Climate

People send me stuff. Readers have been watching the Nenana Ice Cam via a post here on WUWT this weekend, waiting to see if a new record will be set for the latest ice-out ever. WUWT reader Geoff Shorten in … Continue reading →

Yesterday, WUWT was honored to have a guest essay by co-author Nic Lewis on the new Otto et al paper that pegs Transient Climate Response (TCR) at 1.3°C along with Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity at 2.0°C. Lewis , who had previously published … Continue reading →

Now I'm embarrassed at my naivety...it is all as clear as day. The story goes as follows:Way back in the mists of time (well, about 2011 or so) the IPCC authors agreed that the "likely" value for the equilibrium climate sensitivity was 2-4.5C. They then wrote the first draft to match, which was easy enough as they seemed to be unaware of most of the recent literature on the matter, and could easily brush off the few papers they did know about (like ours) as outliers. Inconveniently for them, the observations of the planetary energy balance are actually incompatible with their preferred choice, and as well as some reviewers telling them about the papers that had already appeared, more papers continued to be written - too many to be just ignored this time. So that left them with a bit of a credibility gap.The brilliant solution they have come up with is to write a paper on the planetary energy balance, which in numerical terms of course basically confirms what all the recent papers have said, but describe this with the phrasing that their result "is in agreement with earlier estimates, within the limits of uncertainty." (Here, "earlier" clearly refers to papers which do not use the last decade of data, ie those up to around AR4 time). Thus, this paper can be cited as support for the 2-4.5C "likely" range! They've even got one of their loudest critics, Nic Lewis, to agree with this!Whoever came up with that wording certainly deserves a Nobel prize...for chutzpah. I suspect that Nic may regret putting his name to it, although he could argue - with some justification - that the numerical results should outweigh the verbal gymnastics.Note by the way that it's not just the recent decade of data that points to a more moderate sensitivity estimate. For example, back in 2000, Forest et al generated an 90% range of 1.3-4.2C, when they used an expert prior - but at that time, the IPCC experts had all decided that a uniform prior was the correct approach.

New Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) replies have exposed more misdeeds by Professor Edward Wegman and Yasmin Said at George Mason University (GMU),  closely involved with the Kochs, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and many others known for attacks on climate science. This post reviews  background and attaches FOIA files that unearthed evidence for: -pervasive mis-use of Federal funds for inappropriate work, -plagiarism or falsification in documents used to seek grants or credit, -GMU violations of Federal rules for reporting misconduct, atop an already-absurd procedure. Readers unfamiliar with the history might first read the background below the fold and then return here for a summary of the posts to follow in this series: FOIA Facts 2 - Wegman and Said used existing grants from the Army Research Office and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for efforts on the 2006 Wegman Report, showing "pro bono" claims made to Congress as false. That was not the only funds mis-use. Together, they claimed 48 inappropriate papers or talks, easily consuming more than half their effort. Grants of $492K produced attacks on climate science  and much foreign travel, but almost nothing in peer-reviewed research journals. FOIA Facts 3 - More plagiarism and falsification are documented in 13 total works by Wegman and/or Said, including a few new ones and at least 7 claimed for grant credit. Wegman also wrote a half-million-dollar grant proposal, but evidence shows that roughly half the text was copy-paste-edit plagiarism. Luckily for Wegman, it was rejected. FOIA Facts 4 exposes worse misbehavior at GMU, which badly mishandled simple plagiarism complaints, including one on a Federally-funded paper. That was retracted in May 2011 and finally ruled as misconduct in February 2012. Federal rules required multiple notifications to several agencies, but FOIA requests found no trace of them. GMU seemed to ignore Federal rules, but perhaps other funding and influence are more important. In any case,  Wegman was appointed in Fall 2012 to a 3-year term on the GMU College of Science Promotion and Tenure Committee. Background - Attack on the Hockey Stick,  Wegman Report As Centerpiece From 2001 onward, the "hockey stick" temperature graph of Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcom Hughes was subject to a manufactured controversy,*** not substantially within science, but from outside. Key players 2001-2005 included Senator  James Inhofe (R-OK), Fred Singer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, especially Myron Ebell, and the George C. Marshall Institute, chaired by Will Happer, whose CEO William O'Keefe was a 25-year veteran of the American Petroleum Institute (API) whose 1998 strategy was executed for years by participants. Starting with 2001 contact by Singer, Canadians Ross McKitrick and later Stephen McIntyre became closely-involved with these people. They were brought to Washington, promoted widely, sponsored for talks on Capitol Hill and introduced to Inhofe, who publicized their claims. On May 11, 2005 they gave a talk in Washington, later annotated. Its key thrusts were critiques on hockey stick statistics and the quality of peer review in climate science. In September 2005, Wegman was recruited for Reps. Joe Barton(R-TX) and Ed Whitfield (R-KY) to try to ratify McIntyre and McKitrick's critiques from that talk, which became the "blueprint" for the "Wegman Report".***  The Report was announced July 2006 in the Wall Street Journal. A strong PR campaign included several Congressional hearings, the first with just a few days' notice to scientists being criticized, resembling a well-known witch-hunt. Although ignored or refuted by real scientists, the Report became a centerpiece of climate anti-science for years, treated as totally authoritative by some newspapers and many books, such as Essex and McKitrick (2008, 2nd Edition), Rapp (2008), Solomon (2008), Hayden (2008), Horner (2008), Alexander (2009), Booker 

