Quote of the Week: ego driven science

Phil Jones has been worrying since at least 2005. For him it’s been about winning and not about being right.

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

By the way where did Phil Jones get the “15 years before we get worried’” from???

Dr. Phil Jones is a misunderstood climate scientist of the highest pedigree. He likes sharing his views on death and data.
Here is Dr. Phil in the CRU emails on the death of CAGW sceptic John Daly

Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.
Cheers
Phil
http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1075403821.txt

Yet after the leak of the CRU emails he wanted Princess Charlie boy to give him a loving kiss and cuddle while he threatened to top himself. What a piece of dog’s feces.

It must be difficult when you want that Government money but reality jumps up and bites you in the knees. I notice that after a lung transplant you have a 77% chance of being alive 12 months down the road, BUT, if the lung donor was a smoker you then have a 90% chance. Just like Dr Phil and his 15 year prediction, I bet they didn’t see that coming.
But soft, for my mind misgives etc…

Thanks Eric. Good article.
It’s been 15 years since 1998, the year of the great El Niño.
Dr. Jones has surely started worrying before today. I think he was worrying in 2009. [Thanks Jimbo]

Doom-saying religious cults never recant their beliefs, instead they slowly slide into laughing stock status while everyone pretends not to have ever believed the scare that they were selling.
This is not science we are dealing with, it is religion, plain and simple. A warped hellfire and brimstone religion, for people who tell themselves they’re too smart to fall for a hellfire and brimstone religion.

Jimbo says:
February 10, 2014 at 2:44 pm
By the way where did Phil Jones get the “15 years before we get worried’” from???
……………..
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
I think Dr. Jones was referring to half a climate period, or something of 30 years of length.

Andres Valencia says:
February 10, 2014 at 3:14 pm
Jimbo says:
February 10, 2014 at 2:44 pm
By the way where did Phil Jones get the “15 years before we get worried’” from???
……………..
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
I think Dr. Jones was referring to half a climate period, or something of 30 years of length.

I can see that but what is your point? My point is that we were told 15 years or 17 years of statistically insignificant warming or cooler before the police started arresting these charlatans. Both have come and gone.

Andres Valencia see this too. These people were over confident until the surface standstill persisted. Then they started backing out. I do believe that Gavin did the same despite his earlier position. See the date.

Real Climate – December 2007
Daniel Klein asks at #57:
“OK, simply to clarify what I’ve heard from you.
(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise”)
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?”
————
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I’d need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that’s the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/

As you can clearly see Phil Jones and Gavin Schmidt said in their own words that they would be worried by 15 years of a surface temperature standstill. Yet today they seek to back out. Arrive at your own honest conclusions about the kind of people we are dealing with.

Yes, Jimbo thanks for:
Real Climate – December 2007
Daniel Klein asks at #57:
“OK, simply to clarify what I’ve heard from you.
(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
……………
This is exactly my point, the hiatus proves the CAGW hypothesis (rock solid for the Goal Keepers) wrong.

Thanks Richard,
Climate Normal period is what I meant to write; that Jones feared a hiatus longer than half a Climate Normal period, simply because the 30 years figure was somewhat fixed in the public’s mind and 15 years without any additional warming would weaken or even kill his beloved “established science”. As if such a thing exists.

