Stoat

Assimilated by the Borg

2006-02-24T23:26:00.000Z

I'd delighted to announce that I am joining such august company as Chris Mooney, Tim Lambert, and many more in being assimilated by the Borg, aka Scienceblogs. It looks like I'm now online at http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/; there are still a few minor setup issues (I hope "who is that in the picture"? won't be an issue by the time you go over and check).

Fear not! My editoiral independence is unchanged, and I still get to be called Stoat.

The cost of climate research

2006-02-24T18:06:00.000Z

One of the many absurd arguments against global warming is that scientists are only in it for the money. From the comments of a recent post on RC:

Scientists are people too. The money and perks available to IPCC people are extensive. If oil company scientists are unenthusiastic about GW, then it can be argued that IPCC scientists might be enthusiastic from the same kind of incentives.

[Response: The idea that there are vast wealth and perks to be made from climate science is wrong, and would raise a laugh (albeit a rather bitter one) from anyone "inside" - William]

[Response: Money and perks! Hahahaha. How in the world did I miss out on those when I was a lead author for the Third Assessment report? Working on IPCC is a major drain on ones' time, and probably detracts from getting out papers that would help to get grants (not that we make money off of grants either, since those of us at national labs and universities are not paid salary out of grants for the most part.) We do it because it's work that has to be done. It's grueling and demanding, and not that much fun, and I can assure everybody that there is no remuneration involved... RayPierre]

But... how much does climate research cost? Apparently someone said at AAAS this year that globally, roughly $2 billion is spent on climate research, half of that is in the US, and a quarter each in the EU and the rest of world. And I've heard similar numbers elsewhere. I'm going to accept it, because it fits rather nicely with another number I've just found, from the Economist, wot sez: Monitoring local government currently costs £2.5 billion a year, and that does not include the cost to councils of being inspected (this is in the context of the emasculation of local govt in the UK: since they cannot raise much in taxes, but are paid from central taxation, the central govt insists on minutely monitoring what goes on).

So... assuming that figure is accurate: the costs of simply *monitoring* local govt (not actually doing anything) in one small country exceeds the global climate spend. Do we look forward to skeptics now pronouncing that local govt inspectors are only in it for the money?

However... there is more. The $2 billion annual spend is not all on salaries. Whenever this gets discussed, people usually say that this includes a large chunk spent on satellites, which are expensive. I presume that the costs of the newly approved Cryosat II will get included in the annual climate spend. Its a bit like including the costs of CERN hardware when working out whether particle physics is lucrative or not.

Part of the reason for this post is to invite anyone with better figures to post them. What does Dr Google say?

Bush's proposed budget for ... 2004 ... U.S. spending on climate change this year to $4.3 billion.... Ah yes, but that includes "Tax Incentives for Renewable Energy and Hybrid and Fuel-Cell Vehicles...", about $1b/y. Further down, "Federal Climate Change Science Program (CCSP): Includes $1.7 billion in FY '04 budget request to fund Federal, multi-agency research program, with $185 million requested for the Climate Change Research Initiative in FY '04." And this accuses Bush of cooking the books, anyway.

Although the United States spends $1.8 billion a year on climate research, only 6 percent goes to modeling... England, on the other hand, has focused its spending, with $50 million for the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and another $25 million for Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

Um. So, anyone got any bettter numbers?

BBC goes cpdn

2006-02-23T23:21:00.000Z

The BBC seems to be promoting the Climateprediction.net stuff: go to http://bbc.cpdn.org/. Good for cpdn I guess.

A Few Things Ill Considered

2006-02-23T19:23:00.000Z

Coby Beck now has a blog, A Few Things Ill Considered. Coby has for quite a while now been doing an excellent job on sci.env answering the assorted wackos and skeptics, and now he reveals his sekret debating techniques :-)

Greenland Melting?

2006-02-18T17:38:00.000Z

"Melting Greenland fuels sea level rise says" Greenpeace. "A new report sheds light on Greenland's quickening meltdown — and why that's distressing" says Time. "Greenland's Glaciers Moving Faster, Losing Mass" says Kansas City Infozine. You get the idea (all of that via google news). Though the best one seems to be "Greenland ice melting faster than thought" by physorg.com. So what can they mean? Can it be "Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland" in Science? Oops no, wrong sign, and anyway that was sooooo 2005 :-) Although to be fair even that mentions thinning below 1,500m.

Nope, it must be "Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet" Science, 17 February 2006:

Using satellite radar interferometry observations of Greenland, we detected widespread glacier acceleration below 66° north between 1996 and 2000, which rapidly expanded to 70° north in 2005. Accelerated ice discharge in the west and particularly in the east doubled the ice sheet mass deficit in the last decade from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers per year. As more glaciers accelerate farther north, the contribution of Greenland to sea-level rise will continue to increase.

Which is similar to "Rapid and synchronous ice-dynamic changes in East Greenland" by Adrian Luckman et al in the less visible GRL, though New Scientist found it, as did the BBC.

90 to 220 km^3/y is an increase of about 0.4 mm/y in global sea level according to a quick calc (and I'm sure the arithmetic fiends will be quick to jump on me if I'm wrong...). This is 20% of the current 2 mm/y obs (or 13% of the 3 mm/y obs, if you take the more recent satellite obs). Or if you think it *caused* the increase from 2 to 3, its about half of that... The TAR estimates put Greenland into context (as they were then; oh, and here).

So... what does it all mean? I don't know. I wrote this post to find out... originally it was going to be about Luckman, then I realised there was the Rigot thing too. How confusing. Maybe RC will do it properly :-)

Joke consensus

2006-02-17T21:47:00.000Z

RP Sr has a weird post about "consensus". He has written a paper with four colleagues, and oddly enough they agree. Which is what usually happens when people write papers together. If they don't agree, they tend to write papers separately. And yet apparently this is to be a new model for the whole community: This paper shows not only can we document a weather event using a variety of climate metrics, but colleagues can work in good faith to produce a truly consensus assessment. This is the model that the global climate change community should adopt. Wooo-eee! yes, lets get 5 people to write the next IPCC report, then there would be no problem with getting agreement.

New wiki toy

2006-02-17T20:53:00.000Z

I've discovered a new wiki toy to show you your edits graphically. This is me. Fun, no? I seem to peak at 10pm; the BBC R4 news usually reminds me to tail off; and I've usually stopped by 11 :-)

Meanwhile we have mediawiki installed at work, and very useful it is too. It will be even more useful when they work out how to turn on image uploads :-)

Detecting and Attributing Hurricanes

2006-02-16T22:06:00.000Z

[Stop Press! Chris Rapley says "in the long term, cities such as London may have to be relocated" - heard on R4 10pm news. There will be more, no doubt...]

Well, obviously enough detecting hurricanes isn't too hard. But the question exercising many people minds is *attribution*: has GW lead to an increase in hurricanes? Attributing individual hurricanes is difficult/impossible (the line taken by RC); we're talking about over all trends & stats.

JA (when not blogging about pet food) has a nice article about attribution here, though he means attribution in general. And there is a nice article about an interview with Judith Curry (top quote: William Gray is one of some "hurricane scientists who don’t know a lot about global climate").

But the point I wanted to make is that failure to attribute to GW does *not* amount to an attribution to anything else: natural cycles, etc etc. And failing to determine a human signal is not the same thing as ruling out a human signal (BTW, I'm not actually asserting that this "failure" has occurred). Which brings me to RPs beastly rough post Slouching Toward Scientific McCarthyism (also read the comments). He quotes "NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator" (my emphasis). RP believes that disagreeing with "The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations and cycles of hurricane activity" (again, my emphasis) is bizarre, since the statement is "fully supportable by peer-reviewed science". But is it? For it to have been so, there would have to be a proper attribution to natural causes. If there is any such papers, what are they?

[Minor updates: at least one cultured person has complained that my calling RPs post "beastly rough" was a bit over the top. They have missed the allusion, which I think RP originally intended in his title, to "Slouching to Bethlehem": to quote the second stanza:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I like that; and that was the bit I remembered. But it starts "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" which fits a hurricanes discussion quite nicely :-)

And secondly, my somewhat flippant "detecting hurricanes is easy enough" is not really right; there are problems with detection in remote regions in the early days.]

Analogy Police

2006-02-12T14:18:00.000Z

Do you ever find it annoying when people att empt to win arguments using invalid analogies? Dilbert has the answer...

Your comment was denied for questionable content (Jennifer Marohasy)

2006-02-12T12:21:00.000Z

Don't worry Roger, not you this time :-) Over at www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001176.html there is some debate, with a pile of the usual errors being made. I tried to post the below, and got rejected, so I'll post it here instead:

Gosh what fun. Some comments:

Firstly, Schneider and Rasool isn't. Getting them the wrong way round is always a bit of a tell-tale of a cp from a sketpic source. Its Rasool and Schneider; more here: www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

As for the Genesis Strategy predicting cooling, this is obviously wrong, if you actually read the book: www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/schneider-genesis.html.

"Crazy" LH said: R+S said: "It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." So Ender, Phil, and whoever, this clearly shows that as CO2 keeps increasing, the surface temperature actually starts decellerating. Do any of you actually read and think about what you have read? Then increased CO2 causes cooling.

LH is wrong (well of course he is, he's wrong about everything!). Increasing CO2 increases T roughly logarithmically. This is well known, and its what S is saying. But adding CO2 always causes warming in those models.

All this Hockey Stick stuff is just not as important as people seem to think it is - it wasn't central to the TAR; thats just septics puffing it for reasons of their own. And it has little to do with attribution of current changes. See The Big Picture

Was the MWP global? Castles doesn't seem to have read the TAR: the relevant bit is http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/070.htm, to quote "As with the “Little Ice Age”, the posited “Medieval Warm Period” appears to have been less distinct, more moderate in amplitude, and somewhat different in timing at the hemispheric scale than is typically inferred for the conventionally-defined European epoch. The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2°C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures. The long-term hemispheric trend is best described as a modest and irregular cooling from AD 1000 to around 1850 to 1900, followed by an abrupt 20th century warming..." and so on. M.K. Hughes and H.F. Diaz, "Was there a 'Medieval Warm Period?", Climatic Change 26: 109-142, March 1994 is worth a read.

If you're interested in how the MWP/LIA were viewed in the various IPCC reports, then [[MWP and LIA in IPCC reports]] is your source.

Castles quotes "Finally, on the realclimate site William Connelley [sic] says that it's about time that Castles and Henderson got off their bums and produced their own scenarios!". Yes indeed. In fact even people like Tol admit that using your assumptions makes essentially no difference to the end product.

Wiki bio's

2006-02-11T22:23:00.000Z

The stuff about some US politico's editing their wiki bio's was on the news recently. Wiki's view of that is here; and amusingly, people have filed an RFC against them. Really, who could possibly so tasteless as to edit their own wikipedia entry ;-)?

A bee on the side

2006-02-11T21:20:00.000Z

Fairly often, I get requests for people to use my pictures, usually one of the bee ones. I have a christmas card from someone in the US who took my honeycomb pic and added peoples faces in the various cells. But better than that is Maslab where they get to have fun playing with robots... beats climate science any day! There are some notes, see the ppt, slide 27 for my bee, which is apparently to be an exemplar for future robots :-)

Tripe on TCS

2006-02-10T19:26:00.000Z

Warning! Don't read on if you've already seen enough septic tripe demolished. But if not... JF points me to The End Is Not Nigh? Johns eagle eye had spotted:

Ironically, just as global warming scare-mongering reaches new heights, the global cooling hypothesis is making a come back. It should be recalled that the frightening images of imminent global warming disaster are of fairly recent vintage. After all, in the 1960s and 1970s various prominent climatologists held the view that it was not global warming that formed a mortal threat to humanity but global cooling.

This is traditional septic tripe, there is probably a plug-in for Word to auto-generate it. The traditional answer is http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/. More recently, a novel answer of http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94 has become available.

Who is writing this tripe? Hans Labohm, co-author of Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma, recently became an expert reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Aha! He has become an expert reviewer for IPCC! Obviously a man of some status (isn't it funny how even the septics still cling to IPCC as the gold standard?). However, IPCC expert reviewer means little. I'm one too (err...). All you have to do is nominate yourself. It implies no great expertise. Though of course people of expertise do become reviewers...

Why is he writing it? Probably because he has just written Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma. Published by... Multi-Science Publishing Co., Ltd, UK. And where have we heard of them before? Aha, yes: E&E. Sigh.

As for the rest of it, there's nothing much worth noting, except that he asserts that "various renowned scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC", and puts Hans Oerlemans in this category. This is odd; Hans was a lead author for FAR, SAR, TAR and even that bogey-man of the septics, ACIA (see his page). And given his recent Science paper the assertion seems even more odd. Probably septic desperation.

