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shoyemore at 19:44 PM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Like almost everyone, I am thrilled at the novelty of this work.
I am sure it will be closely critiqued (no doubt it has been already), but the implications are quite large.
- Estimates of climate sensitivity based on recent warming like those of Otto et al will have to be revisited.
- Climate modellers will be smiling.
- The publications that ascribed the "pause" to volcanoes, ozone, deep ocean warming or ENSO will have to be also revisited. But we do understand the role of the ocean in global climate a lot better now.
The scientists involved must be simultaneously thrilled and annoyed!
Given the uncritical attention the "hiatus" received, there is still no sign of a news media report of this paper AFAIK. We can watch the BBC Science and Technology page, and the Economist with interest!
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chriskoz at 12:03 PM on 14 November 2013Cosmic rays fall cosmically behind humans in explaining global warming
jdixon1980@11,
Your critique and an explanation of "assessment" term (that I have not been understanding as deeply as you do) is duly noted and up-voted. Thanks.
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scaddenp at 11:48 AM on 14 November 2013Free computer game - World at the Crossroads
That is puzzling to me. You are saying that you would open a downloaded executable but you wouldnt open a zip file? What do you mean by "download the game directly"?
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r.pauli at 11:16 AM on 14 November 2013Free computer game - World at the Crossroads
Many users refuse to open zip files without more security steps.. I wish there was a site to download the game directly.
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Bob Loblaw at 10:38 AM on 14 November 2013Models are unreliable
Also note that the "flux corrections" discussed by Dikran are specific to models that incorporate simulations of both atmospheric and oceanic circulations (note the AOGCM acronym in the wikipedia page Dikran references - AO means Atmosphere/Ocean General Circulatation Model). Such flux corrections do not exist in any other categories of climate models, and they are not in all AOGCMs.
Simulating both atmospheric and oceanic circulation at the same time is a complex problem: you need small time steps to deal with the rapid atmospheric changes, but you need long simulation times to deal with the slower motions and changes in the ocean. Various tricks (oh, there is that awful word again) are used to deal with the mathematical complexities.
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Paul Pukite at 10:19 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Excellent work. It appears as if the HADCRUT and GISTEMP series may converge if they start to use the Cowtan & Way hybrid or kriging corrections on the HADCRUT data.
In the figure below I overlaid the GISTEMP series to their supplementary figure S6 to show how closely they match. Also shown is the CSALT model which takes into account CO2, SOI, Aerosol, LOD, and TSI variability.
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Magma at 09:54 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Interesting and ingenious approach. I've reserve full praise until I've read through the paper, but the detail and care that went into the accompanying figures and presentations are quite impressive in and of themselves.
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Tom Curtis at 09:48 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Ken from Oz @18, I share your concern.
One of my biggest problems with the nature of political debate in Australia at the moment is Tony Abbot's invocation of his "mandate" as a reason for the Australian Labor Party and other minor parties to support his repeal of the carbon tax. In 2007, the ALP very conspicously campaigned on a policy of introducing a emissions trading scheme. Less conspicuously, so also did Tony Abbot's Liberal Party. Despite this, Abbot seized the leadership of the Liberal Party on a promise to oppose the emissions trading scheme, which he then did. Now, if a party gaining victory in an election has a mandate to impliment its platform such that other parties ought not to vote against that platform, then Tony Abbot ignored the mandate of the ALP from the 2007 election. Not only that, if parties have a obligation to support in parliament the policies they take to the electorate, he also had an obligation to support an ETS.
So, either Tony Abbot believes his mandate theory, and he was an unprincipled political opportunist when he seized control of the Liberal party; or he does not believe it and he is a blatant and deliberate liar when he calls on the opposition to honour his mandate.
I do not see any other possibilities here.
This is so obvious a point of hypocrissy that it is incredible that it is not commented on by journalists. The press of Australia show, however, that they are not bastions of democracy and rational debate by simply ignoring Abbots hypocritical distortions.
How can we expect any honesty from politicians when they are not called on even these most blatant of lies?