another CAGW ego, Justin Gillis, tho i had to find out he was the author by doing a separate search:
10 Feb: NYT: Freezing Out the Bigger Picture
Mr. Obama’s declaration provoked head-shaking from Congressional climate deniers, and unleashed a stream of mockery on Twitter. “As soon as he mentioned ‘climate change’ it started snowing on Capitol Hill,” said a post from Patrick J. Michaels, a climate skeptic at the Cato Institute.
If the world is really warming up, how come it is so darned cold?…
Scientists refer to global warming because it is about, well, the globe. It is also about the long run. It is really not about what happened yesterday in Poughkeepsie.
The entire United States, including Alaska, covers less than 2 percent of the surface of the earth. So if the whole country somehow froze solid one January, that would not move the needle on global temperatures much at all…
This winter is not over, but so far, the most interesting fact about the Arctic blasts in the East might actually be how short they have been compared with the past.
The meteorologists Brandt Maxwell, of the National Weather Service in San Diego, and Robert Henson, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., have been doing some comparisons…
Winters have become so mild over the past 20 to 30 years that a blast of Arctic air feels extraordinary…
Scientists studying human perception have found that our immediate, visceral experience of the world can influence our judgments on tangentially related questions…
Fortunately, we are not stuck with human perception alone. Nowadays we have sophisticated thermometers scattered all over the place…
No matter how cold it got in Wisconsin last week, the world really is warming up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/science/freezing-out-the-bigger-picture.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0
ipscblog: NYTScience: Freezing Out the Bigger Picture
By JUSTIN GILLIS
http://ipscblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/nyt-science-freezing-out-bigger-picture.html
May 2012: Climate Depot: NYT Reporter Justin Gillis Does it Again! Author of ‘Worst NYT Story on Climate Ever’ — gets even worse!
http://www.climatedepot.com/2012/05/01/nyt-reporter-justin-gillis-does-it-again-author-of-worst-nyt-story-on-climate-ever-gets-even-worse/

speaking of egos:
10 Feb: Time: Charlotte Alter: Hollande and Obama Push For Global Climate Change Pact
Newly single Hollande will visit the White House on his own
President Obama and French President Francois Hollande called for a binding global agreement to address carbon emissions Monday, and urged the rest of the world to get on board ahead of a 2015 climate conference in Paris.
In a co-written op-ed published jointly in The Washington Post and Le Monde, the two heads of state pledged to reduce carbon emissions and “expand the clean energy partnerships that create jobs and move us toward low-carbon growth,” with specific focus on helping developing countries embrace low-carbon energy as well…
The op-ed, which also highlighted economic and military alliances between the U.S. and France, was published as Hollande begins a state visit to the U.S. on Monday, the first official state visit by a French president since 1996, the BBC reports…
http://world.time.com/2014/02/10/hollande-and-obama-push-for-global-climate-change-pact/
Washington Post Op-Ed: Obama and Hollande: France and the U.S. enjoy a renewed alliance
By Barack Obama and François Hollande,
Barack Obama is president of the United States. François Hollande is president of the French Republic.
(FINALE) The challenges of our time cannot be wished away. The opportunities of our interconnected world will not simply fall into our laps. The future we seek, as always, must be earned. For more than two centuries, our two peoples have stood together for our mutual freedom. Now we are meeting our responsibilities not just to each other — but to a world that is more secure because our enduring alliance is being made new again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-and-hollande-france-and-the-us-enjoy-a-renewed-alliance/2014/02/09/039ffd34-91af-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html
10 Feb: BBC: Hollande and Obama make joint call for climate accord
France’s robust military response to threats in Mali and the Central African Republic, its tough stance on Iran’s nuclear programme and Mr Hollande’s willingness to join the US in air strikes on Syria, have vaulted France to a leading position among Washington’s traditional allies…
He will hope the first full state visit afforded to a French president since 1996 will bolster his dismal poll ratings, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser.
Mr Hollande’s approval ratings are stuck at barely 20% and doubts persist over his ability to kick-start the French economy…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26117455

Jail is where he should be.

Jimbo and others
On Feb. 6, WUWT had a post “Satellites show no global warming for 17 years 5 months” where in the question was asked (by Kathy) and several answers given to the 15 year issue. My response is fairly short so I’ll just paste it here, but check that post for more: ~~~~
““ The 17 year thingy: Some years ago a member of the “climate Team” expressed the view that 17 years would be indicative of a problem in the Team’s approach to modeling Earth’s atmosphere and taking its temperature.** Apparently, graduate students at several universities poured over hundreds of model runs and could find a “pause” of only about 15 years so the next logical jump was that 17 would not happen in the real world. [I can make leaps of imagination too – I don’t know what really was done in those ivory towers!]
As the 17 year pause got near, the necessary length to be a problem was reset (moving the goal posts) to 30 years or something. No one really cares about the latest statement from “the Team” because “the 17-year Pause” was stated first and boldly. It is the icon of moment and is thus the reason for titles, such as for this post, to incorporate it.
____________
**This used to be done under the arm (Stevenson screen) but the Team now thinks the appropriate place to check Earth’s temperature is in some deep hole where the Sun doesn’t shine. ””
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PS, today: I think Santer first stated the 17 years.

