It’s been an extraordinary 12 months in climate science, I’ve often said nobody knows how much warming additional CO2 will cause, including me. The implication being that all the IPCC models could be right. I’ve also often said that the IPCC is a political group before a scientific organization. These past 12 months have been a series of blows to the body and head of climate science which have left me more skeptical of their conclusions than I ever have been in the past.
First there was climategate, exposing the conspiratorial style corruption of the science, with browbeating for those scientists who weren’t repeating the party line, fear of publishing criticisms, discussion of removal of journal editors with the wrong opinions, blocking of FOI requests for data, hiding of probelmatic data – multiple times. We’ve all discussed it here endlessly, but it’s real it does exist and it did happen.
Then there were the coverups of the problem, covered far more widely by the news than the original event. Scientists exonerated! All you need is an above 80 IQ and enough time to read the emails and you know it’s crap. What does that say about the power of governments involved when they can create multiple reviews all coming to the same blatantly incorrect conclusions. What does it say about the state of the media when they all report the successful exoneration as thought it might possibly be correct. Fortunately, we don’t yet live in the anti-universe they seem to want for us. I wonder why they think they should print disinformation? The scandal would make a lot more money for them if reported honestly. The false exonerations made the truth worse and more obvious than the original emails.
After that, we see multiple discussions of variance loss in paleoclimate reconstructions Christiansen and public comments on Ammanns paper . Each step coming closer to the reality that the calibration methods don’t really work. The death of the rest of the hockeysticks. To me my recent CA post on the near complete lack of temperature signal in proxy data was also fairly shocking.
Recently, McKitrick, McIntyre and Hermans paper proving beyond a doubt that models overshoot observations by 2 to 4 times. This combined with knowledge of the repeated aggressive blocking of the correction to Ben Santer’s paper which showed good agreement between observations and models. The correction used exactly the same methods, yet more up to date data, and for some reason couldn’t get past the gatekeepers at the journals. Again exposing the mechanism by which reasonable work is kept from publication. This is the single most destructive paper to the estimates of severity of AGW I’ve EVER read. It still hasn’t had enough discussion. The methods were unique enough that people didn’t react as strongly as they could have.
All of that didn’t end here, Pat Michaels reported in the Wall Street Journal having 4 manuscripts blocked this year since climategate. And just in the last couple of days Roy Spencer has produced a rather unique result. He’s demonstrated that cloud feedback to warming, at least on a short term scale is negative.
In getting this result published, Roy Spencer wrote:
After years of re-submissions and re-writes — always to accommodate a single hostile reviewer — our latest paper on feedbacks has finally been published by Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR).
Years of his life to publish a single paper. Dr. Spencer is careful in the paper to state that long term feedback ‘might’ be different than short term, but the graphs seem to indicate that the feedback is generally negative. In addition, model feedback examined by these methods matched the model long term feedback. The model had a known equivalent short and long term feedback. The implication of the model verification is evidence for long term negative feedback and a net climate sensitivity to doubling of CO2 of about 0.6 C. Or basically nothing! Demonstrating with measured data, that increased CO2 is potentially no problem.
In other words, another body blow to extremist AGW.
The paper is here, and thankfully not behind a paywall.Spencer-Braswell-JGR-2010[1]
I’ve read it fairly thoroughly but haven’t figured everything out. I’m not familiar enough with the various climate models, and have a few other questions but the satellite plots of short and longwave radiation vs temperature anomaly are quite clear. In other words, don’t take my word for it, I’m sure there will be critique from the pros.
Dr. Spencer has thankfully started allowing comments at his blog. He’s done a reader friendly description of what the paper represents. You just need to remember “internal radiative forcing,” means ‘probably clouds’.
The link to his blog discussion is here.
The paper and blog post are very much worth the read.
What a wild year for climate blogging.
the Air Vent 
Physics vs. Climate “Science”.
A positive feedback from water or clouds would have run the planet off the cliff eons ago. It’s preposterous. It fails every possible sniff and “Reasonableness” test.