Methane and Kuhn

2006-02-08T19:52:00.000Z

I'm reading Kuhn, "The structure of scientific revolutions". I'm only up to chapter 7 so far, and not desperately impressed. Perhaps it gets better later. Anyway, by curious co-incidence, a piece of it is relevant to the "methane debate", recently energised by Keppler et al. (btw, don't miss the clarification). We had a "discussion group" about this at work: mostly ice core folks whose ultimate interest was interpreting delta-C-13 in ice cores; but most of the discussion was trying to make sense of the paper. And the thing that came up repeatedly is that the *mechanism* for the methane production is unknown. Given that, its really not clear what to measure. At some point, the mechanism will be understood, or at least there will be a testable hypothesis, and suddenly there will be a mini-paradigm-shift (K states that P-shifts are not always major revolutions; they are allowed to be little things in their own area).

To illustrate this: the paper measures methane production from both dead and living leaves. The dead stuff produces much less methane (order of magnitude). Is this because the methane in this case is the breakdown product of some molecule produced by the living plant? In which case a time series would be instructive. But the paper doesn't present this. Then again: for living plants, the paper asserts that production is bigger in sunlight. The measurements weren't terribly well controlled, as the paper notes make clear: "sunshine" is defined as what you get in Heidelburg. And then the problem is: if you expose the plant to sunlight, it will get warmer. And elsewhere they note the strong temperature sensitivity of their results. So all of this is rather typical of the early stages: something odd is found, but the measurements are all in a bit of a fog and its not clear exactly what you are trying to measure.

A bit more commentary on the results: all this turns out to come from about 10 living plants, extrapolated to the planet. So the error bars are huge. It may turn out that these plants are quite atypical. Or, they may turn out to be quite typical. In which case, the methane budget is overthrown? Well, probably not that either. The sinks in the methane budget seems to be well known (mostly atmos oxidation); the sources (wetlands, rice paddies, gas leaks) have pretty big error bars. Most of the overall budgets people construct from these various sources add up to about the same number, but that is because people know the number they are supposed to get: viz, the number that makes the current observed increase work out about right. So (especially if the new results come in at the low end of their range) they can be fitted into the existing methane budget quite easily.

[Update: when I wrote the above, I didn't put any numbers in cos I was doing it from memory. But now I have the data: this (may not be subscription). From which you see, firstly, that Nature says the current methane source-sinks is negative (-47 Tg/y; thats based on a range of sources of 500-600 and deciding, for some unknown reason, that 530 is the best value; IPCC seems to use much the same data but get an *increase*, which is correct...), from those estimates: whereas the atmos measurements clearly show an increase (14 Tg/y). So at the very least, flipping that to +47 could be done without surprising anyone: ie, there is room for an extra source of 94 Tg/y. Kepplers estimates are 62-236 Tg/y, so the lower end can be accomodated without trouble: it would even help! And there is even more scope for fiddling (or, put another way, accomodating the new source without changing much else): Nature sources the current balance to IPCC table 4.2. Is the wetlands source 115, 237, 225, 145 or 92 Tg/y? Is rice 100, 88, 25-54, 60 or 53? Confused?]

The Stern Report

2006-02-05T18:09:00.000Z

Sounds like a US TV show, no? In more detail Stern Review on the economics of climate change. Sponsored by the treasury, but nominally an independent review. What relation is it to the failed House of ~~Skeptics~~ Lords report? The HoS reported in early July 2005; co-incidentally the "Chancellor announced on 19 July 2005 that he had asked Sir Nick Stern to lead a major review of the economics of climate change, to understand more comprehensively the nature of the economic challenges and how they can be met, in the UK and globally." I don't know. Best guess is convergent evolution: the problems that need to be addressed are obvious. But it may be a response/corrective.

The Stern review isn't finished; we have a Discussion Paper from 31 January 2006 (together with a pile of similar-looking stuff related to a lecture/press: see the index).

Stern appears to have got one thing right that the HoS got badly wrong: rather than waste time listening to skeptics over the science, he has taken the IPCC view as standard, slightly updated. So we have from the executive summary:

Climate change is a serious and urgent issue... There is now an overwhelming body of scientific evidence that human activity is increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and causing warming. We are already seeing significant impacts. There remain uncertainties about the nature and scale of impacts in the longer term, but the most recent science indicates that some of the risks are more serious than had first appeared. The problem is global in its cause and consequences. Greenhouse gases have broadly the same impact on the climate wherever in the world they are emitted. And in terms of its consequences, no region will be left untouched. But impacts will be unevenly felt throughout the world. Some of the most severe impacts will be felt in the poorest countries that are least able to adapt to the changes. The economic challenges are complex. At its most basic level, climate change is an externality: the emission of greenhouse gases damages others. But these costs will be felt over a long period and over the entire globe; their exact nature is uncertain; they interact with other market failures and imperfections; and those most affected – future generations – are not able to speak up for their interests. This points to a long-term international collaborative response. Effective collaboration will require a shared understanding of the incentives and institutions needed, and careful attention to the complex ethical issues involved.

Actually that seques from the science to the economics, but I'm happy with it so far (RP will quibble the some of the risks are more serious than had first appeared and perhaps I will too... oh hold on, they give examples later: for example release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost or the dieback of the Amazon forest. Yes thats fair enough). After that we're on econ/pol, which I'll ignore.

The fun thing, though, is that Stern has put all the evidence submitted online, which makes for some fun reading. Boehmer-Christiansen seems to have failed to do even a basic punctuation and spelling check before she submitted. However, her evidence itself is deeply boring and carefully avoids the science. British Airways also wimps out of the science - perhaps they (correctly) regard it as a foregone conclusion - and spend a lot of words saying "please don't tax aviation fuel" in a coded way. To my surprise the CBI don't quibble the science: In view of the scientific consensus about the level to which concentrations of carbon need to be reduced, we think it right that the government’s ambition should be for the world’s developed economies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 60% by around 2050 – and that the UK should put itself on a path towards achieving such reductions. Well well.

Someone called Pielke, P :-) has also submitted, and has said what you would expect. While we're on the miss-spellings, "Exxon Mobile" (the fly-by-night branch?) couldn't be bothered to write a proper submission so they dump a pile of old reports on poor Stern, all of which (you guessed it) carefully avoid any mention of the science, which appears to be their current strategy (a step up from trying to poke holes in it, as they used to).

Rahmstorf argues for Sea level rise as a defining feature of dangerous interference with the climate system which harks back to what-is-dangerous: In the UNFCCC, most nations of the world have agreed to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent “dangerous interference with the climate system” (Article 2). A key question for policy thus is: what level can this be? We here propose a criterion involving long-term sea level rise. We argue that a significant likelihood of causing a global sea level rise in the range of 3-5 m over the next few centuries (say, by the year 2300) would constitute a “dangerous interference”, since such a sea level rise would destroy much of the current world coastlines, including small island states, many large cities, most beaches and many coastal ecosystems.

John Quiggin responded to the Castles-Henderson critique of the IPCC - good grief, has the entire blogosphere written to Stern? :-)

I suppose I ought to look at the NERC response... hmm, well, apart from having the name "Helen" associated with it, it seems to do its best to mention all the NERC institutes, as expected :-)

But enough serious stuff, I was wanting to look through the skeptics, sadly they don't label them so you have to look through for keywords like Kininmouth. Who mentions that well-known piece of science, The Day After Tomorrow. Its always convenient when people start off with stuff like that, so you know not to bother taking them seriously (if you think I'm being impolite, he has the gall to call t' hockey stick "fraudulent", so is beyond the Pale). Oooh, but thats not the best bit: apparently "There are ongoing efforts by the climatology establishment to suppress any meaningful debate on the science of greenhouse gases". And his evidence? "The first serious problem with the theory of anthropogenic global warming is that tropospheric temperatures, which have been measured by satellites since 1979, show no significant upward trend". But this is botty-wipes, as [[Satellite temperature measurements]] will show you. Come on: if you're going to be a septic, at least don't be a cr*p one. The Marshall Insititute has a submission, but its so dull and stupid I won't bother link to it. "Allan MacRae" (who he) rants on: The current scientific basis of the Kyoto Protocol is deeply flawed - its greatest weaknesses include excessive reliance on: 1) The IPCC 2001 Summary for Policymakers (SPM) report, which is now in disrepute... etc etc. He seems to be connected to Baliunas, somehow.

So... nothing too surprising. Science 1, septics 0; prize for most interesting piece of science evidence goes to Rahmstorf.

Too busy for science posting...

2006-02-02T22:06:00.000Z

I seem to be a bit too busy for science blogging at the moment. Firstly there is stuff at work, secondly I seem to be busy being an admin on wiki. Ah the sweet taste of power!

Excitingly, I've been involved on a couple of articles about things you've probably heard of: [[Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy]] - oddly enough, this seems to attract frenzied editing, how curious. It got semi-protected (see talk; actually there is so much talk you need to look into the archive). And then there is [[Jack Abramoff]], which appears to be subject to a persistent campaign by a pile of Israeli IPs (see the history). Any techie folk out there who can track 62.0.xxx.xxx and 85.250.xxx.xxx and 217.132.xxx.xxx and others to anything closer that an Israeli ISP, do let me know...

Meanwhile, the US attempt to keep decent cheese out of their country is reaching desperate lengths :-)

More Hansen

2006-01-30T23:25:00.000Z

The "Hansen gagging" story has been around a bit... now I find (via Roger on sci.env) this: I am writing in response to several recent news articles indicating that officials at NASA may be trying to "silence" Dr. James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It ought to go without saying that government scientists must be free to describe their scientific conclusions and the implications of those conclusions to their fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public. Any effort to censor federal scientists biases public discussions of scientific issues, increases distrust of the government and makes it difficult for the government to attract the best scientists. And when it comes to an issue like climate change, a subject of ongoing public debate with immense ramifications, the government ought to be bending over backward to make sure that its scientists are able to discuss their work and what it means. And so on.

[And now checking, I see Prometheus has this already]

"Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major new scientific report has said"

2006-01-30T20:35:00.000Z

Umm... whats happened? (I wondered to myself, lying fuzzy in bed at 8 a.m. listening to this stuff on the R4). Did they publish the AR4 a year early with major revisions to the conclusions? No. All this is about (source: BBC) the conference report from the Exeter conference in Feb '05. So (a) its not news; anything in the report (should!) have been said a year ago; and (b) I don't recall the Exeter conf saying much new at the time, either (backed up by the RC post I wrote at the time). And is this a "major report"? Probably not.

The Beeb (check out the video...) picks up on the sea level rise from Greenland: It fears the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt, leading sea levels to rise by seven metres over 1,000 years. OK, this is fair enough (depending on your scenario it might be more or less than 1000 years, and it might not all be gone for quite a bit thereafter, but its fair enough to be going with... say 5m in 1000 years). But again, its not news, its pretty well in line with the TAR (isn't it? I can't say I've bothered to check). 5m in 1000y is 5mm/yr which is more than the 2-3 mm/yr we have at the moment (and is effectively additional to it) and presumably wouldn't be linear but would come in spurts. Current (and TAR-like) projections for Greenland for the 21st century are much smaller - about 40 mm - which is about right: increasing T increases ppn, but also ablation, so past some (TA-DA!) "tipping point" the SLR contribution from Greenland goes up a lot. But... that pushes the problem a way into the future. Is it reasonable for us to "commit" our descendants to a melting Greenland? (assuming the std.science is correct, and no magic is found, this is what we would be doing).

What else? Above two degrees the risks increase very substantially, involving potentially large numbers of extinctions or even ecosystem collapses. This is onto the bio stuff: could be plausible, I can't comment usefully (I could make it up if you like...). This is linked to the 2oC target the EC has; see my RC post. So, supposing you didn't want to break +2oC (with probability X) you need to limit CO2 to Y; X=60% apparently translates into Y=450 ppmv; since we're currently at 380 my guess is we'll go through 450.

And then it got onto Slashdot which (finally) prompted me to get a slashdot ID and post a comment. See if you can find it. I don't think I'll pursue commenting there... there is just so many comments, so much junk (though some good). This one I quite liked, though others didn't.

[Update: RP has a link to the report pdf itself (I haven't read it yet). Sadly RP also has some dumb comments by Peiser; still, no-one is perfect :-) ]

Gazillion year old ice

2006-01-30T19:53:00.000Z

Before the post, a quick joke, brought on by the word "Gazillion": Bush in the White House; an Aide says "Mr Prez, I'm afraid that 3 Brazillian soldiers were killed in Baghdad today". Bush is shocked, to an unlikely degree, and the surrounding Toadies are surprised. Bush asks: "Just how big is a Brazzillion, anyway?" (here is one source). And if you didn't like that, you can try The Onion.

But onto more serious matters. Nature has a report about some new ice cores from Antarctica (thanks het, who has more links), and something of a race for the first "million year old ice". Kohnen Station in Antarctica's Dronning Maud Land has a new core, and Preliminary tests show that the bottom of the core might be as much as 900,000 years old. They sensibly hedge their bets with The age will have to be confirmed in their laboratory back in Germany, "but we're pretty confident,". But no sooner is this in, than Japanese scientists working at the Fuji Dome Antarctic research station said they have retrieved an ice core sample that could be up to one million years old (again, hedged). If you're wondering where all these various cores are, then look at the pic; original here.