???
10 Feb: BBC: Paul Hudson Blog: UK flooding put in context
The level of coverage in the media of the resulting flooding across the UK has been virtually unprecedented in the last few weeks…
COMMENT by albanaich:
Perhaps more interesting is the unprecedented snowfall in the Scottish Highlands. . . . which has barely been reported.
The amount of snow it such that it may form a permanent snow cap this year, so while the rain drowns Southern England Scotland goes into glacier formation.
Thats the top of the buried Ski lift…
http://ski.visitscotland.com/conditions/nevis/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/UK-flooding-put-in-context

Zeke, thanks for bringing up Vaclav Klaus.
See:
“Czech Republic: President Says Freedom is Endangered, Not Climate” (Dr. Václav Klaus, August 3, 2007), at http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/1546
“Climate Change: The Dangerous Faith” (Sydney speech) (Dr. Václav Klaus, 21 September 2011), at http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2928

Here is Phil Jones, the fixer, “speculating on correcting SST’s to correct the 1940’s warming blip”
http://di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt
They keep working on this until they get it perfect.
more from Phil on correcting “the climate”
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0953.txt&search=1940s

Eric Worrall thank you for sharing. These people are actually criminals. They are causing a massive amount of disturbance for others while minimizing theirs. Look at Suzuki, Phil Jones, Big Ears Princess Charles, et al. They don’t want inconvenience but they want the rest of us to be inconvenienced. They assume they must be smarter and sharper than the rest of us. They are wrong, they happen to have low ethics, high hypocrisy and sometimes the luck of birth. “DO AS WE SAY, AND NOT AS WE DO.”

Retributive justice, would in my twisted opinion, call for these persons to be stripped of all their wealth and then of their carbon.
Sadly an example must be set.
The crime of inciting a mob to violence is as old as humanity.
Actions speak loudly, we have experienced an extended period of fear mongering, attempted scapegoating of any sceptical voices and a constant lecturing and hectoring from persons wearing their lust for power nakedly.
It is human nature, the cycle moves on and some will get what they wished for others.
How sad.
Whats that German word…

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask this question. I was over on “…and then there’s physics,” and there was an article making the point that even with the pause, global temps are still above the predicted values. The author used GISS, HADCrut4, UAH, RSS, and the new set that uses UAH to fill in the polar areas in his demonstration. Basically, he plotted the values out from 1979 through 2013, then drew a trend line using the data from 1979 to 1997. (He said he used this date because “the deniers” cherry-picked it to prove some point. I pointed out in my comment that there was nothing special about 1997, it’s just where the RSS trend started being flat. Well, mostly. I also pointed out the other dates of flatness from the other data sets to demonstrate.)
Anyway, he then showed how the 1979-1997 trend line, projected out, was still lower than anywhere from 14 to 16 out of 16 years of actual observations. I pondered that for a while, then had the thought that this was only so because of the great El Nino of 1998. From 1995 through 1997, the global anomaly had risen as much in those two years as it had in the previous 17. That put the plateau of the pause much higher than the previous trend would have put it, and it was a simple exercise with Excel to demonstrate that. If the El Nino hadn’t occurred (and it certainly wasn’t predicted by any models), the opposite would have occurred, and most of the observed values would have been well below the trend line.
This I put in my comment, which went into moderation hell and has not yet appeared, though many others have from later in the day than mine. But does my point make sense? It seems to me that only through the unpredicted sudden temperature rise of the El Nino does his article have any validity, though it seems as though he’s really saying “See, we were right all along even with the pause.” I’d appreciate any commentary on where I went wrong.

