribed scenarios for the external drivers. If the prescribed scenarios are wrong the predictions done by such a model will accordingly diverge from the real world observations.
This should be sufficient to refute also parts of what you wrote in your other comment, at February 8, 2013 at 12:02 pm in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220323
You also wrote there,
Despite it is not a fact that the report formulated a falsification criterion for models, it did phrase one only for ENSO-adjusted predictions with ENSO-adjusted observations as comparison, your assertion here that the statements in the report were based on simulations with a “sample of the existing models” is not a fact either. It is clearly stated in the report that the simulations were done with only a single model, HadCM3, although with varying physical parameters:
“We can place this apparent lack of warming in the context of natural climate fluctuations other than ENSO using twenty-first century simulations with the HadCM3 climate model (Gordon et al. 2000), which is typical of those used in the recent IPCC report (AR4; Solomon et al. 2007). Ensembles with different modifications to the physical parameters of the model (within known uncertainties) (Collins et al. 2006) are performed for several of the IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (Solomon et al. 2007). Ten of these simulations have a steady long-term rate of warming between 0.15° and 0.25ºC decade–1, close to the expected rate of 0.2ºC decade–1. ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. 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.”
(http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf, p. 23, Figure 2.8b on page 22 illustrates this graphically).
It is stated in the report that this model was “typical”. But “typical” does not mean that all the models give exactly the same answer. Otherwise, we didn’t need more than only one model anymore, if all said the same.
The repeated misrepresentation of statements from the report is on your side.
Jan P Perlw1tz:
This is my only response to your long-winded and untrue diatribe at February 8, 2013 at 5:00 pm.
I am replying so others can see I have completely refuted your nonsense, but I am not writing much because I do not consider you and/or your nonsense are worth any effort.
You now say to me
Really!? That’s strange when your first post addressed to me in this thread was at February 8, 2013 at 3:47 am and it began by saying
That link was to my dispute with Joel Shore about a falsehood which he had posted.
My reply at February 8, 2013 at 11:44 am itemised that dispute and explained how you had presented a falsehood.
Your response is to say the issue which you raised “is not [your] concern, right now”.
Well, of course it is not “not [your] concern” any more because you always change the subject when you cannot see a way to avoid the fact that you were shown to be plain wrong.
Then you pretend of my statements concerning the NOAA falsification criterion
NO! I quote the report verbatim. You and Shore try to misrepresent those clear and unambiguous words.
Indeed, you are very revealing when you write
Yes, very “obviously” indeed. I quoted it, I cited it, I referenced it, and I linked to it repeatedly in this thread, and I have provided the pertinent page number (also repeatedly). But you don’t say I did any of that; instead, you imply there could be some doubt what I was talking about.
Indeed, you make the ludicrous suggestion
Bollocks!
Much of this thread has been discussion of the criterion which you are now trying to claim does not exist!
I and others refuted the misrepresentations from Joel Shore of that clear and unambiguous criterion. Now you expect me to flatter your ego by bothering to refute your similar attempts to misrepresent that criterion. Indeed, you want me to discuss its existence! Well, I won’t because you and your opinions are not worth the bother.
Your long-winded weasel words cannot hide the truth. I am content to allow onlookers to read the thread and to judge the matter themselves.
Richard
richardscourtney on February 9, 2013 at 5:42 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220806, wrote
[snip . . site rules . . mod]
Just one examples for his lies. Mr. Courtney claims:
This is a clear falsehood, since Mr. Courtney has never quoted any passage of the NOAA report where anything is said about “falsification” of models. He can’t quote any statement, because there is nothing in the report, which says anything about a falsification criterion for models. Mr. Courtney has this made up, freely invented, whatever you call it. Instead, he has cited some other statement (a more comprehensive verbatim) version of this quote cited by him can also be found in my previous comment) that formulates a criterion, when one could speak about a discrepancy between simulations done with a model, specifically HadCM3, and observations. In my previous comment, I explained why this is not the same as what Mr. Courtney claims. He is obviously not able to give a substantiated reply to my explanation.
[snip . . mod]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220510
this comment by me still stands as an unanswered and unrefuted reply also to Mr. Courtney latest nonsense.
Jan P Perlw1tz:
Clearly, you can’t stop yourself. When given the opportunity to admit the truth or lie and smear you always choose to lie and smear. For example, your post at February 9, 2013 at 7:39 am says of me
That is three lies by Perlw1tz in that short excerpt alone.
The first mention of the NOAA falsification criterion in this thread was by Joel Shore at February 2, 2013 at 6:19 pm. He did not reference it, link to it or quote from it. Like you, he misrepresented it.
I replied at February 3, 2013 at 3:23 am saying in total
The remainder of your post is similar and is equally easily refuted. Your assertion that I failed to refute your twaddle on the other thread is risible.
So, stop bothering me. You are an egregious nuisance and responding to your whining wastes my time.
Richard
Moderator: Thankyou for retrieving my post. Richard
Jan Perlwitz is trolling here to try and confuse issues. As his name suggests he is a pearl joker.
HenryP says:
February 9, 2013 at 9:39 am
Jan Perlwitz is trolling here to try and confuse issues. As his name suggests he is a pearl joker.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Henry,
Perlwitz seems to be a Climate Modeler for GISS/NASA: link
Perlwitz cannot honestly believe that global temperatures are accelerating. He is a self-serving rent seeker feeding at the public trough, for sale to whoever is paying him. He posts what he is paid to post throughout the work day, as his comment time stamps prove.
To him/her/it/whatever the latest physical-reality-denier machine/robot/cyborg is that’s peddling the latest hateful nonsense…so periods from 1980 – blah de blah also show no statistically significant warming. Hilarious! Now who’s cherry picking!? It’s amusing that when “HOLOCAUST [oh sorry shouldn’t have said that bit] DENIERS” look at trends from the present back x number of years to look at the length of time there’s been no statistically significant warming it’s immediately OUTRAGEOUS and DISGRACEFUL “cherry-picking” but when a “warmonger” wants to find a trend to support their unbelievably convoluted and preposterous argument they can go back AT ANY POINT in the past arbitrarily picking out trends and there’s NO accusations of cherry-picking allowed…even though for the most part, trends of 16 years or more throughout periods beginning 1970 onwards ARE statistically significant UNTIL you get to the more recent times which DOES SUGGEST that the warming rate has decreased. But that’s no doubt just CHERRY PICKING on my part, not because it actually is, but because I’m an evil oil baron that shoots children for fun and profit.
You do. Not have to be a great modeller to see from that graph that we are on parabolic curve currently heading down. In fact you must be daft not to see that.