Science not settled, still in a state of flux – IPCC AR5 in disarray. It is looking like my single word quote in Rolling Stone “stillborn”, will be accurate.
The title is my twist on what Dr. Judith Curry said in an email to David Rose in his latest article about the upcoming IPCC AR5 report:
Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’.
She goes on to say:
She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased.
For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007.
Prof Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.
Professor Myles Allen also got in a few licks, Prof Allen said:
‘The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in future.’
Rose also took Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham to task at the Guardian over ugly death threat type comments that remain about their rebuttal to his article last week, while other comments are removed for not meeting “standards”.
BTW, Rose is Jewish.
And finally, he calls out Bob Ward, but unfortunately doesn’t mention his past as a punk rocker before he became a climate activist:
Another assault was mounted by Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics.
Mr Ward tweeted that the article was ‘error-strewn’.
The eminent US expert Professor Judith Curry, who unlike Mr Ward is a climate scientist with a long list of peer-reviewed publications to her name, disagreed.
On her blog Climate Etc she defended The Mail on Sunday, saying the article contained ‘good material’, and issued a tweet which challenged Mr Ward to say what these ‘errors’ were.
He has yet to reply.
As for the state of climate science, this summary by Rose of the IPCC situation is worth sharing:
‘A REFLECTION OF EVIDENCE FROM NEW STUDIES’… THE IPCC CHANGES ITS STORY
What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’
What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought – it’s below their lowest previous estimate.
What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’
What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement is highly questionable.
What they say: ‘Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 – 15 years.’
What this means: The ‘models’ are computer forecasts, which the IPCC admits failed to ‘see… a reduction in the warming trend’. In fact, there has been no statistically significant warming at all for almost 17 years – as first reported by this newspaper last October, when the Met Office tried to deny this ‘pause’ existed.In its 2012 draft, the IPCC didn’t mention it either. Now it not only accepts it is real, it admits that its climate models totally failed to predict it.
What they say: ‘There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing.’
What this means: The IPCC knows the pause is real, but has no idea what is causing it. It could be natural climate variability, the sun, volcanoes – and crucially, that the computers have been allowed to give too much weight to the effect carbon dioxide emissions (greenhouse gases) have on temperature change.
What they say: ‘Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models.’
What this means: Its models don’t accurately forecast the impact of fundamental aspects of the atmosphere – clouds, smoke and dust.
What they say: ‘Most models simulate a small decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, in contrast to the small increasing trend in observations… There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the small observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent.’
What this means: The models said Antarctic ice would decrease. It’s actually increased, and the IPCC doesn’t know why.
What they say: ‘ECS is likely in the range 1.5C to 4.5C… The lower limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2C in the [2007 report], reflecting the evidence from new studies.’
What this means: ECS – ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – is an estimate of how much the world will warm every time carbon dioxide levels double. A high value means we’re heading for disaster. Many recent studies say that previous IPCC claims, derived from the computer models, have been way too high. It looks as if they’re starting to take notice, and so are scaling down their estimate for the first time.
Rose also mentions the new paper from Nic Lewis taking the Met office climate model to task for having an ECS of 4.6C, which is greater than even the IPCC is claiming:
Lewis’s paper is scathing about the ‘future warming’ document issued by the Met Office in July, which purported to explain why the current 16-year global warming ‘pause’ is unimportant, and does not mean the ECS is lower than previously thought.
Lewis says the document made misleading claims about other scientists’ work – for example, misrepresenting important details of a study by a team that included Lewis and 14 other IPCC experts. The team’s paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience in May, said the best estimate of the ECS was 2C or less – well under half the Met Office estimate.
He also gives evidence that another key Met Office model is inherently skewed. The result is that it will always produce high values for CO2-induced warming, no matter how its control knobs are tweaked, because its computation of the cooling effect of smoke and dust pollution – what scientists call ‘aerosol forcing’ – is simply incompatible with the real world.
This has serious implications, because the Met Office’s HadCM3 model is used to determine the Government’s climate projections, which influence policy.
Mr Lewis concludes that the Met Office modelling is ‘fundamentally unsatisfactory, because it effectively rules out from the start the possibility that both aerosol forcing and climate sensitivity are modest’. Yet this, he writes, ‘is the combination that recent observations support’.
We live in interesting times.
Read Rose’s article here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Global-warming-just-HALF-said-Worlds-climate-scientists-admit-computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html#ixzz2exAZ99b9
Thanks, Anthony. You have helped to start turning the ink tide.