davidmhoffer says: @ February 10, 2014 at 3:40 pm
This was one of the first climategate emails I ever read. I was in state of rage for days…
But the very next thing I did was to try and find out if Phil Jones and his ilk were buying up property in Siberia or Scandinavia, or northern Canada, or Alaska, to provide a safe haven for themselves…
My conclusion being that not only are these people so incredibly selfish that the wish death and destruction upon humanity for their own personal vanity, but they don’t actually believe their own bull sh*t.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A quick check on the property owned by a few supporters of CAGW
May 3, 2010: Nobel Laureate Al Gore purchased a $9 million mansion in the luxurious hills of Montecito, California, recently
Ted Turner has amassed 2 million acres over the past two decades to become the largest private landowner in the country. He owns land in at least nine states, with most of his holdings in New Mexico, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota,
Maurice Strong owns a 63 thousand acre ranch in Colorado called Baca Grande
Bill Gates owns the largest island in republic of Belize; The Grand Bugue Island. Also Water front home @ Lake Washington near Seattle.
Warren Buffet: house in Laguna Beach’s fancy Emerald Bay community California, and a Omaha, Nebraska house.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg estate in Stokes Bay Bermuda.
Some how I don’t see any of these people being really worried about GoreBull Warming.

The fact that Jones wrote the he would “like to see climate change happen” is a tacit admission that he was NOT seeing any evidence of it even way back then. If he HAD evidence he would have said “I would like to see even MORE climate change…”
Oh, those little Freudian slips will give you away every time

Close your eyes, RoHa!
It is my sincere hope that Phil Jones and all of the AGW faithful keep experiencing colder and longer winters until they become complete pariahs, rejected by all of their families, friends, science associates, and acquaintances because they have been recognized as greedy, grant grasping, self-serving climate crooks. It’s time for their polar fleece to end!
Mac

James Schrumpf says:
February 10, 2014 at 5:08 pm
I’d appreciate any commentary on where I went wrong.
I do not believe you were wrong. See the three trend lines shown below. Note the huge difference it makes where you end for the blue and green and when these are extended.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1999/trend/plot/rss/from:1996.65/trend

CarolinaCowboy says:
February 10, 2014 at 2:47 pm
I see the usual suspects have piled on, and not just because you used Bloomberg as an authority. But don’t let them confuse you.
The ocean is not your fresh water fish tank and all sorts of things are going on in 3 dimensions in a difficult place to monitor and on a vast scale. Some comments imply (and some state) that warm water cannot carry heat under the ocean surface. That’s nonsense. See here:
http://marinebio.org/Oceans/temperature.asp
For a fairly large scale example see the images (2) of the flow from the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic Ocean on Chiefio’s site (posted Feb. 4; Which Way What Water Wanders?).

I think Phil Jones is 97% full of chocolate.

