Live blogging . Will add slides and commentary as it proceeds.
Well attended maybe 400 ppl here.
This is the crux of the problem with climatology forecasts.
Nice to see a familiar face used. Heard David Appell and Richard Somerville who were sitting near me both grunt when WUWT was displayed.
Jeez – “Death by Powerpoint for Dummies” V1.0!
This presentation is looking good and appears to be taking in all sides of the discussion – so far, so good.
On a more serious note, will you post all slides and notes or a link to same? They should be readily available from the author as a complete PPT/PPTX file, if she is open to the scientific method.
The very bottom of the “Earth’s Energy Budget” tells why this is all BS. You cannot add F to F and get a higher F. Does not work. Cannot add K to K either. Cannot add w/m^2 either as heat will only go from higher to lower, spontaneously.
“Climate change is … (a) political issue: Surface temperature is its primary metric“
Oh my. Judy is going to catch some $#!^ for that. Party line is now that the primary metric is ocean heat, as measured by vigorous handwaving and as expressed in Hiroshimas. Surface temperature? Denier!!!!
She is one of the few in this ‘field’ that have actually demonstrated possession of sufficient gonads to lay out a specific observed surface temp criterion by which she will call BS on her own position if it is not reached. She is about out of time on that one. Will be interesting to see what she does.
What does.. “59 degrees F equals 59 degrees F , [check mark] … just right” mean?
Could make a foolish snarky comment but this seems a serious attempt to make a decent presentation for high schoolers but I don’t understand how one makes the simple addition. It looks kind of silly but I’ll wait for and explanation as to how the good Dr. spoke to this simplification. Nice slides though but without the context it would be easy to make gratuitous comments that are way off the mark. At least various issues are listed. That is a good start. Many conclusions are possible so looking forward to a summary.
(sigh!)
The AGU crowd considers “warming” to be settled science agreed to by 97% of scientists, SO WHY DO THEY NEED A CONFERENCE TO REHASH TIRED, OLD, DEMONSTRABLY UNTRUE STUFF? I’m guessing it’s to inoculate new/wanna-be scientists against the truth (especially the data).
I assume these presentations will soon be decorating various virtual and physical trash cans.
Complex, multivariable systems wherein relationships between variables aren’t well established become playgrounds for speculation. Add to that speculation statistical uncertainty.
“Less than 15% natural / greater than 80% human” placed in a “Statistical components” bag is a bit of a tell. Looks like a swag to me.
Wall of text powerpoint presentation ,absolute amateur hour.
I like Bugs Man comment on “Death by PowerPoint.” My thought, as a retired instructor well versed in PowerPoint was “overly busy slides.” Lots of pretty pictures and colors, though. ZZZZZZZ!
Sorry I missed it, which chart shows the measured changes in our(earths) atmosphere?
I assume any powerpoint on this topic, would show actual measured changes since we started measuring, date we started to accumulate accurate data and assumptions made to define the “normal” past atmospheric conditions from which current deviations are measured.
w/m2 is not a measure of temperature but of energy. Energy does not stop flowing from a body just because it is adjacent to a warmer body. There will, though, be a net flow of an energy from the warmer body to the cooler one.
I am really curious what she had to say about stratospheric cooling, or the lack thereof, lo these twenty years.
The last slide claims “Anthropogenic components…>80%….” in red type. How do they know that? I say no one knows that, it is unknowable. My BS detector pegged.
The conclusion: “Anthropogenic influences dominate over many decades.”
True insofar as we are putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, there will be a physical heating forcing due to that (plus landuse factors, of course). POSSIBLY correct in that the natural factors of negative feedback and variability, including solar or cloud creation features, MAY be less than the A-CO2 intrinsic effect. But actually unknown, and some evidence says that the natural factors may well have 2X the CO2 effect. Either way.
In this time of scientific certainty, we don’t know what time will bring us naturally, nor what the power of that will be. So while we can model an outcome based on rising A-CO2, we cannot yet predict what will actually happen even if we wanted to. That is why we deal with “uncertainty” and not “risk” in any true scientific discourse – much to the frustration of the eco-green who want the end nailed down, even if it is nailed down within limits.