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Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
I notice a considerable drop during the 1998 El Nino on the adjusted hybrid record - not at all surprising, as missing polar and mid-African regions are known to be less affected by ENSO than much of the world. It looks to me like this downward shift in the earlier part of the record is just as important WRT the trend as the faster global temperature rise in the later part of the 16 year period.
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Ken in Oz at 09:19 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Tom, you are right to expect what's to be in the quotation marks to be an actual quote; that should be corrected. But I have a big problem with what these 'leaders' say being (IMO deliberately) disingenuous and contradictory - and too often diametrically opposed to what their actions 'say'. Howard is certainly encouraging people to think climate science and climate action is the province of zealots - it takes hair splitting to claim there was no such implication in what he said. And implying and suggesting things without saying them directly is a distinguishing hallmark of climate politics as practiced by Howard's student, Tony Abbott.
Not arguing the validity of the science looks like a deliberate tactic for making it easier to push through an agenda based on the science being wrong.
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barry1487 at 09:06 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
I couldn't find a quote to match either, just the ones mentioned above. It would be good to amend the comment in the OP with a note on the misattribution.
When I first read about Howard's speech, the admission of political expediency driving policy struck me as much as the familiarity with contrarian talking points and hollow understanding of the science. For him, global warming is a minor issue except on political grounds.
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scaddenp at 08:42 AM on 14 November 2013Models are unreliable
This gets raised at RC from time to time. You might like to look at the response to this comment. Sounds like an objection based on dated information and overstating the problem.
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Rob Honeycutt at 08:29 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Wow. This is going to tweak a few folks who shall remain unnamed.
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Cosmic rays fall cosmically behind humans in explaining global warming
Listen to what Richard Alley has to say about cosmic rays and global warning 42 minutes into this lecture from 2009. A better version of the graph in the video can be seen here.
Why waste time and resources at the particle accelerators like the one at CERN when Nature did this experiment for us under far more realistic conditions about 40,000 years ago?
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Don9000 at 08:13 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Picking up on John's idea of deconstructing the former prime minister's words, I find it interesting that in his comments to reporters Howard said this:
"I don't completely dismiss the more dire warnings, but I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated." [Due to my grammatical instinctiveness, I inserted a comma between the two independent clauses.]
By leaving out any actual examples of what he means by "dire warnings" or exaggerated claims, and by not identifying who has said or made them, Howard probably comes across as being quite rational to those who are sitting on the fence. His words, after all, suggest that he in fact accepts some of the "more dire warnings," or at least some parts of them. And in doing this, while we may roll our eyes at Howard's ability to tell instinctively whether claims are valid or not, he basically touches base with many non-scientist fence sitters who presumable have heard some of these "most dire warnings" and potentially exaggerated claims in the blogosphere. I'd guess that many of them reacted with similar gut-level responses to "dire" claims. After all, "dire" is a word associated with situations we really don't want to experience first hand. And along comes former Prime Minister Howard, an authority figure by definition to some, who is telling people who don't want anything "dire" to happen to them that they really don't need to worry.
With that in mind, I note that Matt@9 makes an excellent point in noting that Howard draws "no meaningful distinction between climate activism and climate science." I guess I'd add that this is understandable, given that the denier camp really doesn't have much actual science to use as ammunition or to build their arguments on, and thus they tend to wage their campaign by cherrypicking data, or seeking to attack narrow and often out-of-context passages found in scientific papers or in simplified postings about those papers found on sites like Skeptical Science. It is very much a kind of asymmetric warfare where they are reduced to wielding stone knives and spears against the other side. Indeed, with Matt's comment in mind, I suspect it is even possible to conclude that Howard is actually thinking of on-line comment threads on newspaper web sites when he thinks of those dire warning and exaggerated claims. He certainly doesn't provide any evidence to rule that conclusion out.Then too, even if we assume Howard is referring only to warnings from scientists working in the field, there is definitely nothing in his words to make me think he is speaking of published scientific arguments. Instead, I suspect Howard could point to the kinds of things even scientists sometimes say or post off the cuff.