speaking of EGOS: Al Gore on the latest doomsday book by Kolbert, whose previously brought us the cheery “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change”:
10 Feb: NYT: Al Gore: Without a Trace
‘The Sixth Extinction,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers…
In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century…
If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes. According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”…
This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us…
A version of this review appears in print on February 16, 2014, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?hpw&rref=books&_r=0
10 Feb: NYT: Chasing the Biggest Story on Earth
‘The Sixth Extinction’ Looks at Human Impact on the Environment
When Elizabeth Kolbert joined The New Yorker in 1999, after more than a decade covering New York politics as a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, she began gravitating to environmental issues.
“The magazine has a history in this area,” she told me in one of two recent conversations. “They’d published Rachel Carson. It was unoccupied territory at the time.”…
Q. How does a journalist take on a topic this big — mass extinction?
A. I wrote a book almost 10 years ago on climate change, and I was looking for the next project. And my thought was, “Climate change is a huge story — there can’t be a bigger one.” As I looked for a new book, what I kept bumping into was the reality that climate change was actually part of an even bigger phenomenon: the many ways humans are changing the planet…
Q You posit that if there is a sixth extinction, it won’t be cockroaches who inherit the planet, as many New Yorkers predict, but rats. Why rats?…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/science/the-sixth-extinction-looks-at-human-impact-on-the-environment.html
13 Sept 1995: ABC: Quantum: A Chat with Tim Flannery on Population Control
Tim Flannery, Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, is an outspoken advocate for informed and vigorous control of populations. His best selling book, The Future Eaters suggests that we’re eating ourselves out of house and home…an appetite that’s lasted for thousands of years.
The first of Quantum’s tenth birthday profiles on leading scientists.
Q: Why is it that you believe Australia, which has an area the same size as the United States, can’t support a similar sort of population – hundreds of millions ?
Flannery: Really because the ecology of Australia is so different and so unique. Land size really has very little to do with the number of people you can support on it. Witness the Antarctic which is larger than Australia, and no one’s suggesting in could even support a million people. The tiny island of Java which is very, very rich and fertile can support a hundred million. But Australia’s ecology is very, very limiting…
Q: What do you think the ideal population of Australia should be ?
Flannery: Well, my personal estimate is that’s probably going to lie somewhere between six and 12 million. But the great tragedy for the nation is that we don’t know the answer to that question. We’ve never asked it sensibly. I may be proven to be wrong, but I don’t think I’m going to be greatly wrong. The answer may be 20 million, but it’s certainly not going to be 200 million.
Q: How would we control our population?
Flannery: Well, the main and easiest thing to control really is immigration levels because that is what’s contributing to the major population growth at the moment…
But really, in the long term, it’s going to be immigration which will cause the big change.
Q: Your strong stand on population has earned you the criticism of being a racist. How do you respond to that?
Flannery: All I can say is that I think there’s a place for immigration and always will be in Australia’s population policy. I don’t care in the least where anyone comes from – it’s just total numbers that really worry me. My concern as a scientist is simply to ensure that we have a sustainable future in Australia…
http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/info/q95-19-5.htm

Additionally one has to consider the psychology (honesty) of a supposedly intelligent and educated person who declares in all seriousness that he is “not political.”

Hi Gail, couple of things and sort me out if I lose it (thanks) You mentioned the UN policies in 1992 (Frame Work Convention on CC 20 years ago) , I think it goes further back, to the early 50’s ( J Kozak : “and not a shot was fired”) and although that has, on the surface , nothing to do with CC it has everything to do with an overall system of Bureaucratic control..BTW, I loved your Real Estate assessment , Live in just the right place as far as I can tell and it ain’t Siberia, Northern Canada or Mongolia (although there is a great bit of fishing for a week or 3 in the Yukon), Hang in there in Texas it will soon be fine. As a weather observer and a (ex) farmer where I have lived for the last 43 years I see, noted and after talking with the neighbours nothing out of the ordinary, nothing!

It is when Hansen, Jones, Mann and the rest of them became obsessed with an outcome, climate catastrophe, and lost their obsession with discovering the climate, that started us on this path. So we can go back to the 1988 Wirth(less) hearing in all of its stage managed deception as a decent starting point. From their climate science grew from a minor enterprise into the major industry it is today. And the spinoffs have been so lucrative for insiders: windmills, ethanol, carbon credits, carbon trading, solar panels, tax credits, feed in mandates, etc. etc. etc.

asybot says:
February 11, 2014 at 1:14 am
“Hi Gail, couple of things and sort me out if I lose it (thanks) You mentioned the UN policies in 1992 (Frame Work Convention on CC 20 years ago) , I think it goes further back, to the early 50′s ( J Kozak : “and not a shot was fired”) ”
Thanks. Amazon page contains some reader comments giving context.
http://www.amazon.com/And-Not-Shot-Is-Fired/dp/189264701X
But, I’d like to add, until 1961 the UN still planned on becoming the world government by means of force; the US/JFK backed plan was that only the UN would have nukes. This strategy collapsed with the UN-perpetrated massacre in Katanga. It took the UN a decade to roll out their new strategy, based on deception, 1971 at the Stockholm conference on the environment, using enviro issue as “common enemy” as documented by the Club Of Rome.