Solar activity over longer periods have a grater degree of change than one or two “pronounced 11 year solar cycles”, If we have 70-80 years of weak 11 year solar cycles and decreased emissions of UV and X-rays etc… and if we have 70-80 years of strong 11 year solar cycles and increased emissions of UV and X-rays, then the sum of the solar forcing between the two periods will be 70-80% greater than the total forcing between solar maximum and minimum of one 11 year solar cycle.
And still nothing about one of the the largest natural factors of climate change, variability and change in planetary orbits.
Judith Lean is not one of the types that tried to do away with the Medieval Warm Period, she isn’t someone who tries to twist the science to meet political ends, she is a straight shooter. That doesn’t mean she is right — how certain can we be that the next Maunder Minimum type minimun is 2400 years away? — but she deserves respect for playing things straight, in a way that many of the warmists do not.
John Finn says:
December 10, 2013 at 11:27 am
John please note the words “heat” and “spontaneously”. And I never said w/m^2 was a measure of temperature again note the word “either”.
John says:
December 10, 2013 at 12:08 pm
“she deserves respect for playing things straight, in a way that many of the warmists do not.”
Agree. I will quibble with the use of short periodicity solar cycles juxtaposed to multi-decade trends in CO2 / surface temps in her slides. She really didn’t take up long range cycles in her slides (unless I missed it) which might leave one to think that solar cycles are only short and therefore not relevant to longer term trends.
But at least she is willing to talk about it and plays it straight.
Well, it got her a trip to AGU and something to add to the vita.
Beyond showing up, it’s not exactly Feynman science or even the concept of science in practice.
From the “Earth’s Energy Budget” slide: 20% of the sun’s energy reflected into space, by clouds. No mention in any other slide that this amount could change over time, and impact the climate,.
What caused climate changes in the past that were not anthropogenic? Is she telling us that there have not been changes, or that they were caused by things other than the natural components that are now 80% of the driving force is increasing?
Her level of certainty, is not matched by the completeness of the data “in hand”.
Will a new Maunder Minimum cancel global warming….No! Just look at these graphs…
Did anyone else notice the slide on “is melting Arctic Ice Causing Anomalously Cool Northern Hemisphere Winters?”
HA ha ha ha ha!
I guess I can’t use “greater than” “less than” characters.
Above should read:
What caused climate changes in the past, that were not anthropogenic? Is she telling us that there have not been changes in the past, or that they were caused by the natural components that are now “less than” 15%? Why have the surface temps stopped rising, when the ‘greater than” 80% driving force is increasing?
A bit off topic but Hansen totally bails! Tummy ache? Seahawks-49ers game? Or something inconveeeeeeeeeeenient?
What a way to go for the old heretic fear-monger past the end of his career and trying to give a talk about the Frontier! Hansen’s next frontier is getting close by about 2 meters under.
Another luuza from luuzaville. Ha.
Regarding “is melting Arctic Ice Causing Anomalously Cool Northern Hemisphere Winters?”
“No Warming In The Arctic In The Last 10 Years”
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/no-warming-in-the-arctic-in-the-last-10-years/
“Mike says:
December 10, 2013 at 11:20 am
I like Bugs Man comment on “Death by PowerPoint.” My thought, as a retired instructor well versed in PowerPoint was “overly busy slides.” Lots of pretty pictures and colors, though. ZZZZZZZ!
############
for most presentations your given something like 15-20 minutes to present
This conference is mainly about sharing the stuff you are working on. There are thousands of sessions. and thousands of posters on hundreds of topics.
For example. a grad student who is working on X will do a poster. folks walk by, read his stuff and give him feedback.