For example, whenever an otherwise measured and rational scientist writes or speaks more or less off the cuff about the likelihood of an ice-free Arctic somewhere in the not too distant future, I "instinctively" understand that the scientist is thinking about the Arctic seas near or at the end of the melt season, and is using "ice-free" in the sense of "effectively ice-free" or "nearly ice-free." Deniers have differenct instinctive responses and thus exhibit a distinct lack of ability to grasp this kind of difference, and that is why Mr. Howard can say what he says and have people agree with him.
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Doug Bostrom at 08:09 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Michael Tobis at Planet3.0 points out something that I found took some of the "fun" out the finding:
There’s another aspect to this, though, and it may be a bigger deal than might at first be apparent. It adds up to a pretty scary situation.
That’s because the “slowdown” or “hiatus” has also had a number of alternative explanations. Decreased solar activity. Increased volcanic activity. A prevalence of cool-phase El Nino oscillations. Increase in aerosol loading from rapid and dirty Chinese industrial expansion. Heat export to deeper ocean layers.
To be sure, we are somewhat at risk of post hoc reasoning here. If there had been no sign of a “hiatus”, it is likely that less effort would have gone into explaining it! But all of these explanations appear individually to be sound, and with the possible exception of the last, [un]likely to be reversed at any time. What that would mean is that in reality the underlying rate of warming is still accelerating.
But see Stefan Rahmstorf's comment.
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Flakmeister at 08:06 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Hey, congrats to SKS for making it to the floor of the Senate!
Since there are no open threads here, I thought was a good a place as any...
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Tom Curtis at 08:03 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
While on the topic of corrections I would like to see, the final sentence of the OP is too strong. Many conservatives do have an "unreality bias". Indeed, currently this is possibly true of most conservatives, and is certainly true of the most politically influential conservatives in Australia when it comes to global warming. However, there are many political conservatives who do not have that bias (including at least one very great contributor to SkS). Further, there is little doubt that there are mitigation responses to global warming that fit well with conservative philosophy, of which the most obvious is cap and trade (although others exist). We will not win the fight to achieve effective mitigation by simply alienating half of the political spectrum. Rather we should encourage conservatives to be true to both their philosophy and the facts. Even when we disagree with conservative philosophies (there are more than one), we should make that a seperate issue rather than hampering the effort to combat global warming by trying to bury conservatism based on the fact free bias of some conservatives.
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Bernard J. at 08:02 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Easy fix, remove the quotes from around "religious zealots".
I thought the original phrase was meant to have inverted commas. It makes sense as 'religious zealots', although I suspect that the grammatic subtlety would be easily lost.
Whatever the distraction over grammar and the natural of the attribution, the point is that John Howard refers to the mainstream professional understanding of the danger of human-caused climate change as being both over zealous and having the appearance of a religion. He is incorrect on both points.
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Tom Curtis at 07:53 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Ken in Oz @12, expecting only words actually spoken or written by the person being "quoted" to be included inside quotation marks is not hair splitting. It is, at the minimum, an expectation of honest reporting. As such incorrect quotation can be a technique used to make people appear more extreme than they actually are, it can also be a means of libel.
In this case, the misquotation does not make Howard seem more extreme or ridiculous than he is. The news reports should, quite frankly, be focussed on his admission that, as Prime Minister of Australia for thirteen years, during which time he steadfastly refused to take any action to mitigate global warming, his only investigation of the science was read a single book, by a well known denier two years after leaving office. Such fact free policy setting is a national disgrace; and the admission should tarnish Howard's record beyond redemption.
An even greater disgrace is that this fact free approach to policy setting continues to dominate in Australia, with Australia's newly elected PM, Tony Abbot being no better informed than Howard.
It is a shame that the misquotation has detracted from these issues. It the distraction should be ended, however, by John Cook correcting the text of his article, noting the update and the reason and (ideally), apologizing for, and explaining the source of the error, whether that be carelessness (if he is the source of the misquote), or lack of due dilligence (if he assumed from misquotation by others without checking for the original quote). Even better if he could in fact show the quotation is correct by citing the original, but that currently looks dubious.
The distraction should not, however, be ended simply by ignoring proper standards of quotation any more than distraction from inconvenient facts should be ended by simply fudging the data.