Here are five articles mentioning you in Fox News that I have linked to in my pages:
‘Archaic’ Network Provides Data Behind Global Warming Theory, Critics Say, at
By Joseph Abrams, Published March 02, 2010, at
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/02/archaic-weather-network-run-with-volunteers/
Changing Tides: Research Center Under Fire for ‘Adjusted’ Sea-Level Data (Maxim Lott. Fox News, June 17, 2011), at
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/16/complicit-in-climategate-doe-under-fire/
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov’t Help Hide Climate Data? (Maxim Lott. Fox News, December 16, 2011), at
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/16/complicit-in-climategate-doe-under-fire/
Hottest year ever? Skeptics question revisions to climate data (Maxim Lott. Fox News, January 10, 2013), at
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/10/hottest-year-ever-skeptics-question-revisions-to-climate-data/
Distorted data? Feds close 600 weather stations amid criticism they’re situated to report warming (Maxim Lott. Fox News, August 13, 2013), at
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/08/13/weather-station-closures-flaws-in-temperature-record/
George Steiner
Evidence of pause?
These two previous posts may be of interest to you.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/09/are-we-in-a-pause-or-a-decline-now-includes-at-least-april-data/
Today on Real Climate there is a lot of interesting commentary.
So, if the model doesn’t work, there’s nothing to worry about?
[Response: No. If there is a mismatch, there is maybe an interesting reason for it, and people should try and find out what it is. – gavin]
I copied the above and added ”
Er,er, I thought the science was SETTLED??????????????
Oh dear, reading todays comments, seems like the fox is in the hen house.”
Look for the comments to get even nastier as these people desperately try to hold on to their last shreds of credibility.
I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I know that some of you said the movie “The Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore could be wrong or right. We sort of have no proof on if we (humans) are causing it or its just nature because of evolution? I do hope we can stop global warming because it gets worse, but how bad is it now? 1-10? I say its a 5 because we are using a lot of gas, and other chemicals in the air that we don’t know of. I want to say that we have to wait for a couple of years to see a bigger difference.
I missed that IPCC statement where they said they’d lie, fabricate false language to spin their favorite fantasies, insist man’s influence is evil and eventually causes world disaster, edit out the good science put forward, and a number of additional unsavory actions.
Being as that is the IPCC actions in spinning a false summary, where and when did the IPCC actually state those intentions?
The big deal is that the IPCC is wasting huge amounts of money our money. The IPCC considers itself above all the petty governments of the world which means only completely defunding IPCC and CAGW malarkey is a step toward returning to science. National and international law enforcement should issue records protection orders and begin investigations. As a government funded entity, all records should be accessible to all. Immediately.
Anyone care to non-linearly extrapolate Railroad Bill’s looming 6th Assessment Report due for thrilling release in October 2018? Asymptotic or Exponential: That is the question! By then, these bootless hacks will have remanded AGW’s junk-science deadheads to hog-heaven’s Great Recycling Plant where they belong.
ATheoK says:
September 15, 2013 at 5:57 pm
“BBould says: September 15, 2013 at 8:20 am
The IPCC is simply doing what is said it would do, what’s the big deal?”
I missed that IPCC statement where they said they’d lie, fabricate false language to spin their favorite fantasies, insist man’s influence is evil and eventually causes world disaster, edit out the good science put forward, and a number of additional unsavory actions.
Being as that is the IPCC actions in spinning a false summary, where and when did the IPCC actually state those intentions?
“The big deal is that the IPCC is wasting huge amounts of money our money.”
+++++++++++++
I am not sure what to make of your narrative. But I want to focus on the opening sentence of your last paragraph, which I put in quotes above. Personnally I don’t think “The” big deal is that they are wasting our money. The big deal is that they are “using” our money to “fabricate a false sense of urgency” for policy makers to make policy that leads to fewer humans being able to thrive. It’s the negative results from policy makers following the IPCC’s prescription that is the biggest deal.
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Vancouver: September 15, 2013 at 11:13 am brings up a very important observation.
To summarize:
AR4 published in 2007 stated that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade.
AR4 said 90% confidence that AG emissions are responsible for most of the recent warming.
Leaked AR5 says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.
AR5 says 95% confidence that AG emissions are responsible for more than half of recent warming.
I think you will find the 95% confidence level has risen despite the fact the temperatures haven’t, is at least partly because over time, those who doubt the certainty of it all tend to either leave, or refrain from contributing any more, meaning the average certainty of those within the organisation of the IPCC goes up over time.