Think of it as a big networking event
LOL The NASA Earth Energy Budget slide she selected shows no effect of greenhouse gases on the earth energy budget whatsoever. Here’s a better copy:
http://www.earth-climate.com/energybudget.jpg
in comparison to Trenberth’s which claims the effect of GHGs on surface temperature is double that of the Sun [333 Wm-2 vs. 161 Wm-2]
http://hubpages.com/hub/Global-warming-science-press-and-storms#slide2382521
As mkelly points out above, her energy budget slide claims you can add temperatures, but you cannot
The claim that man is responsible for 80% of global temperature change isn’t even supported by the IPCC. If Lean would simply look at the time-integral of solar activity, she would find the Sun explains 95% of climate change over the past 400 years.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-sun-explains-95-of-climate-change.html
“Heard David Appell and Richard Somerville who were sitting near me both grunt when WUWT was displayed.”
Your poster is a liar.
I’m interested in the Ozone slide “When – and Will? – the ozone layer recover?”.
1. The Montreal accord was signed in 1987. It came about because of an ‘ozone hole’ over the Antarctic. Why does the ozone graph start in only 1980? There must be earlier data over a significant period of time showing a large decline, otherwise there would have been no need for the the Montreal accord. Would there?
2. Why does Judith Lean’s slide cover only 60S-60N, when the highly-watched and measured ozone hole is over the Antarctic? ie, there must be good data over a greater area.
3. The slide says “Future ozone will also increase because greenhouse gases cool the ozone layer, which increases chemical ozone production, and warm the lower atmosphere, which alters circulation.”. We are told that the layer cooled by greenhouse gases is the stratosphere, all lower levels are warmed. We were recently told that the ozone hole which suddenly appeared over the Arctic was because of lower stratosphere temperatures. The effect of greenhouse gases on ozone appears to be exactly wrong in Judith Lean’s slide.
4. Although mainstream ozone science says that the ‘ozone hole’ was caused by (mainly) CFCs, and even though this article http://www.antarctica.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/29838/Fact-sheet-on-ozone-hole.pdf by the Australian government subscribes to this view, nevertheless it says “Since the early 1990s the size of the Antarctic ozone hole has been controlled primarily by the size and strength of the polar vortex rather than the amount of ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere.”“. The period “since the early 1990s” is the major part of the period covered by Judith Lean’s graph.
5. Judith Lean’s graph of the ozone level could be seen as bumps and dips about a relatively steady level over the (very short) measured period. The only clear rising trend is in the future, and is caused only by models.
Is there any actual evidence that the ozone hole hasn’t always been there, growing and shrinking along with natural climate changes? In other words, is there any evidence that there is anything that the ozone layer needs to ‘recover’ from?
David Appell –
On this blog to call someone a liar is bad manners even if backed up with an explanation. Please give your reason for saying this.
David Appell said
“Heard David Appell and Richard Somerville who were sitting near me both grunt when WUWT was displayed.”
“Your poster is a liar.”
How can a poster be a liar? I see English is rather difficult for some!
Appell says, “Heard David Appell and Richard Somerville who were sitting near me both grunt when WUWT was displayed.” Your poster is a liar.
So do tell Appell, specifically what did happen when the WUWT slide was displayed? Please include all reactions from yourself and others, and your thoughts in reaction to the factually correct headline on WUWT that Lean displayed.
“Heard David Appell and Richard Somerville who were sitting near me both grunt when WUWT was displayed.”
Your poster is a liar.
Let me see, who do I believe is likely to be telling the truth -Watts or Appell? In a court I would say the credibility of the witness is questionable…
“The effect of greenhouse gases on ozone appears to be exactly wrong in Judith Lean’s slide.”
Quite.
Being saying that for years.
An active sun reduces ozone and cools the stratosphere.
A quiet sun increases ozone and warms the stratosphere.
The strongest solar effect is over the poles which alters the tropopause height gradient between equator and poles so that the climate zones and jets can shift latitudinally in each hemisphere.
That is climate change.
Steven Mosher says:
December 10, 2013 at 1:37 pm
This conference is mainly about sharing the stuff you are working on. There are thousands of sessions. and thousands of posters on hundreds of topics.
For example. a grad student who is working on X will do a poster. folks walk by, read his stuff and give him feedback.