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tmbtx at 07:46 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Sorry, I meant to include the link to the image: http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/media_compare12.png
I see perhaps a similar correction around 1980 and then very little change until about 2000. -
tmbtx at 07:44 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Tom - thanks for that reply. Let me broaden the question a bit then: If the station coverage bias has been there consistently, why is the descrepancy highlighted in the last 15 or so years? The agreement prior to the "pause" interval is pretty good, by which I mean the corrections of the hybridized model seem smaller.
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Tom Curtis at 07:34 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
tmbtx @12, the HadCRUT4 data set excludes large parts of Africa, and significant regions in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Amazon Basin and Australia. Most of these areas are not significantly effected by ENSO, with the result that HadCRUT4 is more sensitive to ENSO than other surface temperature indices. In particular, HadCRUT4 undersamples North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, areas which experienced intense heat in 2010. These two facts combine to explain the relatively large corrections in 2010 and durring the very intense La Nina of 2011-2012. Consequently it is a mistake to focus solely on the Arctic.
On that point, the video does say that most of the change in trend comes from including the Arctic. It is not obvious to me that that is the case. I would be very interested if one of the authors would explain how that was tested, and the portion of the change in trend due to infilling the Arctic compared to the change from infilling the rest of the globe.
Finally, there have been a number of indications that the pause is over-explained by the data, ie, that absent a number of different effects, there would have been an increased 16 year trend relative to the 30 year trend rather than a decrease. However, as the well known "alarmist" (irony intended) Stefan Rahmstorf writes:
"[I]f after all adjustments the global warming trend shows some acceleration, this would probably get the data closer to the model-mean (rather than to a continued linear warming trend).
But it would probably not be statistically significant, so <b>interpreting an acceleration into 15 years of data would be as ill-founded as finding a slowdown</b>.”
(See first comment at preceding link, my emphasis.)
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Glenn Tamblyn at 07:27 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Congratulation Kevin & Rob. Very well done.
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Ken in Oz at 07:26 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
The splitting of hairs is par for the course; Howard suggests and implies that people who demand that the emissions and climate connection be taken seriously are motivated by irrational ideology, not by the real existence of a real problem. The "religious zealotry" motivation behind climate action's proponents is clearly implied.
It's politically necessary for climate obstructionists to impugn the motives of climate scientists and proponents of climate action, otherwise people might think scientists are basically honest and the public might trust them! An undesired consequence of trust in science would be expecting politicians to incorporate that knowledge into government decision making. Howard makes it clear that politics isn't about trusting experts, it's about trusting gut feelings. But it's dirty and dubious politics to make unsubstantiated suggestions of dubious or dangerous ideological motivations of untrustworthy climate
"zealots" to justify politics not responding to valid science.As for the new Prime Minister of Australia, it looks to me that, like John Howard, Prime MinisterTony Abbott is assiduous in avoiding telling the Australian public what he really thinks; he continues being persistently contradictory and ambiguous, rather than candid and clear.
Every statement that the climate problem is real by Abbott or his team seems to be followed by statements that it's not. I can't help but view this a deliberate political tactic; by avoiding any signs of sincerity the climate science obstructors that are his core constituency are reassured that he is not and he does not have to spell out how deep his convictions - his gut feelings - are on this really are.
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Tom Curtis at 07:12 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
I second Synapsid @10's comment.
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Synapsid at 06:48 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
JH @ 8:
tlitb1 has three posts. In the first he asked for sources for two statements by Howard; the second was a thank-you for a source for one of them; in the third he said that he hadn't received a source as yet for the other statement. In what way is this excessive repetition?
Moderator Response:[JH] Upon further review, I made a mistake. I have therefore struck through the comment.
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tmbtx at 06:18 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
I was looking at the briefing page in the link Kevin provided. When you look back at the curve comparisons to 1980 the agreement is good until the most recent 16 years.
Is it a well established finding that Arctic heating has accelerated more than the globe over the last decade or so? -
Matt Fitzpatrick at 06:16 AM on 14 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Easy fix, remove the quotes from around "religious zealots".
