Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel
Simon from Australian Climate Madness reports:
The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to [address] the panel of six.
Here is the press release, which somehow escaped everyone’s a number of climate skeptic bloggers notice until now.
APS to Review Statement on Climate Change
February 20, 2014
A subcommittee of POPA is reviewing the APS statement on climate change in accordance with the policy to review official statements every five years.
Preparations are under way by the APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) to review and possibly update the society’s statement on climate change. In the coming months, the APS membership will have a chance to weigh in on any proposed revisions before the society adopts a final draft.
“We intend to keep the membership informed at every stage in this process,” said Robert Jaffe a physicist at MIT and Chair of POPA. “We’re quite eager to make sure that the revision of the climate change statement is done in the most open and orderly way.”
The subcommittee of POPA that is conducting the review posted its background and research materials to the APS website, along with its charge. The research materials include the transcripts of the subcommittee’s January workshop, biographical information on outside climate experts who participated in the workshop, and their slide presentations. These materials are now available online.
The standing policy of the society is to review its statements every five years. The society first adopted the climate change statement seven years ago, but appended an addendum in 2010. The review also coincides with the release of the latest report on the physical science basis of climate change from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The months-long process started last year with the formation of the subcommittee and a steering committee, which is guiding the statement review subcommittee through the review process. In addition to weighing the opinions of experts from its workshop, the review subcommittee is researching information related to climate change and reviewing the roughly 1,500-page climate change report by the IPCC.
If a new statement is drafted, it will be submitted to the full POPA committee in June. Once approved by POPA, it will go to the APS executive board for a vote. If approved there, the proposed statement will be posted on the society’s website for members to read and comment on, likely sometime later in 2014.
Once all of the comments have been collected, POPA will again review the statement and may revise it further based on members’ input. It will then go to the executive board and the full council for a vote on whether the statement should be officially adopted in its final form.
“We’re not rushing this. Climate science and climate change will be around a long time and we want to get this right before sending it out to the membership for review and comment,” Jaffe said.
Source: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/updates/statementreview.cfm
It does not get any better than this for it finally shows a reasonable good level of openness and transparency in climate science assessment. The review panel has high level personnel who are very critical of the processes that supported the controversial aspects of climate science used for the IPCC reports.
This APS process is a prototype that the The Royal Society, the IPCC, the NAS, AAAS, AGU and the US Congress should emulate.
John
For each additional year that the divergence grows between the consensus models’ projections and observed data, we will see more realists at the table. The perfect exit strategy for the warmists. Cuts down on the embarrassment factor.
Can’t come soon enough, I got this in my e-mail at work this morning: https://services.blimessaging.com/201208/viewaswebpage/viewaswebpage.aspx?unqid=722f0057-4fb0-e311-bd25-000c29ac9535
I don’t even have words.
Rather then the sounds of heads exploding, to me it sounds like the ending of a classical piesc of music , rising to a crescendo and ending with the slow and loud beating of timpanees as the conclusion !
there is a reason why the APS invited christy, Lindzen and Curry.
1. None of them are sun nuts.
2. All of them accept well known science: C02 will warm the planet, not cool it
3. All of them realize that the key question is..
how much will it warm the planet. There is uncertainty here, any fool stating certainty here will be ignored by working scientists.
Like I’ve said, if you want a debate about climate science it exists. How much will C02 warm the planet? If you want to argue for a really small number, you’ll need to do a huge amount of work to
support that. If you want to argue within the range of 1C to 6C, people might actually listen to you.
Imagine the result if the whole skeptical community focused its energy and arguments on that question.
na…. spend your time on jupiter’s alignment with Mars..
Steven Mosher (March 20, 2014 at 10:58 am) “How much will C02 warm the planet? If you want to argue for a really small number, you’ll need to do a huge amount of work to support that.”
It’s certainly possible that warming will increase over the present 0.1C or less per decade medium term (17 years or so) or about the same increase over the long run (e.g. 100 years). But right now we are looking at 1C increase in the coming century. Is that really small? To make the claim that it will be more than that you’ll need to do a huge amount of work.
Just want to reinforce what Rud Istvan and others above said. The link to the transcript has been on Climate Etc, for several days or click here-
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf
It deserves a careful reading which took me about 3 or 4 hours. IMO, it’s the best expert discussion of climate science knowns, unknowns, and confidence levels that has ever been linked or published. What’s more, it was a civil discussion, the APS review panel were knowledgeable. and they asked tough questions.
The APS seminar got off to a good start and this is interesting reading: http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf I thought that Santer badly lost the argument about the tropical tropospheric hot spot. The climate models took some damage in this exchange.
If continued in this open, questioning way, it will be necessary to revise the egregious 2007 climate change statement of the APS. But considering how the leadership treated the petitioners a few years back, it is hard to have much confidence in a completely honest assessment. Sad to say, I have physicist friends who think it entirely inappropriate to question current climate science.
Steven Mosher http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/20/that-noise-you-can-hear-in-the-distance-is-the-sound-of-john-cooks-dana-nuccitellis-and-joe-romms-heads-exploding/#comment-1594986
I agree. This is a good talking point. But if someone could explain to me why this “global” warming in happening only at nights in urban areas of the northern hemisphere.
jai mitchell at 9:43 am sums it up well.
I expect this to be a Potemkin policy review.
6 experts with diverse evaluations advising a subcommittee of six making recommendations to the POPL committee charged with revising existing (legacy) policy of a professional organization. At the same time the whole weight of the EPA is moving to control “carbon pollution.”