=======================================================
Wow! All this activity on “settled science”…appears to be Feynman-like cargo cult activity (i.e. bovine excrement data fed into goofy models) in the hopes of magically conjuring a fervently desired outcome.
Dr. Lean’s Slide, “Global Surface Temperature in Recent Centuries,” shows temperature time series from CRU in East Anglia, beginning ca 1850, when liquid-in-glass thermometers became widely available, which is near the low point in the Little Ice Age ca 1690. This presumably leads the author to the belief that these are the temperatures most important in defining climate change, but ignores the existence of Bond Cycles of duration ca 1000-1470 year lengths as shown with the Ice Cores such as the GISP2 data published by Alley and depicted by Jo Nova and the book by Dr Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, Every 1500 years.
Does Dr. Lean really think that there are no important climate changes in play now which exceed the length of the temperature record which began with the widespread use of liquid-in-glass thermometers?
From her slide, “Earth’s Surface Temperature Change Since 1890,” the answer seems to be ‘yes,’ but extrapolation of the Bond Cycles would lead us to the conclusion that natural warming would continue until about 2190 or perhaps 200 years later.
Svensmark’s and Roy Spencer’s work lead me to believe that the natural variations of cloud cover over many decades are not well known and NASA Earth’s Energy Budget assuming the Cloud Albedo at 20% and Surface Albedo at 4% to be constant over times of significant climate change are not proven.
“Melting Arctic Ice” slide seems to ignore “Twentieth Century Bipolar Seesaw of the Arctic and Antarctic Surface Air Temperatures” 2010 GRL publication by Petr Chylek of Los Alamos.
Finally, her “Statistical (data –based) Climate Models” slides with the pretty background showing high clouds have poor color contrast for the letters and numbers in the equations, making them difficult to read.
Thanks, Anthony, for visiting and posting!
Robert W. Endlich
They better watch out for lazer toting Judith Curry:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/11/denial/#comment-411697
Steven Mosher says:
December 10, 2013 at 1:37 pm
This conference is mainly about sharing the stuff you are working on. There are thousands of sessions. and thousands of posters on hundreds of topics.
==========================
Genuine question for Steven – Anthony’s post estimates 400 people in attendance, you mention thousands of sessions – have more people showed up or have we dropped a zero somewhere?
REPLY: that was just 400 people in that particular room – Anthony
As far as I can see all her slides end at about 2006, and would look very different now. In particular even 7 years of negative trend would throw a major spanner in her assertion that less than 15% of the change can be explained by natural processes, even without the fact that there is a clear “argumentum ad ignorantem” in her conclusion.
When reality is challenging a “group think” concept, the group must rally, in order to bolster the weak members, with back-slapping peer pressure.
It was so much easier when the aristocracy, controlled the data, and only shared it, after it was sanitized. Now they have to go into full sales mode. I noticed, one of the slides above, attributes the lack of warming to increased “La Nina-like decadal cooling”.
The inconvenient truth that it corresponds with a weak cycle 24, is not to be mentioned. They should offer online courses in “Whistling through the graveyard”.
Regarding Dr. Judith Lean, apparently she did some ‘adjusting’ to the TSI numbers, and got called out on it.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/tim-cullen-1366-and-all-that-the-secret-history-of-total-solar-irradiance-tsi/
In case the link doesn’t fire off correctly, Google “1366 and all that”
Worth a read.
About my post@256pm.
Saw the name Judith and assumed it was Judith Curry. Never assume. You make an ass of u and me.
Luke Warmist says:December 10, 2013 at 3:58 pm “Regarding Dr. Judith Lean, apparently she did some ‘adjusting’ to the TSI numbers, and got called out on it.”
More on Judithgate:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=judithgate
Hockey Schtick says:
December 10, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Many thanks. I’ve copied this to my notes for the future. Maybe when Anthony gets back he can take a quick look at it, as I don’t remember it being addressed here. (…doesn’t mean it wasn’t, just means I don’t remember.)
Those presentations are rehashing of the same old stuff. These people have nothing to add.
I noticed in one of the pictures, it says “its the sun stupid.” I also saw that last year here on another presentation from her.