But the important thing about ice is not how old it is (if you want super-old ice, go mine a comet; mind you that might be quite expensive too...) its how well preserved it is and its stratigraphic sequencing. There are, if you look closely at the Nature report, hints of this: The Kohnen core should also provide more detailed climate evidence than the one from Dome C, at least for more recent times. In the upper parts of the core, ice accumulated more than twice as fast as at Dome C, so it will be easier to distinguish between ice layers laid down in consecutive years. The ice at the bottom of the core, however, seems to be at least as old as that at the bottom of Dome C, so it must be very compressed. Err yes. So we'll get a more detailed *recent* record (which may have some value, e.g. looking again at D-O events in the Antarctic) but that could have been got from a much shallower core. And we'll get a record from a different sector (nice to see how things co-vary). But... a more detailed recent record implies a less detailed deep record; which is probably the greatest interest. The EPICA core goes down reliably to 780 kyr; does the Kohnen core provide useful info for [780,900] kyr? It will be good if it does. OTOH, since Kohnen isn't at a dome, the bottom is probably smeared, and very hard to work out where it came from.

And a postscript, on how rapidly things get sensationalised: Researchers dig up million-year-old ice (bad headline, text not so bad). Ditto from physorg.

Torture and Terrorism

2006-01-30T19:28:00.000Z

From the Grauniad, an interesting article about torture, but its about the Inquisition. The assertion that Torture and execution were always carried out by the secular authorities, not church officials is new to me, and perhaps has modern-day analogies. The interesting bit is the quotes from Very Rev Joseph Augustine Di Noia, attempting to put it all into context. He says:

It is a mistake to torture people. However, torture was regarded as a perfectly justified, legitimate way of producing evidence and it was therefore legally justified. Killing people over ideas, generally speaking, seems to us not to be a very good idea after 2,000 years of history ... and generally we disapprove deeply of this kind of purgation, but it seems to me it is possible to understand it within the context of its times and also to understand it within the sociology of religion, how communities react to threats which they regard to be dire or fatal.

There are things to quibble here. Describing killing people as not to be a very good idea is a bit weak; and the "is" of the first sentence seems to delicately assert that it might not have been a mistake in the past. But the arguement that it can all be understood "within the sociology of religion" makes sense to me. But then, I'm an atheist, not a member of a church that claims to be the One True Faith, and on occaision, claims inerrancy. So is this the new Catholic policy? No Eternal Verities, just religion understood from within sociology and context. Sounds radical.

Moving right along, we come to... Terrorism. Which brings me to Israel's shooting of young girl highlights international hypocrisy, say Palestinians (also from the G). And of course links to the recent Hamas victory (for which I'll refer you to CIP and subsequent). And the demands for Hamas to eschew Violence. Which is total nonsense: *we* don't eschew Violence, and nor do the Israelis (what do you think all those guns, tanks and warplanes are for?). Oh... you didn't mean *Violence* from the dictionary definition... you mean Violence excluding anything we do? And as for the equally slippery Terrorism: The army said the boys planned to throw rocks at Israeli cars, which the military defines as terrorism ah yes, Terrorism is what we define it to be. But shooting dead 9 year old girls definitely *isn't* terrorism ...as long as the right side is doing it, of course.

Not the bristlecone pines again!

2006-01-29T18:01:00.000Z

Yes indeed. See this take on science publishing (via Island of Doubt). "My policy with regard to conclusions is to make the maximum plausible claim. It is foolish to leave any unncessary foothold for competitors...". Not only is this close-to-the-knuckle funny, its far more scientifically literate than anything you could hope to find in any UK newspaper.

[Update: I've just corrected my spelling of "knucle". I new it looked rong. Phortunately English is so ezy too spel]

Fun with hurricane trends?

2006-01-28T21:49:00.000Z

Over at http://www.eas.gatech.edu/research/candr.htm there is some fun, with Webster/Holland/Curry/Chang disagreeing rather strongly with Gray (also findable via this) over... yes you guessed it, hurricanes and trends. Its all a bit more raw and bloody than usual science correspondence (In spite of his concerns about data between 1970 and 1984 in the WHCC analysis, Gray nevertheless uses data from 1950 to bolster his arguments. Gray presents an alternative hypothesis for variations of hurricane characteristics in the North Atlantic that involves salinity variations; this hypothesis is not substantiated either in his paper or in the published literature. His analysis of the impact of warmer sea surface temperature on the stability of the lower troposphere contains basic errors in thermodynamics. In summary, there is no credence to any of the issues that Gray raises), so worth a quick read. JA's quote from Myanna Lahsen I think also applies.

[ps: I think I found this via SB; but it may have been CB; in either case I can't remember where. Please remind me...]

[pps: Over in Bogota even weirder things are happening...]

CO2 and SRES

2006-01-27T19:57:00.000Z

The graph shows recent CO2 changes. Top are the CO2 themselves (monthly, plus 13-month running mean); bottom are change-on-12-months earlier. Data from Mauna Loa; sadly I can only find them up to end 2004. Which means I can't provide a decent answer to SB, who asked about reports that this years CO2 rise was 2.2 ppmv. However, even if it was 2.2 (can anyone find a report, or better still the data?), that looks to be nothing surprising, in view of the past. And its clearly lower than the 1%/y assumed by some of the idealised scenarios. When I find the SRES data I want to look at how the various scenarios look around now.

I find it hard to get too excited about the exact levels for any one year; what matters are the long term trends; for the future, those are clearly Upwards, but by how much depends on economics that are rather tricky to forecast. But T rise (etc) can largely be scaled to CO2 level, rather than date. James Annan (ref lost) pointed out that methane levels seem to be well below SRES trends (indeed this shows them to be currently flat; whether that will continue I don't know).

Meanwhile, JF has a post sort-of about this too, with a vigorous exchange of comments.

[Update: And John Quiggin has a post too. Pure co-incidence... he too appears to be on the it-does-make-much-difference idea, but with the advantage of understanding the economics]

Dynamical amplification of polar warming

2006-01-23T22:21:00.000Z

Polar amplification, again. RC recently had a post on this; though now I look again its a teensy bit vague about the actual *causes*. Which I've posted on before. Now along comes... Cai, M. (2005), Dynamical amplification of polar warming, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L22710, doi:10.1029/ 2005GL024481. Unfortunately, I have failed to do my duty, which is to carefully read and understand the paper. Maybe someone else will do that and comment. All I've done is skim it. But read on...

This paper presents theoretical and modeling evidence suggesting that the atmospheric poleward heat transport can lead to a polar warming amplification (i) by redistributing part of the extra energy intercepted by the low-latitude atmosphere to high latitudes, and (ii) by strengthening the water vapor feedback in high latitudes. For an anthropogenic radiative forcing of 4 Wm/2, we illustrate that the dynamical amplifier contributes to about 1/4 (1/10) of the total high-latitude (global) surface warming in winter in a simple coupled atmosphere-surface moist radiativetransportive climate model. Budget analysis of the radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere derived from IPCC AR4 CGCM climate simulations seems to support the dynamical amplifier theory for the larger warming in high latitudes.

The most interesting part of this is part (ii) - the strengthening of the WV feedback in high latitudes. Its interesting because although many people think its why polar amp occurs, this is the first paper I've seen to assert it. The least interesting is part (i), because thats been done already (and better, from a brief scan) by Alexeev in Cli Dyn (see my prev post). The problem is that Cai is using a 4-box coupled atmosphere-surface moist radiative-transportive climate model to illustrate the dynamical amplification of the high-latitude surface warming due to an anthropogenic forcing. And the WV feedback isn't done properly, The water vapor feedback has been crudely parameterized using an ad-hoc formula Equation 5 to mimic the strong dependency of the atmospheric absorption of longwave radiation to the amount of water vapor. Specifically, the total atmospheric effective emissivity in the model is made of two parts: a constant part e0 representing the absorption due to other gases, such as CO2, and a part that varies as a function of the total amount of water vapor in an atmosphere column. And worse than that, I can't see where they seperate out effects (i) and (ii), so at the end of it all I can't see where they say how important the WV feedback is (if we trusted their eq 5).

[Updated to fix funny char (ctrl-A?) in the Wm/2 that was doing naughty things to the feed, apparently]

Just eat it!

2006-01-21T22:43:00.000Z

James Annan has another classic post up, displaying his characteristic incisive wit and complete lack of sentimentality.

According to the 10 o'clock news, its now dead anyway. As far as I can tell, this always happens: great public interest, pointless but newsworthy rescue attempts, and a dead whale. Presumably to be sunk at sea by naval gunfire (to quote the late great Spike Milligan). Perhaps they should just have left it alone: people can never resist the urge to fiddle.

Sci.env: IPCC understates the risks?

2006-01-20T22:01:00.000Z

There is an interesting exchange today over at sci.env, which touches on some things I've been thinking about recently. See here for the thread & if you want to know who they are (well scroll up a bit); I'll extract some here and then comment. Both sides are people I respect (well they are on my blogroll) and yet they are in violent disagreement. I had the slightly unsettling experience of reading the first post, thinking "yes thats spot on" then reading the reply and thinking "hmmm, some valid points there too".


> I believe the IPCC genuinely constitutes a consensus, but I believe
> that the consensus severely understates the risks.

> There are several reasons for this. Notably:
>     - models are tuned for small signal accuracy and can't capture
> large nonlinearities

I don't really understand what you can mean by this point. The models
perform reasonably well across a wide range of conditions including the
6C cooling at the last glacial minimum, the ~12C annual temperature
cycle (more at higher latitudes), not to mention the basic spatial
patterns in the first place. A 3C temperature rise is not large
compared to the range they've already simulated, and there are good
reasons to expect the models to be largely correct in broad detail.

>     - carbon cycle exacerbating feedbacks are not sufficiently attended
> to, and are buried under the rug in the simulation scenarios

Carbon cycle feedbacks have been included in a number of models
(C4MIP), my understanding is that the effects are generally modest, and
even for the outliers it is not something that turns a mainstream
projection into a nightmare. One possible wildcard is a methane burp,
about which I know little but it does on the face of it seem worthy of
consideration.

>     - the IPCC seeks the most likely response of the system rather than
> the risk-weighted outcome, which essentially hides the worst cases

Um...no. That's simply not true. It describes the range of outcomes
(according to some rather vague probabilistic statements).

>     - most scientists are conservative in personality and don't like
> making a big fuss, so shy away from clear statements of the enormity of
> the risk we face

Well...this may be true but even if so is highly misleading. It's not
"most scientists" who we hear, either in the media or through
assessments such as the IPCC. It's those scientists who make their
opinions forcefully enough who are heard, and I absolutely disagree
that this subset are conservative in personality and do not like making
a fuss.

The point of all this is, what-do-you-tell-the-public. There's no great problem with what-do-you-tell-fellow-scientists: thats easy: you publish your research and they read it, or not (thats not really true either when I think about it: its true within physical climate; but when you start to try to do impacts on ecology, then the Bio's need the phys stuff interpreted). But the public need it all interpreted: they are not going to read the original papers (even if they have access to them).

I have much sympathy for most likely response of the system rather than the risk-weighted outcome (its not technically true: the scenarios are not probability-weighted; but you know how it goes). When I give general-public talks (and you can find the stock one I do, by following a few levels of links from this, if you want to) I downplay the overenthusiasm you find in the media for disaster scenarios, but always with the ever-so-slightly guilty feeling that I may be wrong. I point that out too - I try to mention the uncertainty - but I have the impression that people have problems keeping up with everything and are going to miss the subtle side messages.

Sex at BAS

2006-01-18T21:31:00.000Z

James "added 1.5 inches to the crotch length" Annan recently blogged about Sexism in Science (and ref'd some interesting CV stuff). So I thought I would offer my (male) perspective.

In terms of recruitment, we don't seem to be doing too badly. Quite frequently there are as many women as men around our coffee table at work (because the Real Men are too busy researching to come to coffee... ha ha no; coffee time is close to obligatory unless you're John Turner). We get plenty of female candidates, and in the interviews I've done there has never been a hint of bias against (or for) the women. And I'm one of the people working part-time to help bring up children.

OTOH there are no women at all in our senior management structure (or a few, if you lower the seniority bar a bit). Whether this is because its a remnant of previous discrimination, or continuing disc, or innate female unsuitability for senior management I don't know (though I doubt the latter).

Masquerade

2006-01-17T19:04:00.000Z

On the plance back from NZ, I got to watch a weird Japanese TV show called "Masquerade". It was very funny, and I've never seen anything like it before. But then I don't watch much TV. The photo is a screenshot: one chap is a basketball player, and the other chap is the ball (his head; he is dressed in white because you are supposed to not see his body). As a screenshot it doesn't look to impressive: the skill of it is the way the two moved around, with the player bouncing the other chaps head realistically. Another very good one was of a snooker table, where ten people had coloured their heads and then bounced around when struck by the white ball. The contestants make all their props, and jumped around happily when their clapometer scores went up... someone should take it up over here. I didn't have much luck finding it on the web: the closest I found was this pdf (which also features "I’M OLD ENOUGH!": Very small kids are sent out by their parents to go shopping alone for the first time ever. Is that real? Could you do that over here?).

