Dutch meteorological institute KNMI critical of IPCC- suggests they are leaving out study of natural climate variability

milodonharlani on July 5, 2013 at 11:42 am
What he said. The role of CO2 is uncontriversial – producing a trivial logarithmic trend warming, easily swamped for nearly 20 years by noise, while making plants grow much quicker.

The problem as I see matters is that one cannot begin to evaluate the role of CO2 until 3 matters are properly ascertained. These are:
1. The accurate determination of ocean temperatures at all relevant depths. In order to do this, one needs a relatively lengthy data set (which unffortunately ARGO is not). It is necessary to revisit the splicing on of ARGO to older records, and to ascertain whether ARGO contains any inherent bias (being free floating, the buoys drift with currents and currents are temperature and density dependent)
2. The accurate determination of land based temperatures, and not simply Tmax and Tmin but rather hourly coupled with hourly humidity so that energy and not simply temperature profiel can be determined. This will require a proper re-evaluation of UHI, station siting issues and station drop outs.
3. A full and complete understanding of natural variation, precisely what forcings it consists of and the upper and lower bounds of each and every forcing encompassed within natural variation.
The third issue is at the crux of the debate. One cannot begin to ascertain what if any climate sensitivity there may be to CO2 until one can seperate the signal of CO2 from the noise of natural variation. At the moment, it is clear that we cannot presently identify the CO2 signal in any of our data sets. This may be because of short comings in the various data sets, or it may be that the COs sensitivity signal is weak compared to nartural variation so presently we do not possess the resolution to dedect it. Of course, it could be that given other feedbacks which may be negative if properly understood, CO2 in effect has no significant role to play in governing temperature change and all the observed changes are merely multi decadel natural variation.
One concern that I have is that allegedly we cannot see the UHI signal in our thermometer data sets. This is of concern, since we know that UHI is a real phenomena. Every day, cities are 3 to 8 degrees warmer than rural areas. If we cannot dedect a know warming effect of this magnitude in our thermometer data sets, what hope is there of finding a far smaller warming effect of CO2 (if indeed, CO2 carries with it any warming effect). The fact that we cannot find the trace signal of UHI suggests to me serious shortcomings in the resolution and sensitivity of the thermomemeter data sets.
Finally, there needs to be a proper acceptance of the margins of errors and uncertainties in all the data sets. There needs to be a proper investigation into errors and uncertainties so these can be properly ascertained.
The upshot is that it is nearly a return to square one. Climate science is an infant science and it has got off to a very poor start, trying to run before it can even crawl.

richard verney says:
July 6, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Thanks. A very well summed up post, Richard. And the concluding line below especially:
Climate science is an infant science and it has got off to a very poor start, trying to run before it can even crawl.

Great, Marcel is being told by somebody else about what Marcel meant in his post. And 80% of this thread has been wasted by that somebody else.

Edit: Marcel, “advise” is the verb in English; “advice” is the noun you want.

Crok says:
“I would say Holland is fairly critical about how IPCC is operating right now. ….. The IPCC needs to adjust its principles. We believe that limiting the scope of the IPCC to human induced climate change is undesirable, especially because natural climate change is a crucial part of the total understanding of …. human-induced climate change…..”
What is critical about that? They want it to continue and expand its scope as well. I agree that something needs to be done about the IPCC but giving it a new mission is not it. In my opinion they are so corrupt that they should be abolished. Consider: the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is highest ever and yet there is no warming. And there has been none for 16 years as even Pachauri of the IPCC has reluctantly admitted. They put all their their eggs in one basket when they asserted that greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide will warm the world. It does not do that. The same thing happened in the eighties and nineties. From 1979 to 1997 there was no warming according to satellite observations. But ground-based temperature curves were showing a steady warming called “late twentieth century warming.” That was obviously phony and in my book (What Warming?) I demanded an investigation. There was no investigation but after two years the late twentieth century warming I had referred to was quietly withdrawn. The databases involved were GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC. It was done secretly and no one was told about it. I regard this concerted action to be tantamount to an admission that they all knew the warming was phony. But while that warming was on the record it was used as proof of the existence of man-made warming. That amounts to scientific fraud that the insiders were well aware of. All papers that did this should be withdrawn. Now that this phony warming no longer exists the newly revised temperature curves should be introduced to AR5 graphs that still show the late twentieth century warming. They still use it, even extrapolate it in their fly swatter bundle. If we start a new temperature curve from the beginning of the satellite era in 1979 the first 18 years are a no-warming period. That is longer than the present no-warming period of the twenty-first century. a new temperature curve from 1979 up that begins with 18 years of no-warming. Put these two together and you are left with only a small window between them. That is just wide enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its step warming. The latter raised the entire right side of the graph by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. It was not even visible unless you actually read my book because the phony warming covered it up. It is this step warming and not any greenhouse effect which is responsible for the unusual warmth of the twenty-first century. Hansen and other warmists, including the WMO, keep pointing out that nine out of then or twelve out of fourteen warmest years all happened after 2000. Small wonder because they all sit on top of the warm platform created by this step warming. It started immediately after the super El Nino of 1998 and was over by 2001. No way can this be called a greenhouse warming as all those worthies counting warm years try to claim. The entirety of the satellite curve looks very much like a single no-warming period, interrupted only by the super El Nino of 1998 and its step warming. The bottom line is that there has not been any greenhouse warming whatsoever since 1979, which means for the last 34 years. In view of this,what are the chances that there was greenhouse warming earlier than that? Zero in my opinion. All those computer predictions of future warming based on the existence of the greenhouse effect are thereby invalidated. And that means no global warming, period. This absence of greenhouse warming does not rest only on empirical observations but follows also from the saturated greenhouse theory of Ferenc Miskolczi. Using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 he studied the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time. He found that absorption was constant for 61 years while the amount of carbon dioxide in air increased by 21.6 degrees. This means that the addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. To summarize: anthropogenic greenhouse warming does not exist, no matter how you slice it. To obtain closure, we must
CLOSE DOWN THE IPCC!

Why are so many people so scared of CO2, while
1/ Without it, there would be no life on earth;
2/ All the owners of hot-houses/glass-houses always increase the heat to obtain high levels of CO2 to obtain rich crops of trees/plants and flowers;
3/ While the current CO2 level has jut reached a paltry 400 p.p.m., all submariners live and work under conditons of 8,000 p.p.m. without any detrimental effect to their health
and
4/ Complex life on earth started some 600 million year ago, when after more than 200 [volcanoes] simultaneously erupted and caused the earth to change from an ice-covered globe to a very warm one with CO2 rising to 7,000 p.m.m. People in the Tropics can grow 3 crops per year to feed everybody, while regions like Alaska, Siberia or Greenland have a hard strugge to grow just 1 adequate crop?.
Thus why all this obsession with CO2?