The Nobel Prize (for propaganda)

Correlation ain't causation.

But for some time I have been noticing that the correlations between certain aspects of solar activity and certain aspects of climate are getting really rather impressive -- far more so than anything relating to carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide certainly can affect climate, but so for sure can other things, and in explaining the ups and downs of past climate, before industrialisation, variations in the sun are looking better and better as an explanation. That does not mean the sun causes current climate change, but it certainly suggests that it is at least possible that forcings more powerful than carbon dioxide could be at work.

I am not yet a solar partisan in this debate, nor do I plan to become one. But I find the hypothesis that solar variation has been stronger than carbon dioxide in recent decades sufficiently intriguing that I do not see why it should be dismissed yet.

Here are some of the correlations that have impressed me. Some may be wrong, or misleading. Some come from more trustworthy [strikethrough]causes[/strikethrough] sources than others. Some might have been smoothed or otherwise manipulated. I don't really know. But it's interesting to lay them out...


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http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/keeping-open-mind-about-sun

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...OK, so I was right. The Boyce paper was nonsense, the claimed trend was spurious, plankton biomass is holding somewhere near steady or even increasing, and a number of independent records show that the Boyce et al. paper is garbage built on bad assumptions.

I bring this up for three reasons. The first is to show the continuing shabby quality of peer-review at scientific magazines when the subject is even peripherally related to climate. Nature magazine blew it again, and unfortunately, these days that’s no news at all. It’s just more shonky science from the AGW crowd … and people claim the reason the public doesn’t trust climate scientists is a “communications problem”? It’s not. It’s a garbage science problem, and all the communications theory in the world won’t fix garbage science...

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Assuming that the Levitus record of global oceanic heat content increase is anywhere near accurate, what might it tell us about climate sensitivity; e.g., how much global warming we might expect from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations? As we will see, the oceans have not warmed nearly as much as would be expected if the climate system really is as sensitive as the IPCC claims.

The following now-familiar plot of ocean heat content change for the surface – 700 meter depth layer is the result of a layer average temperature increase of about 0.17 deg. C over the 55 year record:

In the meantime, global average sea surface temperatures have reportedly increased at about 3.5 times this rate, about 0.6 deg. C, based upon the HadSST2 data.

As Bob Tisdale has pointed out, the above plot expressing heat content in terms of gazillions of Joules sounds dramatic (if you didn’t know, 10^22 is 1 gazillion) — but the 0.2 deg. C warming upon which it is based?…maybe not so much.

Nevertheless, what is useful about the heat content data is that it is relatively easy to then calculate from the yearly changes in ocean heat content how much of an energy imbalance (energy flow rate into the ocean) is required to achieve such changes.

This ends up being an average of 0.2 Watts per sq. meter for the 55 year period 1955-2010…a calculation that Levitus also made. Here’s what the yearly energy imbalances look like which are required to cause the yearly changes in ocean heat content:

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...The bottom line is that the ocean has not warmed nearly as much as would be expected based upon the climate sensitivities exhibited by all of the climate models tracked by the IPCC.

Now, what I do not fully understand is why the IPCC claims that the ocean heat content increases indeed ARE consistent with the climate models, despite the relatively high sensitivity of all of the IPCC models. While some might claim that it is because warming is actually occurring much deeper in the ocean than 700 m, the vertical profiles I have seen suggest warming decreases rapidly with depth, and has been negligible at a depth of 700 m.

Also, note that I have not even addressed any natural sources of warming. If Mother Nature was also involved in the ocean warming during 1955-2010, then this would imply an even LOWER climate sensitivity than I have estimated here.

Full article:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05...ns-1955-2010-implies-low-climate-sensitivity/

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After months of soul-searching, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has agreed on reforms intended to restore confidence in its integrity and its assessments of climate science.

Created as a United Nations body in 1988 to analyse the latest knowledge about Earth's changing climate, it has worked with thousands of scientists and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. But its reputation crumbled when its leadership failed to respond effectively to mistakes — including a notorious error about the rate of Himalayan glacier melting — that had slipped into its most recent assessment report (see Nature 463, 276–277; 2010).

That discovery coincided with the furore over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, UK (see Nature 462, 397; 2009). Some e-mails seemed to show that leading climate scientists, who had contributed key findings to previous IPCC reports, had tried to stifle critics.