Lovelock: We're all going to die!

2006-01-16T19:45:00.000Z

Well, if I must be called alarmist I may as well justify it :-)). The source (thanks CH) is James Lovelock in the Independent, who doesn't use those exact words but does say:

My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease... The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger... We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

Obviously, billions of people *will* die before the end of the century; I will probably be one of them to die of old age. As long as I don't fall of a mountain or some other accident. Will I die of climate change? At the moment it seems unlikely to me. He also says:

Unfortunately our nation [the UK] is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We *are* quite urbanised, but the farming area is still much larger than the urban area.

Anyway, enough knockabout, what about the substance of Lovelocks words? I disagree with the *certainty* he uses. The temperature rises are not certain; they depend on future CO2 etc emissions (if he is trying to say that these are already committed due to existing forcing, then he is way off the mark; but its all so broad-brush its rather hard to tell). This applies to the "impacts" bit too: i.e. the billions-will-die. He may be right; he may be not. He certainly doesn't back it up with any evidence. Apart from his reputation, why should anyone believe him? Also, his the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years misrepresents what the "climate specialists" do (if he means the physical climatologists): which is to say, we may well predict (or project) temperature rises, but... tend to leave the impacts alone. And of course the we're-all-going-to-die stuff plays into the hands of the septics: if its going to happen anyway, well then why bother do anything. Lovelock doesn't quite say this, or perhaps he says it then unsays it I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time... which if read carefully does make it clear that all this *is* contingent on future emissions.

His temperature predictions are:

...as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

and thats about all the substance (apart from noticing the recent global dimming; perhaps he has got carried away with that?) (He also sez We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years - what is the 100kyr a reference to? One stoat-point to the first convincing answer). Now we all know (having read James "Pielke Demolisher" Annan) that high values of climate sensitivity are unlikely. And the IPCC range is something like 1.5-5 oC (e.g. here). However, what I wanted to hang on this is the fact that temperature increases are expected to vary very strongly by region, and in particular the continents warm rather more than the seas. So its quite possible to get 5-6 oC increases even from the multi-model mean (e.g. this, which is admittedly the TAR but I don't think the numbers are bigger now). But I'm not sure where the 8 oC in the temperature regions and 5 oC in the tropics comes from - perhaps some particular model?

is it possible that all this is explained by My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts...? I hope not. All in all I'm inclined to file this under "irresponsible journalism".

Wikinews

2006-01-16T19:24:00.000Z

A few snippets from wikipedia... I'm now an admin, and hence have ultimate power to CRUSH ALL MY ENEMIES HA HA HA HA!!! <evil laugh trails off into the distance>. Sadly no: the rules prohibit me from abusing my powers and there are always other people watching anyway. And not that I have too many enemies, Of Course. Some of the comments are interesting though: try the RFA, scroll down for the Opposes.

And I've just made my 10,000th edit. That slacker Lubos only has 2.3k, & Charles matthews has a feeble 54k.

Plants and Methane

2006-01-12T13:34:00.000Z

There is an interesting paper out in Nature today (don't send me it, I've just discovered we have Nature online from work, how nice; if you too have access, the article is here and the commentaries here and here: so I've downloaded the pdfs into my computer but not yet into my brain). In the meantime I will of course recomment to you the RealClimate take: Scientists Baffled. I will strongly disrecommend the Grauniad's stupid Global warming: blame the forests; the BBC's Plants revealed as methane source is a bit better.

The point being that this (if true) is a change to the methane source (by up to 30%) but CO2 is a bigger forcing that the total methane; and of course the total methane levels in the atmosphere remain what they have always been measured to be, so historical forcing estimates from total methane remain unchanged. Perhaps the attribution will change a little bit: though to first order we have lost forest over the last century I think, so if plants are a net source that means we've been losing plant sources which means (given that we know the absolute levels) that anthro methane sources have grown more than previously believed...

Blair and Hobbes

2006-01-11T21:11:00.000Z

I'm a bit of a fan of Hobbes (I love the language in [[Leviathan]]; its like the King James bible. The book itself is a great read, and a wonderful source of ideas and argument. But... would you want to live in a society where, for example it is annexed to the sovereignty to be judge of what opinions and doctrines are averse, and what conducing to peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how far, and what men are to be trusted withal in speaking to multitudes of people; and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they be published?).

I had (independently of many others, I'm sure) the idea that US (foreign) policy is based on Hobbes-type ideas (this briefly mentions the same; I assume its a commonplace). And now Blur is citing him... or so sez the Grauniad: when I read "PM cites Hobbes and Tawney to justify new police powers" I was agog. Which bit does he quote? there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign; and consequently none of his subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his subjection perhaps?

But with characteristic newspaper distain for sourcing, all the paper says is Quoting the 17th-century political thinker Thomas Hobbes and 20th-century social critic RH Tawney, the prime minister hoped the Respect action plan launched yesterday would not be judged on whether or not it was "tough" or populist but as opening a "genuine intellectual debate about the nature of liberty in a modern developed society". Hmmm, I suspect Hobbes would not have been very impressed by a Sovereign with a Respect Action Plan. The Civil Sword was more in his line.

So I'm forced off to the #10 website to find the speech. And Prez Blur sez: More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes's Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state? And thats the only use of Hobbes I can find. So: Blur is *not* quoting Hobbes, only citing him: or rather, invoking H's mighty name in an effort to lend weight to B's pallid policies.

And does he seriously believe that politicial theory attained its fullest expression in Hobbes's Leviathan? Its bizarre. Yes I love the book and the language but you can't use it as a textbook for running a state (I'm sure Blur would love to, but even our supine parliament wouldn't let him go that far).

Your blog seems to be corrupted a little bit...

2006-01-09T22:04:00.000Z

Not, not the content, the format. IJ points out that viewed with Internet Exploiter the sidebar on the right drops down to the bottom. Indeed it does, though if you look closely you'll see it puts it in the correct place to start with, then reformats the sidebar to the bottom later. Odd.

I've fiddled with the page width to see if that helps, but it doesn't, so for the moment: my apologies to IE folks, and perhaps you need to upgrade to Firefox :-). If anyone understands CSS and/or IE, please take a look at the page source and tell me whats wrong...

Poor headlines: meat and CO2

2006-01-05T22:54:00.000Z

I read this in the paper Grauniad; but Chris Mooney provides an on-line link. CM doesn't commit himself to an opinion on it, but I will: its poor, at least in terms of headlines. Read New research indicates that gas-guzzling cars are a much less important factor in climate change than the huge amounts of food devoured by carnivorous 'burger man' (or even Meat Eating Causes Global Warming, ahem) and you get the impression that... meat eating causes GW. But the bottom-line factoid of the story is An average burger man (that is, not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year. This probably tells you more about the smallness of the savings from a Prius. Average annual CO2 emissions are something like 10t most of which is fossil fuels not food, so however you look at it diet isn't the *major* cause. However, even though the article sez "Stop eating meat" is unlikely to be the favourite slogan of the new Stop Climate Chaos coalition. Even "eat less meat" might not go down too well... I'm not sure why it does (disclaimer: I'm a vegetarian, but not a vegan). The UK is struggling to emit less CO2. If we could save 10% just by a minor change in diet, why not...

[All this vaguely relates to an earlier post of mine, GW, methane and vegetarianism: http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm]

Aerosols again

2006-01-05T22:18:00.000Z

Having just said that not much is happening in the climate world, there was an interesting paper in Nature just before Christmas in Nature: Bellouin et al., about possible underestimates of the aerosol effect. Oddly enough I haven't heard much about this... maybe its because it was just before Crimbo (someone has just posted it to sci.env though). Or maybe its because no-one wants to talk about it: from the Grauniad: "We found that aerosols actually have twice the cooling effect we thought," said Nicolas Bellouin, a climate modeller at the Met Office. The consequence is that as air quality improves and aerosol levels drop, future warming may be greater than we currently think.". Thats not really anything the skeptics are going to want to tell you. And if you're a... opposite-of-skeptic I suppose, then the idea that the GCMs have got the aerosol forcing wrong is nothing to trumpet either.

I did read the Nature article and I remember thinking it seemed Fair Enough (though I can't re-read it because the evil information-hoarding folk at Nature won't share it... I can't even find a free abstract); you can read the UKMO press release. There was some kind of let-out clause (that maybe, to compensate, the *indirect* effect could be weaker).

Someone over at wiki got round to asking someone at NCAR, who said:

The exact magnitude of various forcings is uncertain. The new estimates you refer to for aerosols are larger than what some models use (the magnitude of what models compute, for example, for sulfate aerosols varies depending on the nature of their sulfur cycle models or types of sulfate aerosol concentrations they use) but not out of the range of uncertainty for aerosol forcing used across all of the more than 20 models currently being assessed in the IPCC AR4. This accounts for some of the range of model responses to the simulation of 20th century climate. Even with this uncertainty in aerosols, the GHGs are still the largest forcing by far, and are the big driver for late 20th century warming and estimates of 21st century warming. The latest simulations will be assessed in the IPCC AR4, but many modeling groups are publishing their latest findings in the peer reviewed literature now (for example, from our group see: Meehl et al., 2005: How much more warming and sea level rise? Science, 307, 1769—1772). [1]

so its possible that another answer is as she says: the new numbers may be different to previous UKMO ones but are within the uncertainty range.

[Update: the pdf fairy has been to visit, so I've read it again (or rather, for the first time: I now realise I only read the commentary; reading the paper I don't see the bit about indirect effect, so maybe that was invented by the commentary...). They estimate a (clear sky) RF of -1.9 W/m2 whereas the TAR (graph estimates about -0.4, with a range up to nearly -1.0. Though the TAR value isn't clear-sky... but B et al. say the model value is -0.5 - -0.9, which is similar.

Anyway, here is the abstract:

Atmospheric aerosols cause scattering and absorption of incom
ing solar radiation. Additional anthropogenic aerosols released
into the atmosphere thus exert a direct radiative forcing on the
climate system 1 . The degree of presentday aerosol forcing is
estimated from global models that incorporate a representation
of the aerosol cycles 1--3 . Although the models are compared and
validated against observations, these estimates remain uncertain.
Previous satellite measurements of the direct effect of aerosols
contained limited information about aerosol type, and were
confined to oceans only 4,5 . Here we use stateoftheart satellite
based measurements of aerosols 6--8 and surface wind speed 9 to
estimate the clearsky direct radiative forcing for 2002, incorpo
rating measurements over land and ocean. We use a Monte Carlo
approach to account for uncertainties in aerosol measurements
and in the algorithm used. Probability density functions obtained
for the direct radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere give a
clearsky, global, annual average of 21.9 Wm 22 with standard
deviation, 60.3 Wm 22 . These results suggest that presentday
direct radiative forcing is stronger than present model estimates,
implying future atmospheric warming greater than is presently
predicted, as aerosol emissions continue to decline

I'm sure Nature won't mind that.]

Wiki: Cold Fusion

2006-01-05T22:04:00.000Z

Since the wiki climate pages have been pretty sane recently, and not a lot has been happening on the climate front, I've been browsing further afield and contributed to the [[Cold Fusion]] page. Or rather, to the discussion of it. Its interesting in itself, if you're interested (so to speak) but its also interesting as an illustration of the problems of psuedo/fringe science: that the True Believers in such are generally far more commited, and often more knowledgeable (in some sense; they know more things about it but not the one key thing: that its wrong...) that the larger mass of folk.

So if anyone out there has a reasonable knowledge of nuke-related matters (hello, John!) do go and have a look and leave a comment at least.

And while I'm on this stuff, I really ought to mention the RFA against Reddi.

Nuclear CO2

2006-01-03T11:40:00.000Z

A while ago I posted tangenitally on the CO2 output from Nukes here. Now a new study (whose reliability I have no way of assessing) says:

The nuclear process emits 2-6 grams of carbon equivalent per kilowatt-hour, while coal, oil and natural gas emit 100-360 grams of carbon per kilowatt-hour [1].

(actually thats The Age's paraphrase; hopefully they can report figures accurately).

After my last post, an anonymomous commenter pointed me to the opendemocracy posting which asserts that:

A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide per kiloWatt hour (kWh) of a gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account.

Hmm... how do we reconcile these two estimates? Firstly gas is better than oil or coal so perhaps we can take the "100" from the first; but even then taking the "6" from the first and the lowest, 20%, from the second we have 6% compared to 20%, a factor of 3 disparity. Unfortunately the source for the second lot (http://www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/) is currently offline.

Based on a simple argument (I think most of the monetary costs of nukes is engineering and safety and disposal; if the CO2 costs were really 40% nukes would probably be even more uneconomic than they are) I'm disinclined to believe the second set. That doesn't mean I do believe the first, though.

I do agree with SB on the comments to my first post: that there are vast energy efficiency gains possible. BS's argument that nukes are too safe is worth reading too. But having said that, any other refs to nukes CO2 would be welcome.

Oh... and this *isn't* going to become an energy-sources blog... back to the science soon!