I just want them to come and stay for a month. I have more fence posts to set (If the weather ever clears) and sheep shearing is coming up soon.
Not happening anytime soon, Gail. Maybe snow today (probably, I think, from the weight of the clouds and the fact that it is 30F outside). Definitely snow and freezing temperatures all day tomorrow, although they are still only calling for 1-3 inches accumulation (which rises every day as the event approaches), with freezing rain or sleet and more snow the next day. I’m guessing Wednesday and Thursday and possibly Friday are going to be (patented) North Carolina Snow Holidays(tm) with schools and businesses closed tomorrow, Universities closed Thursday (Duke never closes with less than apocalyptic weather as many faculty and all students live close enough to walk and it screws up everybody’s schedule and curriculum). The next time the weather spends any time any substantial amount above freezing and wet will be Friday, maybe.
Which is all weather, and as noted doesn’t have anything substantive to do with the climate as a single anecdote on a large planet. However, “The Hiatus” (as it is called in AR5 where Box 9.2 explicitly acknowledges it as a serious problem and engages in some serious hermeneutics to try to explain it away and preserve the central message of threat) is not an anecdote. That’s why it gets its own box. People who are claiming that “the warming is continuing” — no, it’s not. It might start up again if ENSO ever heats up, but no, warming in the primary metric of global warming, the only metric we can really claim to know to some precision for decadal time scales with decreasing precision into the comparatively recent past as “defined” by the global average surface temperature anomaly (in any of its measured forms — GISS, HADCRUT4, RSS, UAH — is not continuing.
The observation that given 36 distinct models in CMIP5, given tens to hundreds of runs per model, some models some of the time produce runs as long as 13, 15, 17 years with no warming is not quantitatively useful. Indeed it obscures the single metric that would be quantitatively useful.
How many times (out of all N model runs completed to date) does this model produce runs not only of 17 years with no warming somewhere in its future output but in the 17 year stretch we are currently continuing?
This question has 36 independent answers. And if the answer for any given model is “less than 5%” then that model should be rejected as having failed a simple hypothesis validation test. If there are too few perturbed parameter model runs for that model for the number to be known with any degree of assurance — less than 30, say — then the model should not be rejected (unless the actual real world data is much more than two standard deviations away) but neither should it be included with equal weight of models where their internal variability and statistics are well sampled and that survive the hypothesis test.
Only the criterion for inclusion/survival of the CMIP5 models really needs to be much more stringent than 0.05, because there are so many of them, there are so many perturbed parameter runs per model to choose from, there is so much overlap of code and method parentage, and of course there is the fact that almost all of the models share the same bias compared to the climate that data dredging considerations come into play.
So the observation that “some models produce some runs” as long as 17 years (out of how many “independent” trials — are we talking about somewhere across the entire 21st century, so that we have to dilute probabilities still further?) really does not help. If all the models put together produce runs as long as 17 years 2% of the time, that is useful information. It is information that any Bayesian statistician would use to conclude that the models are rather likely to be broken, that the model priors need badly to be turned into model posteriors on the basis of the data and modified to fit reality instead of asserting that it is reality that is unlikely and the models are right.
As I pointed out on three different threads yesterday (and now one today) as well as another half dozen threads subsequent to the release of AR5, the statistical analysis of CMIP5 models as presented in the summary for policy makers stands out as a shameful blot on the integrity of science. Chapter 9 openly acknowledges that the statistical presentation they use is without merit or foundation — they list three (out of a rather long list) of the primary reasons why it is without foundation but only in one single paragraph where nobody who is not rather versed in statistics will either find it or understand it (where policy makers, we can assume, are neither one). They present figure 9.8a where one can see at a single glance that it is without merit, that indeed the “MultiModel Ensemble” (MME) mean that they present clearly and badly fails a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the equality of two distributions by spending only 1/6 of its time above and 5/6 of its time below HADCRUT4 over all 155 or so years of the record. It fails completely in its forecast post the reference period, and isn’t even symmetric compared HADCRUT4 in the reference period! If it weren’t for the 1997-1998 Super ENSO — which barely pushed HADCRUT4 back up to its MME mean prediction at its peak before falling back down and flattening up to the present — it would have quite literally never been correct outside of the training set used to “validate” the model parameterization. Its hindcast completely eliminates the natural variability of half of the twentieth century.