The higher confidence level is largely a reflection of those left within the organisation who believe it the most strongly. This is partly how most social organisations tend to become more extreme over time, they simply become more populated by those who are more certain about the role and place of the organisation over time. One of the differences between social organisation and science.
The sea level rise fear mongering is continuing and ridicule is invited: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/15/faced-with-rising-sea-levels-pacific-state-looks-to-become-worlds-first-floating-nation/
“For a decade, Anote Tong the president has been warning the 100,000 inhabitants of the tiny Pacific state that they may not have much longer to cling to their 32 atolls. Now, he can talk about a potential solution.
Improbable though it may sound, with the help of a pioneering Japanese company and a few hundred billion dollars, Mr. Tong is considering the creation of the world’s first floating nation.”
Some Japanese firm wants obviously to sell Kiribati some design that we, taxpayers, are likely to fund thanks to the UN… Canada’s National Post did not made itself appear smarter by reprinting this Julian Ryall Telegraph story.
Oh Dear.
[Apologies to Elvis.]
Uuaaahhh Uuaaahhh, Yea Yea.
IPCee
Is all Fluxed Up.
😉
Pause implies that it is temporary. My question concerned the implication that the PAUSE is temporary. So what is the evidence that it is temporary?
Another propagandist, this time on behalf of the insurance industry:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/Flood+insurance+possible+without+maps+insurers/8915013/story.html
“Co-author Blair Feltmate, a climate-change specialist at the University of Waterloo, said the executives surveyed said the maps are essential for industry to price its products and for governments to plan how they will protect vulnerable communities.
“They see what climate change is causing and they’re paying for it now already through sewer backup coverage,” Feltmate said in an interview.
“We’re rapidly heading into the realm where certain areas of Canada may be uninsurable.”
Clearly Blair Feltmate is either incompetent or misleading: the 1979 Monenco report has made it clear about risks in the Calgary are of the Bow River.
CALGARY (June 1897)
Bow River rises about five metres turning downtown into a lake, washing out bridges, short-circuiting electricity and cutting Canadian Pacific’s line to Vancouver.
CALGARY (June 1915)
The Bow washes away Centre Street Bridge, nearly drowning two city officials. Sheep Creek floods Okotoks and cuts gas mains, leaving Calgarians without cooking fuel.
CALGARY (June 1923)
The Elbow River breaks the 1915 record by 20 centimetres when it rises to 2.9 metres. The Bow River, though it rises 1.5 metres above normal, is still about .6 metres under the 1915 record height.
CALGARY (June 1929)
Bow, Elbow and Highwood rivers overflow to submerge High River as well as southwest and northwest city districts under a metre of muddy water. It takes a heavy toll on zoo animals.
CALGARY (June 1932)
On June 1, 1932, Calgary receives 79.2 mm over a 24-hour period, just .6 mm less than the average rainfall for the whole month. The empty reservoir of the recently completed Glenmore Dam prevents major damage.
History is not kind with Blair Feltmate!
Notwithstanding the inept Calgary Herald journalist Matt McClure who quotes Feltmate without a minimum fact checking…
@markx
Thank you for the original quotes. It is as I was informed: the 95% confidence is for a different claim.
Re the other comment on “more than half” being technically similar to “most” it clearly is not, based on the context. The communicated message is that the portion of the warming we ’cause’ has changed substantially.
I wonder why they named it High River.
Jimbo says:
September 15, 2013 at 4:02 am
////////////////////////////
Many people consider the MWP to be around the period when the Vikings settled in Greenland (ie., circa 1000to 1400 AD). Mann correctly observes “Some of the most dramatic evidence for Medieval warmth has been argued to come from Iceland and Greenland (see Ogilvie, 1991). In Greenland, the Norse settlers, arriving around AD 1000, maintained a settlement, raising dairy cattle and sheep. Greenland existed, in effect, as a thriving European colony for several centuries.”
But it was also warm in Europe some 700 or so years earlier (ie., around 200/300AD). Again Mann correctly observes “It is evident that Europe experienced, on the whole, relatively mild climate conditions during the earliest centuries of the second millennium (i.e., the early Medieval period)….Geological evidence indicates that mountain glaciers throughout Europe retreated substantially at this time, relative to the glacial advances of later centuries (Grove and Switsur, 1994).” There is in fact strong archaelogical evidence that glaciers in Norther Europe circa 200 to 300AD were less advanced than they are today. For example see this article regarding a find of clothing which confirms that glaciers in this region of Norway were less advanced than today
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2408825/Melting-ice-reveals-1-700-year-old-woolly-jumper–experts-say-come.html
So we know that there were warm periods in the Northern Hemisphere around the time of the Minoans, the Romans, the early Medieval period, the Medieval period. There is also some evidence (but not conclusive) of a warm period during the height of the Egyptian civilisation. All of these warm periods were warmer than today, and were times of plenty when life flourished in the benovalent climate conditions that then prevailed. Given that they were definitely not caused by CO2, they all need to be explained before one can even begin to get a prima facie case of AGW off the ground.