Gas excitement

2006-01-02T21:26:00.000Z

Happy New Year folks. Peace and Good Will to all people. Now read on...

Gas delivery is in the news here, not a usual topic even in winter. But the shut-off by Russia of the Ukraines gas supply is having interesting consequences. So far they are only interesting, hopefully they won't get worrying. Refs for this: Guardian and again and more; and the BBC.

The story so far... the EU imports 40% of its gas; the UK, 10%, since the North Sea is starting to run out. Russia exports a lot, but recently decided that the Ukraine ought to pay full market price instead of being subsidised (which is sort-of a pay-off for them cosying up to Nato and the EU and stuff; though exactly why the Ukraine should be subsidised I'm not sure; anyway, thats all the politics bit). Ukraine refused, Russia turned off the taps (in some sense). The complicating bit is that a lot of EU gas goes via Ukraines pipelines; the Russians (in absolutely direct terms) have accused the Ukrainians of diverting some of this and stealing it. Meanwhile the Ukraine accused Russia of resorting to "blackmail" in order to undermine Ukraine's economy.

Now France, Italy, Germany and Poland have reported shortages because of Russias actions and are understandably p*ss*d off; its not clear whether the Russian text is designed to divert blame. The EU have called on Russia and the Ukraine to resume discussions; the US seems to be leaning on Russia a bit.

None of this has much to do with climate or science, of course. But it does give some taste of the unpleasantness that might happen when gas supplies really start to run out. It may also affect the should-we-build-more-nukes debate. No-one wants to be left cold in the winter.

Clever bees

2005-12-29T21:09:00.000Z

I suppose this really belongs on the bee blog, but anyway... from Science: honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces (thanks to JF for the tip).

Bryan Lawrence has a blog

2005-12-22T17:55:00.000Z

I discover that Bryan Lawrence (head of BADC) has a blog: http://home.badc.rl.ac.uk/lawrence/blog. A mixture of climate and software... should be perfect for JF.

The Economist on Climate Change (sigh)

2005-12-22T17:10:00.000Z

The last few issues of the Economist have seen a few climate change type articles. One of leaping penguins even made the front cover (headline "Don't Despair: grounds for hope on global warming"; however the grounds for optimism they find are thin: some grassroots action, and hints of voters changing their minds). The Economist (of course) isn't a very good source for the science of GW; its written by economist-types (oddly enough) not scientists. And they have their biases: mostly a free-market liberalism which makes them rather dislike the idea of anything that won't fit within that framework and which might badly strain it. I quite like their general tone usually: I have pinned up in my office two of their front covers arguing for greater immigration, just next to a nearly interchangeable one from Socialst Worker, which I found ironic; one of the first I saw was in favour of same-sex marriage: the Economist, whilst very free-market, is by no means std.right-wing.

As a side note, the most recent edition notes that Lee Raymond is going, which could well be good news.

The Economist has a good reputation in general, and is widely read by business-politician type folks, so we have to care what they say and how they say it. In particular, first paragraphs matter, because many people won't read past them. Which is why the 7th of Dec (or, in the paper version, 10-17th Dec; thanks CH) article is so bad:

THE climate changes. It always has done and it always will. In the past 2m years the temperature has gone up and down like a yo-yo as ice ages have alternated with warmer interglacial periods. Reflecting this on a smaller scale, the 10,000 years or so since the glaciers last went into full-scale retreat have seen periods of relative cooling and warmth lasting from decades to centuries. Against such a noisy background, it is hard to detect the signal from any changes caused by humanity's increased economic activity, and consequent release of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

This is std.septic.sh*t*. Not because its false, but because its misleading. Try this:

People die. They always have and they always will... therefore we shouldn't worry about whether to fund the health service or worry about cars on the roads or terrorists, its just more or less death.

A more honest intro would reflect the std.consensus: that the recent climate change is likely to be unusual and likely to have been caused by people.

The rest of the article isn't too bad: somewhat skeptic (note we've got the k back now) but not too bad. E.g.:

The third finding is the resolution of an inconsistency that called into question whether the atmosphere was really warming. This was a disagreement between the temperature trend on the ground, which appeared to be rising, and that further up in the atmosphere, which did not. Now, both are known to be rising in parallel.

Parallel is wrong, to be picky: the tropospheric trend should be larger, and is.

In case you're wondering, #1 was that its been warm recently, and #2 was the Arctic. #4 is detection of warming in the oceans; #5 is a bit dodgy in their words: The fifth is the observation in reality of a predicted link between increased sea-surface temperatures and the frequency of the most intense categories of hurricane, typhoon and tropical storm. If I were you, I'd read RC. #6 is the THC (again you want RC).

After a slightly dodgy solar bit, they continue with That the climate is warming now seems certain. And though the magnitude of any future warming remains unclear, human activity seems the most likely cause. The question is what, if anything, can or should be done. And thats a fair question. Too rapid or too great a warming, though, risks serious, unpleasant and in some cases irreversible changes, such as the melting of large parts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. There is, to put it politely, a lively debate about how far the temperature can rise before things get really nasty and how much carbon dioxide would be needed to drive the process. Unfortunately, existing models of the climate are not accurate enough to resolve this dispute with the precision that policymakers would like. Again, pretty good, apart from that last bit (to me it implies that the poor old policymakers are just sitting there wondering when the GCMs will tell them what to do, which is nonsense: they all have agendas of their own).

Then lastly If greenhouse-gas emissions are to be capped, however, a mixture of political will and technological fixes will be needed. Seems fair to me, but we're heading out of my territory with that, so I'll just observe that political will seems distinctly missing, to me. I'm aiming for a post on Montreal soon.

Connolley has done such amazing work...

2005-12-19T22:49:00.000Z

Back to wikipedia... Nature has an article on wikipedia vs Britannica. It was an interesting exercise, and as the most notable climatologist on wiki :-) they interviewed me, which lead to the sidebar article "Challenges of being a Wikipedian" (see the Nature article; click on the "challenges" link near the bottom). It contains the rather nice quote from Jimbo Wales "Connolley has done such amazing work and has had to deal with a fair amount of nonsense" (does Lumo still read this?).

What Nature did was to take a number (50; of which 42 came back usefully) of wiki and Britannica articles, and send them out to experts for review. There was a fairly severe constraint on this: that the articles had to be of comparable length in the two sources; which is why I think no climate change type articles were done. I strongly suspect that if you try to find anything about, say, the satellite temperature record in Britannica it will either be entirely missing or badly out of date. The list of articles is here.

There were 8 serious errors in both sources. Then we move onto more minor inaccuracies. The oddest thing about this is that the average number of errors in Britannica is 3 and wiki 4; and Nature (genuinely) expected us to be *pleased* about this, as though being nearly as good as Britannica was something to be happy about! I rather suspect that this may be due to the choice of articles to some extent. The GW articles don't contain many errors (except the septic cr*p, sadly we can't get rid of it all :-().

The most pleasing part, though, is the accompanying editorial which actively encourages scientists to contribute (James, are you listening?): Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica [oh yes it is... WMC] , but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource.

[Update: there is a Nature blog here and this includes a list of the errors in the EB and wiki versions; see-also [[Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December_2005/Errors]]. The Nature blogs report on Jimbo's visit is interesting too. And [[Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Climate change dispute 2#Removal of the revert parole imposed on William_M._Connolley is nice to have...]

News from NZ...

2005-12-19T21:30:00.000Z

I'm back. And to celebrate, here is a story from a local paper over there. My apologies to all the good folk of NZ, this is not a fair reflection of your country, but it is very funny, I'm thinking of sending it in to Private Eye.

Also, a joke: what do you call a woman who stands between goalposts? A: Annette. And by odd coincidence, Mt Annette was the peak I climbed from the Mueller hut. More on that in the photo-essay to follow "soon".

Also, a note: I'm switching comments to "only registered users" just as soon as I can work out how to do it. I'm a bit fed up with anonymous trolls, named trolls are so much better...

[Update: BL points out the obvious: that Cairns is in Australia (the "West Island") not NZ. Oops. I knew that... He also says that he would have posted that here, except I insist on only registered users. So for the moment, I'm turning that off again, since he is the second person to somewhat dislike that feature, and on reflection I don't need it]

Dunedin: sea ice conf

2005-12-08T20:57:00.000Z

I haven't blogged much about this conf. Mostly because there is no wireless access (dinosaurs...) but also because much of it is deeply technical sea ice stuff of rather limited general interest. Which is in itself a point of interest: the amount of climate change related stuff is small. A few people have shown the std.pic of Arctic september ice, which shows decline (no-one has shown a similar for the Ant) but only a few people have done anything with it (trying to look at the changes in different ice types: first-yeay, multi-year; but then this is tricky). Also there are only a handfull of papers using climate models.

So what is it actually about? A major theme is sea ice depth (ice fraction is fairly easy (err, thouigh see my brilliant presentation deomonstrating that there are problems even there), depth is much harder). Lots of people are using satellites (radiometer on ERS-2; laser on ICEsat) or helicopter or ship or sfc bourne methods to estimate ice depth. The problem is that while its fairly easy to drill a hole in the ice and measure depth at a point, to get an area value is much harder. EM (electro-magnetic) sensors can detect the water level (on a ship they need to be only 3m above the ice; hung from a helicopter they can be 10 m above the ice, with the heli another 20 m higher up, which apparently makes for exciting flying). So those get you transects. From satellite, you can measure ice freeboard (radar) or top of snow (laser) if you can find enough leads to reference the values to a sea level; this is a major problem. Also measurements from underneath: the late lamented autosub; some stuff from military submarines (their CTDs didn't work so they used the entire sub as a billion pound CTD) which at true cost would be incredibly expensive, but since they are there anyway (not really clear what they *are* doing) they can do some science, even if their sounding kit is a bit dodgy for science.

Apart from that, various things: properties of ice; today a pile of talks about the ice formation mechanism, which isn't really my thing: platelets and congelation and frazil and so on. Special mention for the chap running a molecular simulation of ice formation: with 1,500 molecules his simulation of the 9 ns it takes to freeze took 4 days processing; his value for the freezing temp is 271 (+/- 9) which he regards as extremely accurate. How ice freezes from underneath; new ice dynamics models; measurements from campaigns; etc etc.

Last night we had the conf dinner in Lanarch "Castle" a magnificent but truely fake building, more of a manor house or small chateau. And we had the piping in of the haggis and address to same. And the drinking till midnight.

Note to PH: yes the foxgloves are non-native. But they are lovely.

Road deaths and terrorism

2005-12-08T19:51:00.000Z

Continuing an old theme, but this time with some actual numbers, via Nature:

114 deaths per million people occurred in road crashes in 29 countries in the developed world during 2001.

0.293 deaths per million people were caused by terrorism each year in the same countries in 1994–2003.

390:1 is the ratio of road deaths to deaths from terrorism.

Source: N. Wilson and G. Thomson Injury Prevention 11, 332–333 (2005).

And if I didn't mention it before, I'm currently in Dunedin because of this.

NZ: eternal sunset

2005-12-05T22:12:00.000Z

I'm in NZ, Dunedin. And it turns out they do have internet here. To prove it, here are some pics of the flight over.

Heathrow to LA was good: we had a long slow sunset as we headed north, sunrise as we went due W, then sunset again into LA. Its a shame they don't have a better quality "photography" window in the back somewhere. We got to see greenland (briefly; the W side; the E side was in cloud) and sea ice over Hudson bay (see pix: this is the firt sea ice I've ever seen in real life; its from 11,000 m) and the vast expanses of frozen Canada. LA to Dunedin is 12+ hours; I managed to sleep much of it thankfully.

Trivia: on the flight into LA, we had all-plastic cutlery. Out of LA, we got metal forks and spoons.

Catherine Bennett can FOAD

2005-12-01T20:05:00.000Z

As if the gulf stream stuff wasn't enough to wind me up, the Grauniad published Catherine Bennett Climate march, but will it work?: Going on the climate change protest this Saturday is like marching for niceness - and just as ineffectual. Though the first headline is only in the online edition. The article itself is just blather; she has nothing to say; I interpret it to mean that she has grown too old and fat to bother, and has nothing better to do than mock people who do care.

Anyway, on that temperate note, I'll sign off for the moment, and probably for the next two weeks, unless NZ is connected to the internet.

ps: thanks to those who commented on the poster, I corrected most of the typos.

"Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream"?

2005-12-01T18:48:00.000Z

By now you'll all have read the RC post: Decrease in Atlantic circulation? (see, thats where I got my question mark from); which is about Bryden et al. in Nature. RC, of course, has a nice science analysis; I just wanted to compare it to the Grauniad story: Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream. Now the headline is nonsense, because the Nature paper itself sez: the northwards transport in the gulf stream across 25 oN has remained nearly constant. Something more complicated is going on (return flow shallower, hence warmer, hence overall heat transport N is less because more is coming back S), which I'm not going to explain because (a) its over at RC and (b) I haven't read the paper properly yet (I look forward to doing so tomorrow during my long flight). It looks to me like it was too complicated for the Grauniad sci writers.