F = m*a; a = F/m
a very large mass and a diffused interfering force, results in miniscule acceleration.
It is better than nothing. To make a difference the whole membership of the APS will need to vote for a significant change in the policy statement and I don’t see them getting that opportunity.
In the battle between warmers and luke warmers global warming can’t lose.
Steven Mosher says:
March 20, 2014 at 10:58 am
first of all, thank you for helping me to learn R…youre free with your knowledge, and thats too rare in this world. anyone who bashes you should think twice before doing so again…
but really now, dontcha think that most of what are called “skeptics” understand that CO2 absorbs IR across a small range of frequencies, and that on a net basis it warms the planet just a smidge…that the effect is logarithmic, and that CO2 levels are almost at the saturation point?
really, dragon slayers are no better or worse than the people who couch inferred energy imbalances in “hiroshimas”
no shortage of fools….
Steven Mosher says:
March 20, 2014 at 10:58 am
“na…. spend your time on jupiter’s alignment with Mars..”
it is dawning of…the age of aquarius, after all.
Steven Mosher writes ” If you want to argue for a really small number, you’ll need to do a huge amount of work to support that.”
Nonsense. You and I have been over this many times. Since no-one, and I mean no-one, has measured a CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph, it follows with all the inevitability of the inevitable, that there is a strong indication that the climate sensitivity could be 0.0 C for a doubling of CO2, to one place of decimals or two significant figures.
The APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) formed a Subcommittee to review its Climate Change Statement. The members of the Subcommittee are: Steven Koonin (chair), Phillip Coyle, Scott Kemp, Tim Meyer, Robert Rosner and Susan Seestrom.
No sign of Christy, Curry or Lindzen, they don’t appear on the POPA panel either so someone’s misled you.
http://www.aps.org/about/governance/committees/popa/index.cfm
– – – – – – – – –
Claudius Denk,
Why do you consider Christie or Curry or Lindzen ‘lukewarmers’?
In my thinking, with a reasonable context wrt what in hell ‘lukewarmerism’ could rationally be, Lindzen is not one. Curry can be arguably considered not one in any theoretical sense. Christie doesn’t strike me as one.
I am interested in your basis for saying they are ‘lukewarmers’.
John
Yes, lukewarmers is how anthony has them pegged but it could be another title room temperature!:]
I skimmed the entire transcript of the workshop (and read certain parts thoroughly) awhile back. The physicists on the panel definitely appeared interested in the points made by Lindzen, Christy, and Curry. From my point of view the warmists were extremely unconvincing.
Also, I would add that Curry, Lindzen, and Christy came came across as highly skeptical of CAGW, in my opinion.
Steven Mosher says: Imagine the result if the whole skeptical community focused its energy and arguments on that question.
Imagine the result if the whole Alarmist community focused its energy and arguments on that question rather than on wealth redistribution..
jai michell says:
“none of them say that the experts are “on” the committee… hmmmmmmmm. . . no Christy, Curry or Lindzen to be found!”
mitchell points out that the committee is not composed of experts. I agree.
Why did the APS bar M.I.T.’s head of atmospheric sciences, who has twenty dozen climate related peer reviewed publications to his credit? The other two mitchell mentioned are as knowledgeable, or at least in the same league as Prof Lindzen.
Maybe jai mitchell can explain why non-experts compose the APS committee, and experts are barred. Politics, maybe?
Seems to me the likely outcome is that APS will make no significant change to their statement, but when challenged about it, will reply that “We engaged skeptics to help craft the statement”.
Thats much more the wack tard position of the people who have inverted the formal ”Infrared Cooling Model” the planet earth operates by
into the thoroughly debunked ”Infrared Warming Models”
that are the legacy of the James Hansen era Computer Modeling sewage, disguised as science.
=======
Steven Mosher says:
March 20, 2014 at 10:58 am
there is a reason why the APS invited christy, Lindzen and Curry.
1. None of them are sun nuts.
2. All of them accept well known science: C02 will warm the planet, not cool it
3. All of them realize that the key question is..
how much will it warm the planet. There is uncertainty here, any fool stating certainty here will be ignored by working scientists.
Like I’ve said, if you want a debate about climate science it exists. How much will C02 warm the planet? If you want to argue for a really small number, you’ll need to do a huge amount of work to
support that. If you want to argue within the range of 1C to 6C, people might actually listen to you.
Imagine the result if the whole skeptical community focused its energy and arguments on that question.
na…. spend your time on jupiter’s alignment with Mars..
I picked up on this weeks ago via Bishophill and Judith Curry (late February I think). The link by several people here to the seminar/workshop transcript is well worth downloading. The transcript of the seminar is a must-read for anyone with any technical interest – there are some very strong points made by Lindzen and others and there is some real truth about the strengths and weaknesses of climate models. Its a very long document but it is a goldmine of uncensored, honest, scientific views on climate science and modelling. And remember these are actually what people said, recorded “on-the-record” by a stenographer. No backtracking in the future – this is a permanent record.
Read it!
(And I am looking forward to when the hiatus reaches 20 years….)
Steven Mosher says:
March 20, 2014 at 10:58 am
You’d have to do more work than is physically possible (without lying or cheating) to come up with anything in the 2 to 6 degrees C range. Even IPCC has dropped to a best estimate of 3.0 degrees C, which is still too high by a factor of ~2. Without the assumed water vapor feedback still not in evidence, anything above 1.2 degrees remains improbable.