The Week That Was: 2013-05-18 (May 18, 2013) Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org) The Science and Environmental Policy Project ################################################### Quote of the Week: “The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen [H/t … Continue reading →

New energy-budget-derived estimates of climate sensitivity and transient response in Nature Geoscience Guest post by Nic Lewis Readers may recall that last December I published an informal climate sensitivity study at WUWT, here. The study adopted a heat-balance (energy budget) … Continue reading →

This new paper just appeared on the Nature Geoscience journal website. I’m expecting a guest essay from Nic Lews at any moment which I’ll post. Energy budget constraints on climate response Alexander Otto, Friederike E. L. Otto, Olivier Boucher, John … Continue reading →

At last the great and the good have spoken. There's a new article in Nature Geoscience (here, but the bulk of the details are in the SI which seems to not be paywalled) concerning the energy balance of the climate system, which basically confirms what had already been presented in the slew of recent papers pointing to a lowering of climate sensitivity estimates.The analysis itself is not particularly novel or exciting: what makes it newsworthy in my view is the list of authors, which includes some who had previously been trying to talk down these recent estimates (e.g. Knutti: "my personal view is that the overall assessment hasn’t changed much"). Even though this paper is too late for the IPCC AR5, I hope it reflects a change in thinking from the IPCC authors involved. (Notable also that Nic Lewis is involved.)The results are described in rather strange terms, considering what they have actually presented. They argue that the new result for sensitivity "is in agreement with earlier estimates, within the limits of uncertainty". But of course none of the published estimates are inconsistent with each other in the sense of having non-overlapping uncertainty ranges - no-one credible has excluded a value of about 2.5C, that I am aware of. The contrasting claim that the analysis of transient response gives a qualitatively different outcome (being somewhat lower than both the previous IPCC assessment, and the range obtained from GCMs) is just weird, since both their ECS and TCR results are markedly lower than the IPCC and GCM ranges.This looks like a pretty unreasonable attempt to spin the result as nothing new for sensitivity, when it is clearly something very new indeed from these authors, and implies a marked lowering of the IPCC "likely" range. Although the paper does not explicitly mention it, the "likely" range for equilibrium climate sensitivity using the full 40y of data seems to be about 1.3-3C (reading off the graph by eye, the lower end may be off a bit due to the nonlinear scale). So although the analysis does depend on a few approximations and simplifications, it's hard to see how they could continue to defend the 2-4.5C range.Update: post by Nic Lewis here, also coverage in NewScientist.

According to the ice breakup log, the latest the ice has ever gone out was May 20th, 1964 at 11:41 AM. As of this writing there is about 28 hours to go to break that record. Geophysicist Martin Jeffries at … Continue reading →

OVERVIEW This post presents the annual cycle in sea surface temperatures for the hurricane main development region in the North Atlantic. It also presents the sea surface temperature anomalies for three regions: (1) the Main Development Region, (2) the Gulf … Continue reading →