So there have been many warm periods in Europe/the Northern Hemishpere (in addition to the Holocene Optimum). We do not know what caused those warm periods, nor what mechanism could give rise to warm periods covering an extending period of time but pertaining only to a small (or relatively small) geographical area. Given the sparsity of Southern Hemisphere data we are unable to assess whether or not that these warm periods extended into the Southern Hemisphere and of course the matter is further complicated by the dampened Southern Hemisphere response brought about by the greater oceanic area in that half of the globe. Even today, the Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere so this is entirely consistent with what we know as fact about the earlier warming periods experienced in the Northern Hemisphere these last 4.5 thousand years (or so).
Further to my post above, the final paragraph was missed off. It reads:
So are we seeing anything unusual in the late 19th/20th century? At any rate as far as the Northern hemisphere, the answer to that must be NO. There have been many instances when the Northern Hemishpere has been as warmer or warmer than today. Until those periods can be adequately explained and until one can demonstarte that what caused those periods to be warm is not operative today, there can be no valid strong confidence in AGW. Professor Curry is right given that the ‘pause’ in temperature rise was not predicted, runs contrary to the CO2 GHE theory, and until such time as this event is adequately explained by an explanation consistent with AGW GHE theory, there cannot truly be more confidence in the theory and the claim that the latter half of the 20th century was predominantly caused by man, than the confidence level expressed in AR4. Infact logic dictates, there must in truth be less certainty in that claim, not more, and the IPCC will look ridiculous if it publishes AR5 with a claim of even greater certainty than that expressed in AR4.
George Steiner says:
September 15, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Pause implies that it is temporary. My question concerned the implication that the PAUSE is temporary. So what is the evidence that it is temporary?
The ‘evidence’ of the pause is seen simply in the WUWT post of Sept 9th, about Syan Akasofu’s paper – which in simple terms shows the likely recovery from the LIA, with a superimposed natural multidecadal oscillation on top.
If one believes that palaeo proxies are reasonably accurate, based on the last few ice ages – we are possibly at or very near the top of the interglacial warm period AND nearly at the end of said period.
The pause relates to the ‘belief’ that the underlying LIA recovery is not complete (which it may well be?) and the fact that the natural oscillation is on a downward swing – and it will presumably follow into its upward swing sometime soon – hence a pause, rather than a complete halt.
If we are actually at the end of the interglacial (warm period) then of course temps may never rise as per the last 150 years again! But we cannot know this until it stops and we have another several decades of data going into the next ice age! Of course, this is something the warmists will never admit too!
Politics is about weasel words. Ever heard a politicians admit they were wrong?
Science is about clear concise statements. Not declarative statements of fact (if none are present), but clear statements of the situation as it is known.
That the IPCC needs a translation clearly indicates that the document is not about science, but politics. Which again is not surprising. The IPCC is a political animal that is in danger of losing its cause for existence, and so like any threatened animal, it is using every arrow in its quiver to justify its existence and continued funding.
Good on you David Rose for this courageous, important and timely article.
That the IPCC is admitting the existence of the MWP (Medieval warm period) is as significant as the downgraded number fro CO2 sensitivity.
Plus the article has a nice photo of Judith Curry.
How the media reports on climate change….the graphs are worth looking at!
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/media_coverage/index.html
Big spikes during Climategate, not so much lately.
IPCC honesty – ‘With 100% level of certainty, we don’t know what regulates the climate.’
@markx
I just read your citations again and it boils down to this:
2007: 90% confidence that most of 0.2 deg was from AG CO2 and other forcing contributions
2013: 95% confidence that at least 0.05 deg was from that cause.
This is obviously an escape clause. All we have to do is watch for ‘interpretations’ of the weasel’s words. Apparently it was not enough to predict hot/cold/dry/wet/desert/flood/hurricanes/tornados and mass starvation in the midst of plenty (of fluxed up evidence).
As the lowering of the sensitivity was about 50% (with waffling) there is, in ‘climate science terms’ a correlation between the overall drop in probable cause and the probable effect. This opens a new door to claim that AR5 authors knew all along that the impact of AG emissions is low and not dangerous, why is everyone so excited about it?