None of which prevents them from making grandiose assertions in the AR5 SPM with high confidence, or medium confidence or whatever.
Clearly the term “confidence” is being used in the sense of “high confidence” racket, because it is absolutely indefensible by use of statistics as their own chapter on the statistical analysis openly, if very, very quietly, acknowledges.
No wonder they felt compelled to add Box 9.2. No wonder Phil Jones has prayed for the moral equivalent of a Super ENSO to come to the rescue. What if “The Hiatus” extends through 2014? Solar forcing (weak variation as it is) is peaking now and will only go downhill from here as we enter what can reasonably be expected to be a protracted solar minimum tailing out cycle 24 and into a cycle 25 projected to be even weaker than 24. If there is any merit at all to claims of causal links between solar state and climate, we are in a position to make accurate measurements for the first time in the satellite era that might actually confirm or falsify both claimed correlation and hypothetical causality. The ENSO-meter on this page is solidly in La Nina territory, and has been neutral to descending for some time. We could conceivably have a “Super La Nina” that might actually counteract global warming and reset equilibrium lower that the current neutral trend — something that I personally rather hope for because I do not relish the idea of a catastrophic climate shift whether or not it is caused by humans and whether or not it proves any number of scientists wrong.
Box 9.2 is simply a mandatory CYA addition to an otherwise literally incredible chapter of AR5. And it is literally the only chapter that matters, except possibly for the sections associated with ocean acidification (which is really a completely independent issue from global warming or “climate change”). If the CMIP5 models can all or mostly be clearly rejected as failed models on the basis of simple statistical tests applied per model (and more sophisticated one that might be applied to reject entire model families) then we are literally back to the drawing board, forced to try try again to build models that actually work to hindcast the 20th century and forecast the 21st. That’s what science is all about, and I daresay that pretty much all of the modellers are working frenetically on doing just that because they are not idiots and they know a failed model when they see one, prayers for a career-salvaging non-anthropogenic assist from a Super-ENSO leading to disaster aside.
But AR6 could well be the last IPCC activity before a very serious backlash if The Hiatus continues to (say) 2016 with no sign of abating, or worse, if a strong La Nina actually increases the interval with no statistically observable warming to 1990, the epoch year of the GCMs post their reference/training data, or earilier!
I don’t think Box 9.2 will save them, at that point. Too many people like myself, like Roy Spencer, like Judith Curry are going to be there pointing out the discrepancy between section 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3 — which basically say that the MME mean is statistically meaningless — figure 9.8a — which basically shows that meaningless or not it is wrong — and the assertions of confidence and disaster in the SPM. They at some point will be called on to justify the “confidence” they asserted while advising the world to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of lives to avoid a disaster that they knew perfectly well could not be reliably predicted from their own data.
On that day, what will they do? The axioms and theorems of statistics will be of no use to them because they have violated them! How, exactly, can they reply?
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Do you think that the “climate scientists” & bureaucrats most responsible for perpetuating this expensive & murderous, catastrophic, man-made scam should be tried for fraud, or would that have a chilling effect (so to speak) on the practice of real science?
For the most part, no. Specific cases where there was specific evidence that people had a vested interest and went beyond good faith science might, but that seriously is almost all the exception, not the rule. I think most climate scientists do, actually, drink their own grape-ade. They might be wrong, but they are wrong in good faith.
If they are wrong. Their hypothesis is not disproven. It just isn’t particularly strongly supported by the evidence.
The interesting question will be whether or not some future congressional investigation turns up any actual evidence of collusion or conspiracy to falsify any of the science. Most of what I’ve seen can be explained by simple grant-induced confirmation bias (similar to what has happened with the “dangers” of marijuana) without any real need for malice.
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And they actively employ dirty tricks to suppress skeptic views, because they genuinely believe that efforts to cast doubt on their theories endanger humanity.
SOME of them employ dirty tricks. The others simply try to rewrite their perception of the past climate history of the planet to eliminate any doubt that the present is “the hottest ever”. Which is patently absurd. They somehow take temperature estimates with an uncertainty on the order of degrees kelvin and transform it into knowledge with a perceptual precision of tenths of a degree to make the claim, since there has only been order of 1 C total warming from the LIA — maybe.
But either way, they seriously believe and think they are saving mankind.
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