Is she saying that sarcastically or is she really saying the sun is driving (or having a significant role in) temperature changes?
“Climate change is … (a) political issue: Surface temperature is its primary metric“
Too bad they chose something physically meaningless as their primary metric.
Thanks for the skinny on Lean!
Hand in hand with Overpeck/Nail it.
We’ve really got our arms around it in the last ten years or so. The sun has been flat….It’s not the sun, It’s just impossible.
“Too bad they chose something physically meaningless as their primary metric.”
If that’s not a facetious comment, it’s wrong.
¡Ay! Mucho acerca de nada. It’s hard not to trip over one of the many loose phalli in here.
Sorry, posted this to the wrong thread – what point was Dr Lean making when she referred to this blog?
Anthropogenic influences dominate, modulated by natural processes?
I don’t think so, Dear Doctor. There is more in the heavens and on Earth than your philosophy speaks of.
I have no issue with the logically unhinged – they are quite amusing really,
But i do object to them when they waste an expensive education, then compound it by continuing to bludge (look it up) on the public purse.
NOTE to all politicians entrusted with fiscal control, CUT the funding now, and let these zealots make it on their own expense as they pursue a monstrous myth (Carbon dioxide induced climate change) first postulated by an American wind bag who got pretty much everything else wrong in ‘his field’ in the late 19th century.
Stephen Wilde says:
December 10, 2013 at 2:44 pm
An active sun reduces ozone and cools the stratosphere.
A quiet sun increases ozone and warms the stratosphere.
Stephen, it is the opposite: an active sun emits 10% more UV than a quiet sun. That increases ozone formation in the lower stratosphere and more ozone absorbs more UV and therefore warms up. The difference in the lower stratosphere is ~1 K between an active and a quiet sun.
That increases the equator – poles gradient, pushing the jet streams more polewards, including the adjacent cloud/rain patterns. That is visible in the waterstreams like the Nile, the Po, the Douro, the Mississippi in the NH and South African rivers for the SH.
“This is the crux of the problem with climatology forecasts.”:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/wpid-wp-1386702236783.jpg
It’s back to front, natural variations at the scale of weather dictate the climatic changes. It takes very long range forecasting at the scale of monthly weather to have any clue where the climate will be going.
“A new Maunder Minimum will NOT cancel global warming or cause another little ice age”:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/wpid-wp-1386702727455.jpg
Rubbish, we have already been getting Maunder Minimum type land temperatures occurring since 2009, and there’s plenty more to come.
No it’s not wrong. There is no global temperature.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
December 11, 2013 at 2:59 am
I know that is the conventional view but observations suggest the opposite.
The solar effect is greater at the poles and above 45km and appears to influence ozone amounts below 45km after a while.
Joanna Haigh acknowledged that there is a reverse sign solar effect in parts of the atmosphere which requires investigation.
============================================================
Perhaps a kangaroo kicked him?
To Mike Jonas:
Replying to your point 1:
The signing of the Montreal protocol banning CFCs in in 1987 was not accompanied by
a long-term demonstrable decline in ozone. The “Antarctic ozone hole” was first noted
in 1956 by British scientist G. Dobson (atmospheric ozone is quoted in “Dobson units”).
He characterized it as “one of the most interesting results … to come out of the IGY
(International Geophysical Year).” It’s related to a cold polar vortex which forms during
the Antarctic winter. In 1985 a sharp, unexpected drop occurred in the ongoing observations
of Antarctic ozone. NASA reanalyzed previous satellite ozone records. Previously,
anomalously low Antarctic ozone levels had been thrown out as unreliable. The new
re-analysis concluded that worldwide ozone levels had gone down by around 5 percent
from just 1979 to 1986.