There are I think various caveats to interpreting this: most notably (as RC notes), that if this really has already happened, you might expect some signal in the SSTs which doesn't seem to have been seen.

Also, the Nature article and the Nature commentary are a bit selective in their reading of GCM results to support this.

[Update: also see James Annan's take and wise words re Nature]

Reading the entrails: New Nukes?

2005-11-29T16:39:00.000Z

The BBC says:

Blair says nuclear choice needed

Tony Blair says "controversial and difficult" decisions will have to be taken over the need for nuclear power to tackle the UK energy crisis.

The prime minister told the Liaison Committee, made up of the 31 MPs who chair Commons committees, any decision will be taken in the national interest.

He is said to believe nuclear power can improve the security of the UK's energy supply and also help on climate change.

A government review of energy options is expected to be announced next week.

I like the any decision will be taken in the national interest. This fails the try-negating it test: any decision will be taken against the national interest is unsayable. So ItNI means "prepare for an unpopular decision".

Although there is always a techno-industrial lobby in favour of Nukes, I'd guess that and also help on climate change may be quite accurate. Blur has been talking about Kyoto options and as I noted I think the govt has realised we're (they're?) not going to hit our targets. So he needs to pull something out of the hat. These nukes won't do it: they won't be onsteam by 2012 unless they arrive rather fast; but they could probably be folded into the plans if pushed.

So... is this a runner? Lots of people don't like nukes: Greenpeace protesters have disrupted a speech used by Tony Blair to launch an energy review which could lead to new nuclear power stations in the UK. Two protesters climbed up into the roof of the hall where Mr Blair was due to address the Confederation of British Industry conference. After a 48-minute delay, Mr Blair made his speech in a smaller side-hall. Forcing Blur off into a side-hall is a success, and will have annoyed him a lot.

But the "debate" about their (de)merits is as poor as ever: at least judging from radio 4 this morning. We had someone who doesn't like nukes, and then Bernard Ingham who does (I think, like Bellamy, out of an unstated assumption that its Nukes or Windfarms and he doesn't like windfarms). The green chap said Nukes are uneconomic; BI said they are. I rather suspect that they aren't, under current conditions: our present Nukes barely manage to stay afloat even with all their building costs written off; and I don't see piles of commercial applications waiting to be built. Of course some of this is due to the endless wrangling which costs; and how to cost the long term storage is obviously a bit of a poser since no-one yet knows how it will be done.

One of the arguments that the Green side is starting to push is that Nukes aren't that good for CO2: that over their lifecycle, they emit lots, comparable with coal/gas. I rather doubt that makes sense. I've never seen the figures. If it *is* true then it would account for the economics being so bad. If anyone has them, do please leave a comment.

You'll have noticed that I haven't explicitly given my opinion on this, though which side I lean should be clear enough. I excuse this by it being far from my expertise: I'm not sure why you should want my opinion. If offer this observation, though: that through the years on sci.env I have observed that the people in favour of Nukes invariably know more about them, and those against know little. Blur is likely to be an exception to this, though.

Sea ice: what I do in my spare time

2005-11-29T13:55:00.000Z

Fairly soon now I'm off to NZ (oh dear, my CO2 burden...) to present some sea ice work. The poster part of it is nz-hadcm3.pdf. I have a day or two left, so feel free to point out typos and gross scientific errors.

The theme of the work is upgrading the sea ice dynamics in HadCM3, which has occurred just in time for it to be replaced by HadGEM. Never mind, we learnt a lot in the process. Mostly we learnt how hard it is to force the sea ice to behave itself in a coupled model.

The poster (in theory) says it all, so I won't explain at length here: but feel free to ask questions...

Topping Punts

2005-11-28T22:26:00.000Z

There is an air of "tipping points" about. This is an idea (possibly coined by Schellnhuber) where "the balance of particular systems has reached the critical point at which potentially irreversible change is immenent, or actually occurring". That quote, somewhat bizarrely, comes from the Books and Arts section of Nature (here), which is a slightly dodgy regular section where they make a feeble stab at pretending the "two cultures" ever talk to each other.

And so the piccy is S's attempt to find an "icon" for climate change. But (ibid) "the issues surrounding climate change are extraordinarily complex. Can an image be found that is both simple and good science? Given the contentious nature of the debates, particularly in the United States, it is unwise to offer hostages to fortune by parading vulnerable predictions". I don't think the image is simple: is it good science?

But first of all, what about the "tipping points" concept anyway? I've previously pushed the idea that the climate is stable (in the absence of perturbation). You could argue, quite plausibly, that we shall soon have emitted enough CO2 to raise the T enough that we will be committed to melting Greenland. Perhaps that counts as a tipping point. But its slow. Its on the map as "instability of the greenland ice sheet" which is an odd way of phrasing it but has the "virtue" of implying speed.

But enough quibbling. The one I reacted badly to was "Antarctic ozone hole". Its an envoronmental icon, but hardly a tipping point: as far as its known its reversible, and on a long slow trend to being reversed (err, as long as GW doesn't cool the stratosphere too much...).

As to all the rest... I dunno, its a bit vague isn't it? I'm not sure I'm too keen on this search for an icon stuff.

A couple of BTW's to finish off: (1) I'm down to wiggly worm, so it looks like status is based on snapshot rather than accumulated - must get posting again. (2) I'm off conferencing for a while at the end of the week, so will be dropping further down. (3) I may get assimilated by the Borg in the near future anyway... Mark seems to have self-assimilated.

Campaign against Climate Change - march Dec 3rd

2005-11-27T11:47:00.000Z

A foray into explicit politics: promotion for the Campaign against Climate Change and the London march on Dec 3rd.

The Parker Paper

2005-11-26T20:11:00.000Z

The Parker UHI paper (see [[Urban Heat Island]]) from Nature 2004 (and the Peterson 2003) strengthens the TAR contention that the UHI isn't important; and perhaps negligible. Now RP Sr has taken a shot at it. Unfortunately his paper is... difficult. You can take his word for what it says if you like, but I'd rather not. Happily, RP is so confident of his position that he has followed up with a whinge about Nature rejecting him, which includes the reviewers responses: Pielke has failed to adequately assess whether there are any trends in windiness in the Parker data set. Parker stratified by wind conditions, both at rural and urban sites, so any trends in windiness (even if this were possible in a stratified data set) would occur both at rural and urban sites. To suggest that there would be different turbulent mixing at rural and urban sites would then require differences in trends in temperature to be found, which is exactly what Parker found not to be the case. The logic presented in Pielke’s comment is circular and incorrect is the briefest.

One day I may actually read it, or meet someone who has. Until then I don't have a good way to assess it.

Its cold and Scott Adams gets whacked by Dogbert

2005-11-25T20:18:00.000Z

Today we had the first (and who knows, maybe the only) snow of winter. Just a flurry; nothing settled, sadly.

Meanwhile, although I really like Dilbert, it looks like Scott Adams needs a whack from Dogbert to chase out the demons of stupidity aka ID/Creationism: via some rather circuitous routes I found Stein and Wolfgang.

And while I'm here, there is nice blog starting by Robert Friedman about his trip to the South Pole. Take the virtual tour!

Grauniad: Sea level rise doubles in 150 years

2005-11-25T18:27:00.000Z

Yes, back to the familiar old topic: bashing science coverage in the papers. This time that old lefty favourite, the Grauniad, which has an article on Sea level rise doubles in 150 years. Who have discovered that Global warming is doubling the rate of sea level rise around the world... The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century... Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by... fossil fuel burning... during the past 5,000 years, sea levels rose at a rate of around 1mm each year, caused largely by the residual melting of icesheets from the previous ice age. But in the past 150 years, data from tide gauges and satellites show sea levels are rising at 2mm a year.

To which the obvious reply is "is this supposed to be news"? Slightly garbled of course (satellites say 3mm/y; the longer time tide gauge record is ~2 m/y; see the wiki [[Sea Level Rise]] page and the refs to the IPCC therein). The other interesting bit of garbling is the 1mm/y over the last 5kyr... the TAR says Based on geological data, global average sea level may have risen at an average rate of about 0.5 mm/yr over the last 6,000 years and at an average rate of 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr over the last 3,000 years. So, *if* they haven't garbled it, they story is that the folk from Rutgers University have upped the estimates of SRL over the last 5kyr. But I'd bet on garbling myself. The abstract from Science is here but I can't read the full contents (I had an offer of a subs for $99/y and am considering taking it up...) but it seems to be more interested in the Myr timescale.

The Grauniad also covers the latest EPICA stuff, but thats much better covered over at RC so you should go there for that.

[Update: thanks to the kindness of not one but two readers, I now have a copy of the article from Science. In true blog style, I've quickly skimmed it far enough to discover that the 1 mm/y over the last 5kyr is a bit of a sideshow, and fortunately for you, its in the supplementary online material freely available. They say "Sealevel rise slowed at about 7 to 6 ka (fig. S1). Some regions experienced a mid-Holocene sealevel high at 5 ka, but we show that global sea level has risen at È1 mm/year over the past 5 to 6 ky." So I must apologise to the Grauniad: no garbling.

So how do we reconcile that to the pic I show (which is from wiki, not the Miller paper)? Both show a rise of about 15m over the last 8 kyr. The wiki pic has that very steep (15 to 4-) from 8 to 7 kyr; then much shallower. The Miller article fig S1 starts a bit deeper and has a much more uniform slope. Since the Miller data is almost entirely from one area and appears to contradict what I think I already know, I'll stick with wiki and the TAR for now. But informed comment is welcome. I do find it a teensy bit surprising that the Miller paper doesn't comment on the discrepancy between their Holocene results and "accepted wisdom": its possible I have the AW wrong.

Update 2 (minor): switch href on the figure to the wiki page]

Stability in a control run of HadCM3

2005-11-23T17:24:00.000Z

One of the things I do is port [[HadCM3]] to new platforms (although I shouldn't over emphasise my role in that: much of the hard work of portabilising it was done at the Hadley Centre; nonetheless new platforms throw up new problems). HadCM3 was written for a Cray T3E; its known to be stable when run without forcing for thousands of years on that platform. There is a portable version of the model, which requires a little bit of effort to make it run on new platforms. The first thing to do is make it compile; the second to make it run through the first timestep; the third through the first meaning period; and then hopefully all that remains is to check that it is stable.

Which brings in this picture. Black is a 200 year control run, with the g95 compiler on a 4-processor Opteron system (using 3 procs for most of the time). Blue is a rather older run on an Athlon system under the antique fujitsu/lahey compiler. Red is an in between run on Opteron with the Portland Group compiler (pgi). All are seasonal data, differenced from 100 year means of an "official" control run. What you'll notice is that the red run has a distinct climate drift, which is enough to make it unusable. Blue looks OK; black has been run out long enough to be sure its OK. The grey shaded bit is some kind of 95% confidence limit based on the variability of the 100 year "official" run.

Quite why the Opteron/pgi runs drifts I don't know. Its 99.999% the same code as the other runs (differing only in whatever it took to make the compiler accept it). Most likely there is some compiler bug in there; but I will probably never know.

By eye, the 200 year run has no drift. By line fitting, the results are:


0- 50: [ 0.00168505, 0.00451390]
0-100: [ 0.00052441, 0.00159977]
0-150: [-0.00050959, 0.00009494]
0-200: [-0.00060853,-0.00015253]

where I've shown the (95%) confidence intervals for a line fit over the first 50, 100, 150 and 200 years. Which shows up the internal variability quite nicely. If I'd just taken the first 50 years I might have believed in a drift of 0.3 oC/century, which is small but not perhaps totally negligible. By 100 years the "drift" has a central value of 0.1 oC/Century which would be negligible. Out to 150 years there is no statistical trend. Out to 200, a trivial cooling. Note, BTW, that all these sig estimates are rather thrown-together and should be a bit wider to take proper account of autocorrelation.

The mirror world

2005-11-22T18:39:00.000Z

RP has what I regard as a posting full of mistakes: Reflections on the Challenge (my post The Big Picture refers). And he doesn't get any better in the comments.

One of mine got through. This one, below, got stopped for "questionable content" - judge for yourself - so since I have my own blog I'll post it here.

Roger - you're still getting it wrong; Tom Rees is essentially right.

You say "So your position now is that the hockey stick was in 2001 a key study in making the case for attribution. That is, that without the hockey stick the case for attribution in 2001 would have been somewhat weaker? I disagree."

No. I didn't say *key*. But I *do* say that without MBH the attribution case in the TAR would have been *somewhat weaker* (but not *very much weaker*). [Good grief], you can just read the thing (surely youre familiar with it): http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/007.htm. Which makes it clear that MBH is part of, but by not means the whole of, the attribution case.

Yes, MBH wasn't in the SAR, but then as the TAR sez "Since the SAR, progress has been made" and MBH was part of that progress.

If you want to position yourself as some kind of referee in this [bizarre] process, you need to be much clearer about the structure of things.

The words in []'s are ones I experimented with deleting in the hope of getting past the content filters. No such luck.

Stoat related fun!