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...The change in my written views since 2008 is most easily summarized by my rejection of argumentum ad populam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum ). I along with many others trusted what the IPCC has done and generally supported the consensus. I no longer substitute the judgment of the IPCC for my own in my written or oral presentations. And if you think I was wrong to do so in the first place, well so do I, but most everyone else was doing it, and I fell for the argument “don’t trust what one scientist says, but trust what thousands of international scientists have to say in a formal assessment process.” The other change has been my serious investigation into the subject of scientific uncertainty, which I think has been woefully lacking in most of the field and certainly the IPCC...


http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/02/is-extreme-weather-linked-to-global-warming/#comment-73265

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... As Montford explains, the Hockey Stick refers to an attempt by global warming alarmists to mislead people into believing the Medieval Warm Period of the 13th century, when coastal Greenland was actually green, trees in California grew above today’s tree line, and wine grapes grew in places too cold to grow them today, never occurred.

As Nigel Calder, author of The Chilling Stars, explains in the foreword to The Hockey Stick Illusion, this is a thriller about code-breaking—not Hitler’s codes or al Qaeda’s codes, but computer codes programmed in a manner to produce a false claim about the temperature record.

The Hockey Stick made its grand entrance in the scientific debate in a paper published in April 1998 in the journal Nature. The senior author was a then relatively obscure scientist named Michael Mann, who had just received his Ph.D. and was serving as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachusetts. The paper is commonly referred to as MBH98 for the three authors, including Ray Bradley and Malcom Hughes.

The MBH98 paper describes, but does not include, the 112 sets of data the authors claimed to have studied in forming a temperature analysis of the previous millennium. The authors referred to the data as “indicators”—commonly described as “proxies”—in which tree rings and other items are asserted to convey temperatures long before humans set up a global network of mercury thermometers.

Statistical experts Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick suspected something was funny about the unprecedented claims made in the MBH98 paper and the authors’ failure to disclose the raw data upon which they made their claims. The Hockey Stick Illusion details how McIntyre and McKitrick spent years navigating endless roadblocks and obstacle courses to obtain the raw data and unravel the statistical gymnastics performed by the MBH98 authors to make their maverick claim current-day temperatures are higher than those of the Medieval Warm Period.

Reading Montford’s book, it is impossible to miss the parallels between McIntyre and McKitrick unraveling the MBH hockey stick scheme and federal law enforcement officials exposing the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. One must hope fervently that Mann’s deception will get equally extensive exposure.

Mann and his coauthors used a variety of tricks to make their analysis of their unpublished data appear plausible to those not expert in statistical analysis. Montford offers clear tutorials on every one of Mann’s statistical tricks, which could make this book an excellent selection for outside reading in a college statistics course. You do not need to understand statistics to enjoy this book, but if you do, you will especially enjoy Montford’s tutorials on such things as centring, regression analysis, and principal components.

After years of investigation and analysis, McIntyre and McKitrick showed a graph of the earth’s temperature during the past thousand years does not resemble a hockey stick...

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I just love it when the authors of these sorts of articles start out with a series of mistakes…

The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?

by Adam Frank

About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended. The planet became warmer, wetter and entered the geological era scientists call the Holocene. Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans. The entire history of our civilization (agriculture, city building, writing etc.) is bound within the Holocene and its bounty of productive land and oceans.

Now, it appears, the Holocene is over…

[...]

NPR http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/...n-humans-survive-a-human-age?ft=1&f=114424647

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The author, an astrophysicist, must have never taken a course in Quaternary geology.

Mistake #1: “About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended.”

The glaciers retreated; but we are still very much in the grip of an ice age that began about 35 million years ago (the x-axes of first four graphs are denominated in millions of years ago (MYA) – Today is to the left)…

The boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene marks the beginning of the Cenozoic ice age. It’s the fourth major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon…

The Holocene is an interglacial period within an ice age. The only thing that distinguishes the Holocene from previous Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the fact that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction…

Yes… I know that there’s not much evidence that our ancestors were capable of causing so much extinction prior to the invention of capitalism – But those megafauna had coped with all of the previous glacial-interglacial cycles just fine, so long as our ancestors stayed in Africa.

At this point in time there is no reason to assume that the Holocene marked the end of the Cenozoic ice age… There’s not even any reason to think that it marked the end of very cold Quaternary Period…

Mistake #2: “Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans.”

The Holocene has been a heck of a lot more stable than the preceding Pleistocene glacial episode (the x-axes of next three graphs are denominated in calendar years – Today is to the right)…

But it has been far from stable…

And it hasn’t always been nice to humans…

The Holocene of the Dark Ages Cold Period and Little Ice Age were quite often very unkind to humans.