There's no doubt that Howard calls climate activism a religion, and more than once. And, from the text of this speech, I see Howard drawing no meaningful distinction between climate activism and climate science. In fact, Howard conflates activism and science on page 4 of his speech, by invoking the specter of the "Climategate" East Anglia e-mail theft, and repeating the old "redistributing the world's wealth" quote mine to accuse the IPCC of advancing political agendas.
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Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
The coverage issue is definitely something to be aware of when reading the literature or looking at blog discussions for models vs. observations - camparisons have to be made with the same masking of effective area to be informative.
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Tom Curtis at 05:48 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Congratulations Kevin and Robert. Well done.
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DaneelOlivaw at 05:33 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
It's a nice reminder that every time you start looking for an explanation, you first need to be sure that there's an effect in need of one.
I'm curious to see how this research fits into other studies about the "pause" (AKA, "the paws"). Seems that Kosaka & Xie 2013 might be at odds with this finding since their POGA-H model had an excellent fit with the original temperature record.
That brings me to a question. When a model is compared with a temperature record, ¿do they use the same averagin method? It seems to me that if you are using an average observed temperature that doesn't include the Arctic, then you should construct an average model temperature with exactly the same converage. I don't know if that's customary but if that's what K&X did then there would be no problem.
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tmbtx at 04:43 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
doug_bostrom: "But when I think about it, I had no reason to assume."
Yeah.... same here. I started to type a few other things about why I didn't know that and realized it was because I hadn't checked. You know, like 99.99% of all people whether or not they're informed on the issue overall.
But now there's a problem, even with well-intentioned media coverage, of having to explain why the temperatures are really going up faster without looking like we're cooking the books. *I* know the books aren't being cooked but how do I convince people of that?
The difficulties of scientific communication have never looked so intractable to me. -
vrooomie at 04:29 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
What Doug Bostrom said, at #4....we are inba much more dire sitation that any may have thought.
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Doug Bostrom at 04:25 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
tmbtx: I assumed that's what had already been done, unfortunately.
Me, too, pretty much. With polar amplification being significant where a substantial part of the 16% of missing coverage lies and especially given the unexpected excursion of sea ice "up there," my assumption was that somehow, some way the gap was accounted for before banging on about a pause.
But when I think about it, I had no reason to assume. Which brings us back to the old saw about "ass u me." :-)
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tmbtx at 03:57 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Expanding a bit on Doug's point about public discussion - how do you present to a general audience the various decisions that are made in reconstructing temperature data? Obviously a discussion of kriging isn't really material for the local pub, but temperature curves published by the media get portrayed as "this is the temperature" not "this is the temperature we get from using stations with 85% global coverage and we suspect the other 15% would be warmer."
Nice work though. It's pretty clear the hybrid approach is better. I assumed that's what had already been done, unfortunately. -
Doug Bostrom at 03:44 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
There's an object lesson here in terms of how we may forget that our public discussion can be perilously dependent on speculation without our pausing (!) to carefully consider what we fairly know. For all the sound and fury expended over "the pause" we didn't actually know what was happening, not enough anyway to get in a lather about it.
Now, suddenly, it appears "the pause" has shrunk rather dramatically, thanks to people who look while the rest of us leap. Sheepish looks should be the hangover, not that it's likely any of the more extreme hyperbole we've witnessed is going to be accounted for.
I'm truly surprised this previously gaping hole wasn't emphasized more in all the premature chatter. Particularly it's strange that people who should and do know better have gone on to formalize "the pause" in various embarrassing places.
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DSL at 03:31 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Thanks, Kevin and Robert, and congratulations!
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Kevin C at 03:03 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
Thanks Andy.
For anyone who is interested there is a longer video abstract, a detail background document, and every single piece of code and data required to reproduce our results from scratch on the project website.
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Andy Skuce at 02:49 AM on 14 November 2013Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows
This result is staggering. My congratulations to Kevin and Robert for a great piece of work.
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jdixon1980 at 02:04 AM on 14 November 2013Cosmic rays fall cosmically behind humans in explaining global warming
I'm disappointed that suckfish @1 got a down vote. I see no reason to assume his questions were anything but an honest and relevant inquiry.