2005-11-17T22:02:00.000Z

There is some good stoat-related fun over here (thanks to Jim E).

Testing the Fidelity of Methods Used in Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Past Climate

2005-11-14T23:04:00.000Z

There's an intersting new paper just out in J Climate, Testing the Fidelity of Methods Used in Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Past Climate by Michael E. Mann, Scott Rutherford, Eugene Wahl & Caspar Ammann (hat tip to John Fleck).

[Update: the actual article is now available: thanks John & Mike]

Two widely used statistical approaches to reconstructing past climate histories from climate 'proxy' data such as tree-rings, corals, and ice cores, are investigated using synthetic 'pseudoproxy' data derived from a simulation of forced climate changes over the past 1200 years. Our experiments suggest that both statistical approaches should yield reliable reconstructions of the true climate history within estimated uncertainties, given estimates of the signal and noise attributes of actual proxy data networks.

This is similar to (but I think there is more than... I really should finish reading it before I post...) von S's Science thing of last year, of which it sayeth:

One study by Von Storch et al. (2004--henceforth 'VS04'), however, concludes that a substantial bias may arise in proxy-based estimates of long-term temperature changes using CFR methods. VS04 based this conclusion on experiments using a simulation of the GKSS coupled model (similar experiments described by VS04 using an alternative simulation of the HadCM3 coupled model showed little such bias). The GKSS simulation was forced with unusually large changes in natural radiative forcing in past centuries [the peak-to-peak solar forcing changes on centennial timescales (~1 W/m2) were about twice that used in other studies (e.g. Crowley, 2000) and much larger than the most recent estimates (~0.15 W/m2--see Lean et al., 2002; Foukal et al., 2004)]. A substantial component of the low-frequency variability in the GKSS simulation, furthermore, appears to have been a 'spin-up' artifact: the simulation was initialized from a very warm 20th century state at AD 1000, prior to the application of preanthropogenic radiative forcing, leading to a long-term drift in mean temperature (Goosse et al., 2005).... These arguably unrealistic features in the GKSS simulation make the simulation potentially inappropriate for use in testing climate reconstruction methods.

We shall see.

Momentum

2005-11-14T21:40:00.000Z

No, not another in the butterfly series, you'll be pleased to hear. Eli wants to know about momentum in GCMs. Specifically, "how momentum is transferred from the Earth to the atmosphere as it rotates". Well as far as GCMs are concerned the rotation of the earth is a lower boundary condition and its fixed (in the real world variations in the atmospheres angular momentum, from exchanges with the earth, do cause tiny but detectable changes in the solid earth rotation rate. But these changes are so tiny that for GCM purposes they should be neglected).

However in a GCM the atmosphere does exchange momentum fluxes with the earth (which affect the atmos if not the earth) and with the ocean (which *do* affect the ocean and are the main cause of the various oceanic currents). In the boundary layer above the earth (or ocean) the exchange is represented by Monin-Obukhov similarity theory which I won't go into (BL met is a thing in itself) but the momentum exchange is proportional to the near-surface windspeed, the roughness length of the underlying surface (which is a combination of the real roughness of the surface as you would measure it, enhanced to represent the form drag from orography below resolved scales if your model supports that), and a parameter, call it C, related to the stability of the atmosphere (very stable conditions (i.e. strong inversions) have little coupling of sfc to atmos and hence small C (theoretically, zero for very strong inversions). Unstable (convecting) atmos has lots of coupling and a large C. Above this there is some friction between the various atmospheric layers leading to momentum exchanges. As well as this there some other terms: the form drag of mountain ranges leads to more mom flux (up to half the total I think?). And Gravity Wave Drag which represents the effects of momentum transfer from surface orography to breaking gravity waves high up (300 hPa?).

But quite apart from that, there is another interesting thing. My picture shows the near-surface (10m) winds from HadCM3 (it would look almost the same in the re-analyses, if you're silly enough not to trust GCMs...). BTW, I apologise for the lack of anything drawn on top of the positive colours: I've no idea why the IDL Z-buffer insists on this: any IDL gurus out there?). Its an annual mean - it would look somewhat different in different seasons. No matter. The contours are the zonal (EW) component and the horizontal wind arrows are drawn on top. The most obvious feature (apart from the low speeds over the continents: they are much rougher than the oceans; and perhaps the strong southern ocean westerlies) is the tropical easterlies: this is an inescapable dynamical consequence of the earths rotation and the heating at the equator: air rises there, hence there must be equatorwards flow near the surface, hence (Coriolis) these winds are deflected towards the west; hence the band of easterlies from 30N to 30S. Now (supposing you believe in conservation of angular momentum) this necessarily implies average *westerlies* over the rest of the globe, since we know that on average the atmosphere is neither slowing down nor speeding up. This then touches on does-the-ferrel-cell-exist kind of stuff: because although there are good dynamical reasons (so people tell me...) for the mid-latitude westerlies, the actual reasons behind them are quite complex.

More UK CO2 emissions

2005-11-14T20:57:00.000Z

Speed limit crackdown to cut emissions says todays Grauniad. Who are they fooling? UK car drivers have grown to expect to be able to violate speeding laws on the motorway with impunity: it will take more guts than this government has to try to enfore them.

It was drawn up by Elliot Morley, minister for climate change (did you know we have a minister for cliamte change?) at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and is being discussed (read: watered down) by the cabinet committee on energy and the environment, which is expected to publish a revised (read: watered down) version early next year.

Marked restricted, the review document says: "The government needs to strengthen its domestic credibility on climate change (ah, they've noticed that have they? Good)...

The review lists 58 possible measures to save an extra 11m-14m tons of carbon pollution each year, which it calls the government's "carbon gap". One of the options, a new obligation to mix renewable biofuels into petrol for vehicles, was announced last week (that one seemed distinctly dodgy). Stricter enforcement of the 70 mph limit, the document says, would save 890,000 tons of carbon a year - more than the biofuels obligation and many other listed measures put together.

Andrew Howard of the AA Motoring Trust said: "They would have to win a lot of hearts and minds to convince the public that this wasn't just a revenue generating exercise. It also raises some big questions about whether speed enforcement for environmental rather than road safety reasons should be an offence for which motorists get points on their licence."

See? the usual suspects are piling in favour of the poor downtrodden motorists inalienable right to break the law.

But there is more, because Government sets out challenge for greener Britain contains various policy options and how much they would save. Of the "frontrunners" one is an order of magnitude bigger than the rest: Extend UK participation in EU carbon trading scheme (4.2). Now I may be doing them a disservice, but what I think (in fact I'm practically sure) they mean by this is, don't actually produce less CO2, but buy permits to emit it. Of the "emerging" category, the two biggest are Introduce ways to store carbon pollution underground (0.5-2.5) (i.e., don't produce any less, just...) and Force energy suppliers to use more offshore wind turbines (Up to 1). Which would actually save CO2. In the "difficult" category the biggest is Change road speed limits (1.7) - a surprisingly large number.

All in all, I think they would *like* to reduce our CO2 emissions but don't have the determination required to even seriously try to do it. Too many sound bites, too little action.

Your comment was denied for questionable content.

2005-11-14T20:35:00.000Z

Over at Jennifer Marohasy on politics and the environment there was some kind of debate over the stupid HoL economics-of-IPCC report. Belatedly, I thought I'd join in. So I posted the comment below, but got back Your comment was denied for questionable content... shades of an earlier post!

So I shall post it here, and you can judge. This version has a few words like "tedious" and "nitpicking" removed, but still it fails. Can anyone guess what the problem is?

Am I too late to join this exciting debate?

Early on, someone said: The hockeystick, and the hockeystick alone, was the reason for the claims that this was the warmest century in the last long time.

But if you actually read the IPCC TAR (does anyone?) it says "Globally, it is very likely7 that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental record, since 1861" and "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely7 to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely7 that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year". What is *doesn't* say is that the 20C was the warmest.

The amusing thing, of course, is that everything the TAR said about the hockey stick remains valid for all the reconstructions subsequently published (see http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/10/increase-in-temperature-in-20th.html).

Continuing, someone challenged Mann to say why this hockey stick debate really really matters. Well the answer is: it doesn't really. See http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/11/big-picture.html

Oh, and as for all the SRES stuff... its tedious. If these poor dear marginalised economists want to produce their own CO2 projections... why don't they just do so?

Arctic temperature trends and data sparsity

2005-11-13T21:20:00.000Z

Whilst browsing the wilder shores of skepticism (well, I'd just been to Ikea and needed some light relief...) I came across the inaccurately titled "Reality in Arctic temperature trends. Scroll down about 1/4 of the way to the 1880-2004 temperature plot. So... temperatures higher in 1935-1945 than now? Interesting! And using CRU data too. How come... Well, one funny thing is that he calls this "A sobering dose of reality" - presumably forgetting that elsewhere he has attacked the Jones data as the spawn of the Devil. A second funny thing is that he is using [70,90]... [60,90] is more usual. Would you get the same results for [60,90]? And are there really many stations between [70,90] in the early period?

I'm sure you can guess the answers, and its "no" to both. Have a look at my pic (but be careful, there are lots of lines...). The top graph is [70,90]. The bottom graph is [60,90]. Both show the area-averaged temperature anomaly (in black; the 13-month running mean is in blue) from the HadCRUT2v dataset, in 100's of oC, which is why the left hand scale is 100 times bigger than you think it ought to be. Both plots have the same general shape, but for the wider area the current (last 10 years, mean given by red bar) temps are higher than for the 1935-1945 average. But even for [70,90] the temps in 1935-45 are only marginally higher than now - about 0.1 oC - hardly "much higher than today" as our septic claims.

But... look at the green lines. The lower green line on each plot is the fraction of the area covered by obs, on the right-hand scale. So for [60,90] about 40% of the area is observed, since 1960. In the 1940's, about 30%. For [70,90] about 20% is observed, recently (though with a huge annual cycle: far more people about in summer!) and less than 10% in the 1940's. Our septic complains that the "Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) start their temperature records in 1960". Errm yes, well that might well be a good idea. Perhaps the ACIA people actually bothered to look at the data rather than just area-averaging it.

In fact, to my not-great-surprise, the ACIA people do indeed look at temperatures before 1960 (hint: if a septic sez something is true, its probably false...) and even draw nice maps of the trends at various time intervals: see the ACIA sci report, p36 and after. But they note the data sparsity problems early on.

The total *number* of filled 5x5 degree gridboxes is the upper green line on each plot, and the scale is (conveniently) the [0,400] of the upper half of the temperature scale (has your mind exploded yet?) *except* that for [70,90] that would be too small to see so I've multiplied it by 10 (boom!). So at the time of that huge (and rather suspicious...) jump in the upper plot at 1919, there were only 5 (=50/10) stations. For [60,90] there are nearly 200 filled boxes, recently.

Just looking at fraction-of-obs can be a bit dry, so here are maps of gridboxes filled (with their anomaly values, no in sensible units) for July 1919, 1940 and 2000. Note that using July maximises the filled boxes for the year. Its pretty obvious that 1919 is *very* sparse; 1940 is sparse; but even 2000 isn't exactly packed, north of 70; though its pretty good from 70 to 60 (oh, the black circles are 60 and 70 N, of course).

So... what do we learn from all this (apart from never trust the septics, but we knew that already)? We learn that plucking a dataset off the shelf and playing with it and only showing the end result may well mislead... we learn that you should be cautious with sparse data.

Weaselly behaviour

2005-11-13T19:16:00.000Z

Via Wolfgang via CIP, I learn of Scott Adams Weasel Poll - weaseliest individual is Bush and weaseliest org is the Whitehouse. Reporting it as "finding supplies" when white people loot does creditably in the weaselly behaviour category. Though if you ask me SA can't draw weasels for toffee (his look like rats); and his weasel day mustelid is actually a ferret.

Also, this is a good recent one...

Scary scaling

2005-11-11T20:00:00.000Z

A while ago - back in 2002 I suppose - I heard vague refs to a paper about "scaling" which somehow demonstrated global climate models fail to reproduce real climate when they are tested against observed conditions. Since this was being posted to sci.env by the usual nutters I didn't pay too much attention, and as far as I can see neither did anyone else; though it occaisionally recurs. For one thing, the original article was published in Phys Rev Lett which I (and I think most climate folk) don't read; and pdfs weren't scattered across the web quite as freely in those days. And for another, whatever they were saying was so abstruse as to appear meaningless (even the nutters didn't push it much, because they had no idea what it was about either).

However, someone who isn't a nutter (thanks Nick! But I was right: its the Israelis) has re-drawn it to my attention, and even provided me with it on paper, so I've read it. You can too: its Global Climate Models Violate Scaling of the Observed Atmospheric Variability by R. B. Govindan Dmitry Vyushin Armin Bunde, Stephen Brenner, Shlomo Havlin and Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber. And it did get some attention: e.g. from Nature (subs req) (reputable of course, but sometimes over-excitable). But... is it any good?