By itself, this should not have triggered alarm. Unless you’ve worked in geophysical
space science, you cannot conceive of how noisy the data are. A single sunspot
cycle shows larger variation than 5 percent! What triggered alarm is how well this
seemed to fit with results demonstrated on a laboratory bench by two University of
California scientists in 1974. Sherwood & Molina put forth a hypothesis that CFCs
which managed to diffuse into the upper atmospheric might be disassociated into
chlorine gas which would catalyze the destruction of ozone. Essentially, their
hypothesis was that a single chlorine atom could catalyze the removal of many
thousands of ozone excimers from the upper stratosphere. (Notice, though, that
ozone is being continually re-created by solar UV. The presence of chlorine would
result in a new equilibrium, possibly lower, NOT complete destruction of the ozone
layer, as portrayed by the public press.)
Well, this drop from 1979 to 1985 was associated with the Sherwoord-Molina hypothesis
in the public press, whether this was scientifically demonstrated or not. THAT put
the cat among the pigeons. World mean total ozone had INCREASED by 5 & 1/2
percent from 1962 to 1979. Not important to the public press. In vain did serious
scientists point out that you can’t tell a trend from less than one full sunspot cycle.
The environmentalists stampeded world politicians into signing the Montreal protocol.
So okay, maybe it was needed, maybe not. We will probably never know. Two things
to note: (1) All the patents that covered CFCs were held by a handful of companies
and were about to expire. That may have been why the chemical industry was so
quiet about the whole thing–no percentage in it. (2) The environmentalists, pumped
up by their success in stampeding world politicians into the Montreal protocol by
dodgy science, took it as a model for how to influence future policy. I think it’s no
coincidence that the use of dodgy science in climatology, the substitution of PR for
good science, false claims of total certainty that CO2 was responsible for all
temperature changes, etc., took a big upswing after 1987.
AGU 2013 seems like an ideal group to ask about the impact of anthropogenic forcings on global temperatures.
0-20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, 60-80% or 80-100%?
It’s not complicated.
thisisnotgoodtogo says:
December 10, 2013 at 9:51 pm
”
“Too bad they chose something physically meaningless as their primary metric.”
If that’s not a facetious comment, it’s wrong.”
No it’s not wrong. There is no global temperature.
True, but it is called “global averaged”, not “global temp”
Jeff, I agree that it’s been misused, and now even disowned by former proponents of The Cause , but I think it’s going too far to say it’s totally meaningless.
I should have said ” ‘former of it’s proponents’ joined in The Cause.
It’s physically meaningless. Like saying the average human has 1 testicle and one breast. An average of intensive variables gives the false impression that the system moves as one. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hockey Schtick says:
So do tell Appell, specifically what did happen when the WUWT slide was displayed? Please include all reactions from yourself and others, and your thoughts in reaction to the factually correct headline on WUWT that Lean displayed.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2013/12/anthony-watts-lying-again.html
I was paying attention to the speaker, not the the reactions of those around me.
Oldseadog says:
David Appell –
On this blog to call someone a liar is bad manners even if backed up with an explanation. Please give your reason for saying this.
Because I didn’t “grunt,” especially insofar as Judith Lean put up her WUWT slide as an example of the kind of _bad science_ that gets tossed around.
I know my own reactions. Watts is a liar. But that’s hardly surprising.
=====================================================================
Said by the paragon of truth.
To the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You”
Well I don’t know why I caused such a fright,
I had the feeling that something ain’t right,
I made a scare of some emails out there,
And I’m wondering how my rep now will fare,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in Yamal on a yew.
Yes I’m stuck in Yamal on a yew,
The “threats” were against kangaroos,
It’s so hard to keep this egg off my face,
I’ll say, yeah, “Someone invaded their space,”
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in Yamal on a yew.
Normally a presentation alone is not a suitable format to put forward a scientific content.
In a serious conference I would expect that the presentation is support for an oral presentation of an academic paper. I would expect the paper to be published in the proceedings. (In academia, proceedings are the collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference.)
I find it peculiar if the presentation is not supported by an academic paper. If not supported by a paper, the presentation is hardly of any use at all.
Or he has bad hearing.
‘methinks the lady doth…’
The fact that Appell uses the emotive word ‘liar’ firstly followed by ‘bad hearing’ is, IMO, clearly a Freudian slip,