I do like the way chriskoz and Dana responded with a wealth of information; that's what makes this a great site. That is, with the exception of chriskoz's admonishing opener, "Your assessment is simplistic and incorrect," a mischaracterization of suckfish's comment - suckfish was explicitly airing out an "impression," not making an "assessment," and even inviting the impression to be corrected. All of us get wrong impressions from time to time due to gaps in our own level of understanding/expertise and/or incomplete information, and there's nothing wrong with that. (What can be harmful is precisely when people mistake their own wrong "impressions" for thorough and sound "assessments.") A purported "assessment" would reflect a belief by the speaker that she has considered enough of the relevant data and evaluating the conclusions of others to form her own firm conclusion. It would not be accompanied by a question about what the latest research indicates, and it would not itself be punctuated by a question mark, both of which appear in comment #1.
I don't know if there may be some history related to any prior comments by suckfish in other threads that may have triggered the downvote and/or the (in my view, inaccurate, as explained above) admonishment, which might justify them in a private conversation, but in a public forum it would regardless tend toward giving a wrong impression to anyone unaware of that history that we here at SkS are quick to assume anyone questioning any part of the main post is just a troll to be criticized and condescended to.
I think I speak for the community of regular visitors and contributors (my own small contribution so far consisting entirely of a single Spanish translation of the "ocean acidification is not a problem" climate myth, though I aspire to pick up the pace soon and start adding more translations) when I say we want to encourage honest and relevant inquiry, and that there is no shame in approaching an issue with initial impressions that may turn out to be incorrect.
Moderator Response:[PW} I agree: the never-ending onslaught of denier drivel has had, unfortunately, a corrosive effect on even the most genial of discussions and some--I am not absolved in this either--of us have an 'itchy rigger finger,' when we think we see a concern troll in its initial salvos.
I think it instructive, this bit of behavior and the poster's observations about it, and urge all to give everyone who visits SkS the benefit of the doubt, unless/until they show what their true motives are in commenting here.
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Dikran Marsupial at 01:17 AM on 14 November 2013Models are unreliable
dvaytw It sounds to me as if your firnd may be thinking of "flux corrections" but modern climate models have improved to the point where they are no longer necessary. Sadly unless he can give a concrete example, it is difficult to address his concerns more directly. The modellers do however perform experiments to determine the sensitivity to the parameters, which I understand are called "perturbed physics experiments". IIRC there are on-line repositories that contain the results of such experiments resulting from a sort of SETI@home type project where people can use their spare processor time to run climate models (I'll see if I can find it again).
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dvaytw at 01:06 AM on 14 November 2013Models are unreliable
I have a friend of a friend who is a physicist. He is ~not~ an AGW denier; he does however have objections to models as he claims they are used in climate science. He fears that, to quote him:
Where are the studies of model sensitivity to variations in the way any given model fixes up non-conservation of mass and/or energy? Every model I have looked at in detail has non-conservative processes, and they are always fixed up by hand at the end of each time step. This is a very bad thing. and I have yet to find any study on the sensitivity to the various choices one might make as to how to do this.
I suggested he post this question himself, but since he didn't feel it worth his time (which, I pointed out, is maybe why, though ignorant myself, I shouldn't take his objection too seriously), I told him I'd post it and see what people had to say. If this question doesn't explain his position clearly enough, I have some longer expositions of it I can post as well.
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DSL at 00:43 AM on 14 November 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #46A
GISS L-OTI for October is out: 0.61C, the fifth warmest October. By simple average, I have 2013 at .596C, on track to be the third warmest year in the record and easily the warmest for years with MEI average negative.
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Esop at 00:07 AM on 14 November 2013Cosmic rays fall cosmically behind humans in explaining global warming
Fall of 2009: Svensmark predicts an immediate and rapid cooling
2010: Warmest year on record (tied with 2005)
Svensmark has been much less outspoken in the last few years.
Still heraleded as the man who proved AGW wrong by sections of the anti-science crowd, of course (and clueless MSM journalists, especially in Norway)
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tlitb1 at 22:46 PM on 13 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
@BillyJoe
Google is your friend. Try "john howard religious zealots".