Edit note: Only 1 “e” in “suffers”. 😉
Jeff, you and your audience live in a fantasy world.
2010 will be second or third warmest year on record. the arctic sea ice recovery story looks not good this year.
facts simply beat the “climategate” phantom story.
Sod: Read the paper and you have no credibility after that comment on climategate.
3#
??
So, you think that’s inconsistent with a general rising temperature trend of 0,6ºC / century -for a couple of centurys, wich may continue, or may not? And you think such a trend is consistent with IPCC’s end of the world? Well, speaking about fantasies …
#3:
First of all, your arguments did not address the climate sensitivity issue, and the model discrepancy with the observations. That was a ridiculous smog cloud argument which did NOT prove ANYTHING about climate sensitivity AT ALL.
Secondly, we had the 2nd warmest El Nino since the record year – of course we get anomalies near record levels. See after one year what incoming LA NINA will do.
Thirdly, Arctic sea ice will propably be higher than in 2009, or at least higher than 2008. So the recovery from 2007 weather phenomenoms IS continuing.
It has indeed been quite a year. I think the inflated importance given to severely-limited computer models has led to intellectual and moral damage in many climate ‘activists’ and ‘scientists’. These models deserve a much more modest and less-respected role than they have enjoyed to date, a role presumably so exalted precisely because of its suitability as support for various political ambitions in and around the UN and the ludicrous yet influential ‘Club of Rome’.
Josh says it better with a lighter touch on Bishop Hill, here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2010/8/28/josh-33.html
I guess you can’t do a drive-by trolling on flat tires, Sod.
Supposedly, in the real world: With great power comes great responsibility
In the actual real world of climate science, post-Climategate ‘inquiries’: With great power comes great whining
“The false exonerations made the truth worse and more obvious than the original emails.”
It’s amazing how the Hockey Team, the climate science community and the IPCC seem to be hell-bent on admitting as few problems as possible as late as possible. It’s as successful as Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, only much larger. I’m just wondering if this is the biggest PR failure in history.
the futility of Man-made Climate Control via CO2
Just watch the video
the futility of Man-made Climate Control via CO2
Just watch the video
We know increases in [CO2] are forcings that will increase the Earth’s surface temperature (on average). How the climate system responds overall isn’t so clear.
We also know that injections of aerosols into the high atmosphere by volcanoes are forcings that will decrease the Earth’s surface temperature (on average). Unlike rises in [CO2], aerosols are transient; they get washed out on a time frame of months to years.
Volcanic aerosols should be informative as to the sensitivity of the overall climate system to forcings. In that regard, I had a short conversation with commenter Julio at Lucia’s Blackboard in the comments to a July post, beginning at #48623. (It was a short exchange without a definitive conclusion; search for “Pinatubo”.)
My impression is that Pinatubo’s forcing in W/m^2 could be fairly precisely calculated, and than many GCMs predicted an effect over many months of about -0.4 C. However, the measured effect on surface temperature was modest, half or less of the predicted value.
From my naive point of view, this would seem to suggest that there are negative feedbacks in the climate system that attenuated the effects of Pinatubo, and that such negative feedbacks are not well-represented in many GCMs.
Is this a reasonable interpretation? Are there strong counter-arguments?
Jeff,
Totally agree. I want to emphasize some points. First, I’ve also made the point you stress about the whitewashes. They do lead to the logical conclusion that the corruption of CAGW science is “even worse than we thought”!
Second, the behavior exposed in the e-mails is really bad and that is obvious without reference to any formal inquiry by a committee. If that kind of corrupt behavior does not constitute scientific fraud or academic fraud (not necessarily the same thing), then science and the academy are clearly not worthy of our respect. The failure of science or the academy to embrace ethical standards does not require society to accept blatantly corrupt advice in the making of public policy. They can choose to swim in the sewer, but society need not jump amidst the filth and stench with them.