Will there one day be a clear geological distinction between the “Anthropocene” and the Holocene and the rest of the Quaternary? I seriously doubt it – But no one will know for hundreds of thousands of years.

Professor Frank started out with a paragraph-full of mistakes; which then formed the basis of his sheer speculation about the Anthropocene’s future relevance in the geologic record.

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An Oxford academic has won the right to read previously secret data on climate change held by the University of East Anglia (UEA). The decision, by the government's information commissioner, Christopher Graham, is being hailed as a landmark ruling that will mean that thousands of British researchers are required to share their data with the public.


The ruling also marks a victory for critics of the UEA and its Climatic Research Unit in the "climategate" affair. It comes at the end of a two-year rearguard action by UEA climate scientists to prevent publication of their "crown jewels", an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office.


Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.


Graham gave the UEA one month to deliver the data, which includes more than 4m individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. The commissioner's office said this was his first ruling on demands for climate data made in the wake of the climategate affair.


Critics of the UEA's scientists say an independent analysis of the temperature data may reveal that Phil Jones and his colleagues have misinterpreted the evidence of global warming. They may have failed to allow for local temperature influences, such as the growth of cities close to many of the thermometers.


But Jonathan Jones, who is not a climate scientist, said he thought "the most significant features of this decision are the precedents that have been set". The commissioner is likely to rule more generally in favour of public access to scientific data.


Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, public bodies such as universities have to share their data unless there are good reasons not to. But when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available.


But in a damning verdict, Graham said suggestions that international relations could be upset by disclosure were "highly speculative", and "it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information requested."


Jonathan Jones said this week that he took up the cause of data freedom after Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician, had requests for the data turned down. He thought this was an unreasonable response when Phil Jones had already shared the data with academic collaborators, including Prof Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. He asked to be given the data already sent to Webster, and was also turned down. So he appealed to the information commissioner.


"I am extremely concerned about the apparent pattern of secrecy and evasion," he said. "My sole aim [in pursuing the case] is to help restore climate science to something more closely resembling scientific norms."


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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/01/climate-data-uea

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People have asked why mainstream scientists are keeping silent on these issues. As a scientist who has largely kept silent, at least in public, I have more sympathy for silence than most people here. It's not for the obvious reason, that speaking out leads to immediate attacks, not just from Gavin and friends, but also from some of the more excitable commentators here. Far more importantly most scientists are reluctant to speak out on topics which are not their field. We tend to trust our colleagues, perhaps unreasonably so, and are also well aware that most scientific questions are considerably more complex than outsiders think, and that it is entirely possible that we have missed some subtle but critical point.

However, "hide the decline" is an entirely different matter. This is not a complicated technical matter on which reasonable people can disagree: it is a straightforward and blatant breach of the fundamental principles of honesty and self-criticism that lie at the heart of all true science. The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong. The recent public statements by supposed leaders of UK science, declaring that hiding the decline is standard scientific practice are on a par with declarations that black is white and up is down. I don't know who they think they are speaking for, but they certainly aren't speaking for me.

I have watched Judy Curry with considerable interest since she first went public on her doubts about some aspects of climate science, an area where she is far more qualified than I am to have an opinion. Her latest post has clearly kicked up a remarkable furore, but she was right to make it. The decision to hide the decline, and the dogged refusal to admit that this was an error, has endangered the credibility of the whole of climate science. If the rot is not stopped then the credibility of the whole of science will eventually come into question.

Judy's decision to try to call a halt to this mess before it's too late is brave and good. So please cut her some slack; she has more than enough problems to deal with at the moment.

If you're wondering who I am, then you can find me at the Physics Department at Oxford University.

Feb 23, 2011 at 10:29 PM | Jonathan Jones

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In a paper published in the journal Nature today, the CLOUD experiment at CERN has reported its first results. The CLOUD experiment has been designed to study the effect of cosmic rays on the formation of atmospheric aerosols - tiny liquid or solid particles suspended in the atmosphere - under controlled laboratory conditions. Atmospheric aerosols are thought to be responsible for a large fraction of the seeds that form cloud droplets. Understanding the process of aerosol formation is therefore important for understanding the climate.

The CLOUD results show that trace vapours assumed until now to account for aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can explain only a tiny fraction of the observed atmospheric aerosol production. The results also show that ionisation from cosmic rays significantly enhances aerosol formation. Precise measurements such as these are important in achieving a quantitative understanding of cloud formation, and will contribute to a better assessment of the effects of clouds in climate models.

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