Thanks but I’m afraid Google isn't my constructor. I've tried Google and not found any examples of Howard literally describing scientists as "religious zealots".
In the above linked speech I *do* see he talks about
"...zealous advocates of action on global warming..."
"...public support for over-zealous action on global warming has passed."
But I have found nothing that remotely supports this statement:
Howard characterised scientists who accept the evidence that humans are disrupting climate as “religious zealots”.
This preceding statement implies it is derived from specific source statements emanating from Howard himself, not interpretations found in the media.
This piece is supposed to be "deconstructing Howard" not the media.
I think any reasonable person would think a more direct quote or reference can easily be offered up to justify the claim that Howard has described any scientists as “religious zealots".
Moderator Response:[JH] You are on the verge of skating on the thin ice excessive repitition which is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy. Pleae read the Comments Policy and adhere to it. Thank you.
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Tom Curtis at 22:39 PM on 13 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
tlitb1 @1, I am not aware of John Howard calling climate scientists "religious zealots". In the lecture, he does say:
"I chose the lecture’s title ["One religion is enough"] largely in reaction to the sanctimonious tone employed by so many of those who advocate quite substantial, and costly, responses to what they see as irrefutable evidence that the world’s climate faces catastrophe, against people who do share their view. To them the cause has become a substitute religion."
He does not call anybody a "zealot" in the lecture, but refers to "public support for over-zealous action", and refers to "the more zealous advocates of action on global warming". Neither term implies directly that anybody are zealots as such. There is widespread reporting of the contents of the lecture as indicating that Howard had called the "climate change spruikers religious zealots" to quote a headline from The Australian. Note, however, that "religious zealots" does not appear in quotes, and so is not a direct quotation, but rather a paraphrase or interpretation of Howard's claims.
Absent evidence of a direct quotation, it appears that John Cook has mistakenly taken an indirect quotation to be a direct quotation. It is not clear whether he was original in doing so, or accepted, without due diligence, the mistake of another. In any event, the phrase "religious zealot" in the OP should not be in quotation marks.
Response:[John Cook] Howard does actually use the term zealot - but you have to watch the YouTube video of the speech where he opens with some off-the-cuff remarks. I've updated my blog post an excerpt of his exact words. Thanks for the comments, Tom.
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BillyJoe at 22:11 PM on 13 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
tlitb1,
Google is your friend. Try "john howard religious zealots". Lots of links. This one explains his ignorance:
"Mr Howard revealed before the speech that the only book he had read on climate change was Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming, published in 2008.
Mr Howard said he read it twice, once when he was writing his autobiography, when he used it to counter advice for stronger action on climate change given to him by government departments when he had been prime minister."http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/the-claims-are-exaggerated-john-howard-rejects-predictions-of-global-warming-catastrophe-20131106-2wzza.html
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shoyemore at 22:03 PM on 13 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
Howard's remarks put me in mind of a saying of the great statistician and management consultant W.E. Deming.
"In God we trust; all others must bring data.“
Abbott and Howard (more like Abbott and Costello) are saying "Trust me; I know better than the data"
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BillyJoe at 21:59 PM on 13 November 2013Deconstructing former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's 'gut feeling' on climate change
John Howard supported an emmissions trading scheme in 2006 for the following reason:
"... late in 2006 my Government hit a 'perfect storm' on the issue. Drought had lingered for several years in many parts of Eastern Australia, leading to severe restrictions on the daily use of water; not for the first or last time the bushfire season started early; the report by Sir Nicholas Stern hit the shelves, with the author himself visiting Australia, and lastly the former US Vice President Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth. To put it bluntly 'doing something' about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia"
He is now rejecting action on climate change for the following reason:
"In the past five years, the dynamic of the global warming debate has shifted away from exaggerated acceptance of the worst possible implications of what a majority of climate scientists tell us, towards a more balanced, and questioning approach"
In other words, political expediency.
(plagiarised from here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-07/green-when-grave-facts-and-political-calculation-collide/5076354)
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