Third, I am increasingly puzzled by the failure of logic which seems to have seized so many alarmist apologists. See for example the claim that the hockey stick “doesn’t matter” (or Rahmstorf’s silliness, or Jones’ UHI China fraud, or the exposure of the massive siting failures, or the appalling quality control problems, or the volume of false claims by the IPCC, etc., etc.). Each of these failures points to conclusion that the people in charge of most of the climate science apparatus are incompetent. The evidence is becoming overwhelming. Note, some also appear to be corrupt as well, but the conclusion they are incompetent is the more important one.
The scientific method has broken down. Crap isn’t corrected (mostly because no one ever bothers to check it). The apologists resist making any effort to connect the dots or see the big picture. In a sense, this is like Mann’s thimble trick with the bristlecones writ large. They argue that one small mistake doesn’t invalidate the whole theory, but the whole theory is built on an ever growing assembly of similar mistakes built by the same incompetents who have demonstrated that they can’t distinguish solid ground from a pile of crap.
Finally, Willis’ discussion of the Armagh study points out something that has bothered me for a while. There is a disturbing tendency for these guys to announce findings which make broad sweeping conclusions after conducting a minor, short sighted study of a tiny bit of data. They appear to be re-enacting the old story of the blind men and the elephant. Perhaps the worst example of this was “it must be CO2 because we can’t think of another explanation”. [eyes roll]
Re: AMac (Aug 29 09:19), As Eric and Bart have pointed out or alluded to, one of the interesting aspects of the debate is to consider making the assumption that water is slightly negative. Then to balance what has been observed, the climate sensitivity is greater. What does that mean if we continue to raise the CO2? Is it more likely to swamp out the effect of water, since it is at relatively close to saturation? For someone like me, I would expect that the volume of water, and the fact that humidity is increased by the mechanical energy of wind, that it cannot be swamped. But is that what would happen? Sometimes, I think the castle mentality’s worse result is ignoring or downplaying where our concerns should be, rather than where they seem to be forced into.
Jeff,
Your claim that the exonerations were covered more widely in the media than the accusations sounds opposite to what I think it was. I have the opposite experience with Dutch media (just anecdotal evidence of course) and Scott Mandia looked at some google statistics to also conclude that the accusations were in fact covered much more than the exonerations: http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/climategate-coverage-unfair-unbalanced/
According to Trenbeth, the surface of the earth receives about 490 watts per square meter, and about 100 watts of this is dissipated in latent heat. As temperatures drop, the amount of water vapor in the air drops exponentially, so the ratio of latent heat/sensible heat should drop as temperatures go down, and rise as temperatures go up. There’s obviously a large negative feedback effect there in regards to sensible heat- the more heat going into the earth, the smaller and smaller fraction goes into increasing temperatures and the larger and larger the fraction going into evaporation and rainfall.
Ah, yes, what a year! It is truly fascinating to observe how the truth is coming out loud and clear, despite the fact that the extremists had/have ALL the power: all the money, virtually all the media attention, all relevant governmental agencies, all environmental NGOs, IPCC/UN, virtually all the “scientific” organizations. A few people and the Internet can take a lot of credit for this amazing phenomenon.
#17 Bart
Perhaps, sort of, but they were “exonerated” from the very start. There were media reports that said there was nothing bad in the emails even before anyone had had time to read of them. The Google statistics survey is worth nothing unless you consider the content and tenor of the articles found.
In general, a claim that’s being contested and is the subject of debate and disagreement is likely to get more media coverage than one that’s presented as a definitive truth. So the numbers could mean the opposite of what is being suggested.
Sod: “2010 will be second or third warmest year on record”
And 1934 was probably the warmest. And the 1930’s were probablyt he warmest decade (beofre adjustments that cooled older records).
So?
NEUTRON REPULSION . . .
. . . is the energy source that powers the Sun and the cosmos.
Neutron repulsion is an empirical fact recorded in the nuclear rest data of every nucleus with two or more neutrons.
The following manuscript is currently under review:
Click to access Neutron_Repulsion.pdf
If published, it will help expose the misleading “concensus opinions” on Earth’s climate and the Standard Solar Model of a Hydrogen-filled Sun.
The first half of the manuscript is a summary of experimental data from 1960 to 1983 and subsequent efforts to manipulate data after 1983 to support the illusion the Earth’s heat source is a giant ball of Hydrogen heated by H-fusion.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
And 1934 was probably the warmest
it is shocking, how long this piece of misinformation stays alive.
it should be a reason for every single responsible person, independent of position on the subject, to shun and attack the blogs and institutions that spread misinformation like that.
ps: globally, 1934 was definitely NOT the warmest year on record!
“ps: globally, 1934 was definitely NOT the warmest year on record!”
You may be right; hundreds of studies show that it was much warmer in 1200 AD. If you can explain why, I might listen to your opinions.
So, Sod is cherry picking the arguments he wants to answer. Good to know.
From Post:
“What does that say about the power of governments involved when they can create multiple reviews all coming to the same blatantly incorrect conclusions. What does it say about the state of the media when they all report the successful exoneration as thought it might possibly be correct. ”
Ummmm, global average IQ less than 80?
#5 Sod: Read the paper and you have no credibility after that comment on climategate.
after? 😉
yes indeed, what a year it has been. Still a ways to go though as we have co2 being blamed for the cold in South America and the heat in Russia. Strange days.
#28TGSG
Tamino had an article about the hot July in Russia called “Red Hot” where he pointed out that July anomaly for Moscow was a 3.6 sigma event and that “t’aint likely” that this is merely natural variability and unrelated to AGW. Reading this I went to USHCN to look at northern continental US average July max temps in the 1930’s (reasonably similar geographically to Moscow). I plotted the data for 4 stations from Northern North Dakota and found that July 1936 ranged from 3.4 to 4 sigma using the 60 year period begining from late 1800’s (start of continuous records).
(Yes Jeff, I did this in R. Not where I want to be with it yet but I have been doing some work for the last month or so 😉 ).
Sorry for the OT.
#29, now that sounds like a fun post.
#30
Yep it would. To say that July 1936 max temps were an outlier in ND would be an understatment. July (monthly) max for Willow City was a whopping 95.42F. Way out there by itself on a histogram. The next closest was 90.12F in 1894.
Oliver K. Manuel (#23),
While I am a physicist, my field is electro-optics (lasers, intense gamma ray sources etc.).
When I read your paper on neutron repulsion my first reaction was that you are deranged. However, as I continued to read some of your stuff began to make sense. Now I am totally confused.
I think the appropriation of the term “models” by the IPCC-Cult is unjustified. Their computer games don’t qualify. “Mock-ups”? “Illustrations”?
Get professional model-makers, statisticians, and forecasters involved from the get-go and you avoid all this pseudo-scientific abuse.
Gallopingcamel #32
Thank you for your comment.
The first half of new paper documents that the practice of hiding and/or manipulating data took control of the space science community soon after Nature published a candid 1983 news report on “The demise of established dogmas on the formation of the Solar System”, Nature 303 (1983) 286:
Click to access swart-1983.pdf
Conspiratorial style corruption of science, with browbeating for those scientists who weren’t repeating the party line, started in about 1983 and hid from the public overwhelming evidence of a.) Solar mass fractionation and the Sun’s iron-rich interior, and b.) Neutron repulsion as the energy source that generates solar luminosity, solar neutrinos, and solar hydrogen in the proportions observed:
Click to access Neutron_Repulsion.pdf
I would be happy to participate in a discussion and to answer questions on this matter here or in a separate thread devoted to neutron repulsion.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Sod: “2010 will be second or third warmest year on record.”
Logically that means there hasn’t been a warming trend since the warmest year on record then.
“the arctic sea ice recovery story looks not good this year.”
My money is on Joe Bastardi to be right:
“This year I have a major ice melt season forecasted though, even as global temps turn rapidly down. But dont fool yourself, this will be almost back to the 2007 min before its over this year. However a major recovery will occur in the coming two years so the min in 11 and 12 will be a greater extent than 09. NH ice is in a recovery, but in a herky jerk one step down , 2 steps up fashion. The real turn in this will come in 10-15 years when the AMO joins the PDO with cyclical cold in tandem.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/24/the-sea-ice-monster-its-a-scaly-thing/#comment-395961
#13;
David McKay’s “Sustainable Energy” takes a number of the assumed numbers used by Warmists and then runs them through the actual extrapolations. The conclusions are that TOTAL human influence on the climate to date has been about 0.09°C, max. Crippling the planet’s economy will achieve a mitigation of increases in the next century by 0.014°C, max.
His concessions are far too generous, and those minuscule figures are seriously overstated, of course. They should actually be much lower.
The book the video refers to is available in PDF free, as is a 10-page synopsis here: http://withouthotair.com/download.html
Highly recommended.
You folks should learn to ignore “sod” – I do.
#38;
Yes, he’s been relentlessly trolling for AGW and other progressive delusions for years, on multiple sites, and never absorbs a single datum, just changes the subject and reruns his talking points. The original “scroll-by”.
Logically that means there hasn’t been a warming trend since the warmest year on record then.
your logic is still wrong. look at this series:
2010.1
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
can you figure out the trend? (i did correct you already in the “understanding climate” topic. hint: you do not understand climate at all!)
Anthony and Brian, two comments in this block made massive errors. (“1934” and “no trend possible since 1998”)
instead of correcting these obvious and substantial errors, you attack me. sticking to your team is more important to your folks, than the truth is?!?
#38 Brian H. I see what you mean about not absorbing anything, he’s ignoring the McShane and Wyner paper and is trolling on minutiae, rattling off number of year series like they mean something.
It’s fun to watch. Next he’ll be on about something else (probably that we are ignoring him) while ignoring the M&W paper further.
#29 #31 Layman Lurker
It’s also worth asking whether 3.6 sigma is actually relevant to the disaster, even though everyone seems to assume so. The actual difference in temperature between a normal heat wave and an extreme one is small, a few degrees at most. It’s counterintuitive that this would have been the critical factor in starting the fires, especially since it’s long term dry weather that makes the most difference.
Pls, let the sodster continue with his messages. He does an excellent job further damaging the credibility of the AGW advocates.
sod, since I don’t understand climate why don’t you explain what your series means please?
PS sod, I’d like to cut you off before you make a silly claim like the trend exists starting from 1999 as in this comment I have specifically stated ” since the warmest year on record”. Draw a straight line from that year to this and the slope is obviously negative. Although I do see now GISS wants to make 1998 cooler to avoid this issue.
It’s been reported but not emphasized that there are extensive peat bogs around Moscow, where the fires have been raging.
As part of the push to modernize in the first half of the 20th century, the communist government engaged in large-scale drainage projects, cutting canals and the like. There were two objectives: one was to turn bogs into usable land (where many dachas are today), and the second was to dry out the peat, for use as low-grade fuel in power stations.
Prior to this intervention, heat waves presumably wouldn’t have led to massive, persistent underground fires that generate huge amounts of smoke.
The media properly identifies the heat wave as unprecedented in the historical record. However, readers and viewers are left with the impression that the notable environmental effect of the heat wave — the fire-caused air pollution — is the consequence of climate change. And it is… but only to a limited degree (heh).
#47 AMac
Logically it could be a consequence of climate change to some tiny degree, although as I have pointed out, the temperature difference needed to produce an extraordinary heat wave rather than an average one is not large and by itself should have little impact.
What is clear is that if climate change has affected the likelihood of such events, the effect is not yet strong enough to be detectable statistically. And it might not be detectable even with 6 degrees of global warming, as the alarmists predict.
#14 AMac said
Appears to have been done:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/spencer-on-pinatubo-and-climate-sensitivity/
Jeff,
Indeed, “It’s been an extraordinary 12 months in climate science . . .”.
The current events you outline, such as the new papers by M&S, M&M&H and S&B, are milestones on the road toward re-establishing the scientific process as it bears on climate knowledge.
Your blog is part of that process and I thank you for that leadership.
Still, the longer (far view) strategy begs for definition. Such a strategy sustains effort, without it there will be just random wanderings.
A far view strategy needs to be based on very fundamental concepts. I am looking forward to that dialog on it here someday.
John
#43 Dagfinn
I went to GISS to map the spatial anomaly for 1936. Lo and behold, it turns out that Moscow had a similar July in 1936. (Tamino used only continuous records which did not start until 1960 so did not refer to 1936). I did some quick searching for articles on the event but found nothing pertaining to fires or heat wave related disasters in 1936. However “World Climate Report” found the same GISS anomaly map for an article posted August 12th.
I haven’t downloaded the data for Moscow but this article from Russia claims that July 1936 in Moscow was only off of 2010 by 0.2C: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100724/159935998.html
#51
Correction to above – 1936 off 2010 by 0.3C.
The Greasemonkey for Firefox add-on killfile works here. It makes it really easy to ignore trolls.
Thanks, DeWitt. There’s not much in the way of explanation or instruction up front, but it becomes self-evident once you go back to a comments page.
#52;
Counterbalanced by cold-killed penguins in South Africa. And fish in Bolivia. And people in Peru and Argentina. ;(
Never ignore Sod. It is a wonderful natural thing. SODding your lawn can really make a difference. It is a quick way to landscape also. Gotta love that SOD!!
Too bad there is no intelligence in SOD. Just built in automatic processes.
PS sod, I’d like to cut you off before you make a silly claim like the trend exists starting from 1999 as in this comment I have specifically stated ” since the warmest year on record”. Draw a straight line from that year to this and the slope is obviously negative. Although I do see now GISS wants to make 1998 cooler to avoid this issue.
drawing a line between two points is NOT how we calculate a linear trend in a dataset.
a judge has ruled against Cuccinelli’s witch-hunt against Mann.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/08/judge_quashes_cuccinelli_subpo.html
sorry guys, but the investigations into “climategate” have found that you were wrong. multiple false articles based on reporting by North had to be retracted by newspapers.
and the climate facts this year simply didn t follow “sceptic” claims about “cooling” either.
you can t “killfile” facts, you know?!?
KK, #56;
Actually, the ‘Sod’ in question is Brit slang for ‘fug’. As in, “Sod off!”
#58 Sod, I don’t mind your trolling but the claim that the Climategate scandal was incorrect is simply a lie. Its intentionally written to misdirect the casual reader.
58.sod said
August 30, 2010 at 2:30 pm
a judge has ruled against Cuccinelli’s witch-hunt against Mann.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/08/judge_quashes_cuccinelli_subpo.html
—————–
Sod,
No joy yet for UVA and Mann. This is a step in a tireless and relentless pursuit of due process. It means Cuccinelli will adjust and resubmit. He only needs to get one little toe in the door then UVA and Mann will need to be open about what happened. Patience Sod, justice will be bourne out.
John
While I wish that Cuccinelli would just abandon his misguided efforts, for Sod at #58 to dismiss Climategate is absurd. As usual.
Tom Fuller,
What concerns do you have against due process in the matter of Cuccinelli? If he (Cuccinelli) is incorrect the justice system will find it and prevent further action. The current court decision does not appear to prevent continuing efforts to seek info from UVa or Mann.
John
2010 will be the warmest year on record if Hansen “assembles” the temperature record.
#64;
… and picks which weather stations to read.
Although Spencer & Braswell’s paper is compelling and admirably clear in comparison with most technical papers I’ve had the misfortune to wade through, there’s nothing like going through the numbers oneself to dispel the inevitable remaining ambiguities–and reveal latent ones. tAV is the first place I would look to for that type of effort. Is such an exercise planned here? Alternatively, is anyone aware of a supplemental-information site for their paper?
Among the complications is obtaining, from the raw satellite readings (whose retrieval is already beyond my ken), the net SW-LW values used by the authors as forcings.