Weeeeeelllll... probably not. This is yet more of the fitting power laws to things stuff. They use "detrended fluctuation analysis" (DFA) which I don't understand, but that doesn't matter, we'll just read the results. So... Govindan et al. do their DFA on observations from 6 (rather oddly chosen) stations; and 6 GCMs. The first oddness is their chosing Prague, Kasan, Seoul, Luling (Texas), Vancouver and Melbourne as represenatative of the world. Never mind. They get A ~ 0.65 for these stations. Don't worry too much about what A is; its related to the memory of the system: A ~ 0.5 is no memory (white noise); A ~ 1 is long memory (red noise). They assert boldly that this 0.65 is therefore an Universal Value. They discover that the GCMs, forced by GHGs only, by contrast get A ~ 0.5. Which, says Govindan et al., means that the GCMs overestimate the trends. Just to make sure that you won't miss this, they repeat the same at the end. But... this is not news. The fact that GCMs forced only by GHG's overestimate the trends is in the TAR (like just about everything else you need to know about climate change, its in the SPM, as fig 4). When you add in sulphates, the A from the models increases somewhat (to 0.56-0.62 ish); but thats arguably still too low. So whats up?

Which is where we turn to... Fraedrich and Blender, Scaling of Atmosphere and Ocean Temperature Correlations in Observations and Climate Models. Also in PRL. Who argue that G et al. are wrong: their Universal Value of A ~ 0.65 is not universal at all. They do a much wider analysis: instead of just a few stations, they use a gridded dataset across as much of the globe as they can. And they find (surprise!) exactly what you would expect: over the oceans, high A (~ 0.9) and over the continental interiors, low A (~ 0.5) and in between, mixed A (~ 0.65). Why is this exactly what you expect? Because the ocean has a long memory but the land doesn't. And... if you draw the same plot in a GCM (ECHAM4/HOPE) you get a remarkably similar pattern. So they come to a quite opposite conclusion: the DFA analysis actually shows the GCM performing rather well. And they conclude: The main results of this Letter follow in brief: (i) The exponent A ~ 0.65 is predominantly confined to coasts and land regions under maritime influence. (ii) Coupled atmosphere-ocean models are able to reproduce the observed behavior up to decades. (iii) Long time memory on centennial time scales is found only with a comprehensive ocean model. That last point arises because they tried the same analysis with a slab ocean and with fixed ocean; unsurprisingly, the scaling doesn't work in those cases.

F+B also picked their own seemingly odd station, Krasnojarsk, as a continental interior station, and showed (their fig 1) a scaling of A ~ 0.5 between 1y-decadal scales. At this point Govindan drops out, but some of the original authors reply, saying that (i) the scaling isn't 0.5 at K; and (ii) it isn't 0.5 at other interior points too (they pick yet another scatter of random stations). F+B reply, that (i) Oh yes it is (ii) maybe its the fitting interval: they use 1-15 years; the others are using 150-2500 days. On (i), looking at the pics, I'm with F+B and I can't see what the others are up to.

F+B, incidentally, argue that a control-run GCM (ie no external forcing) is quite good enough to get the long-timescale correlations, and that other forcing doesn't much help (for these purposes at least; you might perhaps have argued that adding in solar forcing and volcanic and stuff might help further). In Blender, R. and K. Fraedrich, 2004: Comment on "Volcanic forcing improves atmosphere-ocean coupled general circulation model scaling performance" by D. Vyushin, I. Zhidkov, S. Havlin, A. Bunde, and S. Brenner, Geophys. Res. Letters, 31 (22), L22502. DOI: 10.1029/2004GL021317 they criticise Vyushin (one of the et al. with G) for suggesting that volcanic helps, on the grounds that it simply isn't needed to get these A values right.

So after all that, what do we end up with, and what have we learnt? Assuming F+B are more right (and I think they probably are, based on what I've read so far) we've learnt very little. The fact that T increases are bigger sans aerosols is bleedin' obvious; as is the longer memoery of the oceans. We have a validation of the GCMs by another measure, but a rather abstruse measure and not an obviously useful one.

I'm an "Adorable Little Rodent"!

2005-11-11T17:26:00.000Z

I've finally succumbed and got a blog counter (from blogpatrol). Its off down the side underneath the ads... I started it at 40k, which is where google adsense says I am (approximately); but now everyone can see not just me. Out of compliment to CIP (where I got the idea) I chose the same style as him. CIP also has a rather more gracious way with words than me, so I'll use his:

I would just like to thank all of you for stopping by. I'm especially grateful to those who leave a comment, even if it is just to tell me I'm wrong, crazy and or stupid! Especially if you explain your reasoning

I do indeed thank you for stopping by... but just to prove that I am less gracious than CIP I'll add comments are only welcome providing you are polite.

However the title of this post refers to my place in the TTLB ecosystem (see the sidelink somewhere) where I have moved up from "Slithering Reptile" (back in September; then, CIP was only a Flippery Fish, now he's been promoted to Crawly Amphibian!). I wonder if there is a mustelid category, though Adorable Rodent is close-ish.

Timing of Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles

2005-11-10T22:04:00.000Z

A tentative post this, unlike my usual strident opinions :-)

The starting point is Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf (GRL, 2003), and also recent RC: chaos and climate (check the comments). When I first read the GRL paper I somewhat distrusted it. I'm not sure why. The basic idea of that paper is that the [[Dansgaard-Oeschger events]], which occur with approximately 1,500 year spacings in the last glacial, really are regularly spaced, albeit with occaisional "misses". This somewhat overturns what I thought was the conventional wisdom, which is that the D-O events are responses to the Laurentide ice sheet internal instabilities, or somesuch, and if so would only be quasi-periodic.

One problem with that view is that if they *are* truly on a clock, then that probably requires an astronomical clock, nothing on earth being regular enough. In todays Nature Braun et al (inc Rahmstorf) propose a Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model which they get from combinations of the De Vries (210) and Gleissberg (86.5) cycles. I only mention that to draw it to your attention; I have no opinion as yet.

You only get the nice 1,470 spacing if you use the GISP core, and only for the first 50 kyr of it. Which is maybe why I was suspicious... it smacked of choosing your data carefully. But now, having overplotted this stuff a few times, I've come to appreciate that the GISP and GRIP timescales aren't the same. And (so it is claimed) the layer counting for the first 50 kyr of GISP makes it most accurate. Quite likely.

My own little contribution is the plot here. Sorry about the garish colours. Its a [[wavelet]] decomposition of the same delta-O-18 data. To do that I had to regrid the data onto a regular 10 year time grid, which is why that plot is lying about the timescale: for "year" read "decade". One plot is GISP. The other is GRIP. I forget which: if you really know your data you can discover which is which. Your clue, if you need one, is to look near the 40 kyr date. However, on this plot at least, GRIP and GISP look fairly similar. My own view is that on this view, the data looks quite noisy.

Errm, and thats it for now. Sorry there's no conclusion!

Rabett vs Pielke

2005-11-10T17:54:00.000Z

Not everyone reads comments, so I point you to some interesting stuff in the latest RC post, in particular this by Eli Rabett criticising RP Jr's position: What you are doing here, and in your publications, and on Prometheus is to assert ownership of a series of issues, the latest of which is hurricane damage due to climate change. Your incessant self citation is a clear indication.... Strong stuff, and there is more. I look forward to the extended exchange.

Politics: good news at last: Blur illiberalism routed briefly

2005-11-09T17:52:00.000Z

"The prime minister has suffered a humiliating defeat" says R4 news at 6. Ho ho, schadenfreude, etc etc.

At last a bit of good news over the terrorist panic. MPs have finally stood up and told Blair to f*ck off over the proposal to hold people for 90 days without trial. So R4 5 o'clock news tells me, and this seems to confirm.

The margin is larger than expected: 31 votes. So the farce of recalling Brown from Israel to pack the lobby was a waste of time and money too.

In one aspect, though, the illiberals are already winning: the debate (insofar as anyone is seriously debating this rather than pontificating) is over how far the period should be extended from the current 14 days (more quietly, the news tells us that the HoC has just voted in favour of 28 days. Sigh. Celebrating too early... I would have suspected that 90 was all a cunning plot to get 28 days through quietly, except Blair nailed himself to the mast a bit too thoroughly for that). It should be about cutting it back down from 14.

But really, all this vast panic over terrorism is stupid. Car drivers kill far more people than terrorists do, but kill someone with a car and you probably won't get a 90 day sentence even if found guilty.

I'm curious: how long could you be held in the US (outside Guantanamo, of course) without being charged?

Vote for us!

2005-11-09T17:08:00.000Z

Go on... click on the image... it will take you to the vote site, then you can vote for RealClimate, hurrah. Or click here for the current results... quick, click now...

The Abdication of Oversight?

2005-11-08T14:04:00.000Z

RP (Jr) has an interesting post The Abdication of Oversight. He begins by noting that Barton got his fingers burnt for his nonsense of last year (I paraphrase...) and this was one reason why Barton has wimped out of a follow up.

But he continues:

Providing ample evidence that the politicization of science by politicians is a bipartisan pastime, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and 150 fellow Democrats have introduced a rarely used "resolution of inquiry" to explore whether the Bush Administration has been hiding evidence that the current hurricane season has been caused by global warming. Kucinich said in press release last week:

"The American public deserve to know what the President knew about the effects climate change would have, and will continue to have, on our coasts. This Administration, and Congress, can no longer afford to overlook the overwhelming evidence of the devastating effect of global climate change. It is essential for our preparedness that we understand global climate change and take serious and immediate actions to slow its effects."

And challenges us all to condemn this as nonsense.

So... while I disagree with RP over some of the nuances of the hurricane issue (see Hurricanes and Global Warming - Is There a Connection? for my/RC's views) I would be happy to say that looking for a global warming signal in hurricanes is definitely the wrong place to start. Hurricanes are a noisy signal, hurricane damage is even worse: the least noisy signal is the temperature signal, and that the obvious place to look. Because of the particular track that Katrina took (and probably because levee money had been siphoned off to pay for a stupid war, but thats another matter...) it did an inordinate amount of damage. With a slightly different track (and there is no way to predict the exact track from GW) we would have a somewhat over-active season but no particularly exciting events.

The motion (as described above) is on completely the wrong track (ho ho) and looks like band-waggon jumping after an "exciting" event: from a climate science point of view what their motion should be about is something different. The real Bush failure is to acknowledge the considerable degree of certainty of the attribution of recent, well observed, climate change to anthropogenic factors. Bush/Republicans/Skeptics/Whoever need to start by acknowledging the existing warming as real (Bush has done this, but quietly and weakly) and stop quibbling about it; admit that the current best science attributes most of the warming to us and stop overplaying the uncertainty; and then have a proper policy-relevant type debate about what to do; in the meantime the scientist types can go back to quietly refining estimates of attribution an future warming.

Oh, and on a completely different topic: I liked this from CIP and point you to JA's latest failure to get the skeptics (Bill Gray) to ante up.

Sht frm Lindzen

2005-11-07T19:51:00.000Z

Lindzen is a bit of a contrarian, but I had thought he mainly kept his skepticism within the bounds of reason and deserved his "k". I now find I'm wrong: I recently found Lindzens testimony for the House of Lords. Its so bad its funny. Consider:

Lord Kingsdown: Can I just go on to ask you how far your view of the role of water vapour is shared by other scientists?

Professor Lindzen: That is shared universally.

What utter bilge! Lindzen is out on a limb on his Iris Hypothesis, which has by now been discarded by just about everyone. He's welcome to like his own research himself, of course, but pretending that anyone else does is dishonest. The rest of it is cr*p too.

How (coupled AO) GCMs work

2005-11-03T19:42:00.000Z

Having done extensive research (a quick google search that threw up this excellent and well-referenced post but nothing much else; and reading comments at RC and elsewhere) its pretty clear to me that (a) almost no-one outside the immeadiate community knows how coupled ocean-atmosphere GCMs work and are used in climate modelling and prediction (or "projection" as the IPCC calls it); and (b) this may be because there are no webpages on it. If you fancy reading some GCM source code, then this will get you GISS ModelE; or this for HadCM3. But you're unlikely to learn much from it unless you're *very* determined.

So I'm going to write up a post on it. What I hope to do is produce a first draft here, publish it, get feedback from you lot on bits that are unclear (or mistaken? no...; still the ocean bit is thin) or missing, and update it until adequate. Or until I get bored. Also please comment if you can find a better description elsewhere. This from the Met Office is an example of something thats not much use...

For definiteness, I'm going to talk about coupled-atmos-ocean GCMs (AOGCMs, though I'll probably just say GCMs) which are the heavyweight tool for climate prediction. You can't do that with an atmos-only model. And the only ones I'm at all familiar with are HadCM3/HadGEM.

Components

AOGCMs have two main components (atmosphere and ocean of course) and two more minor components (sea ice and land surface). I suppose sea ice modellers (me!) or land surface folk might complain about me calling them minor. Delete the word if it offends you. Traditionally the land surface scheme sits inside the atmos model, and might well be considered part of it. The sea ice scheme might well sit inside the ocean model. Mostly.

Those are (I think) the essential bits. You can also have various optional bits (for example carbon cycle or atmospheric chemistry) but those are not needed. One very common mistake is to think that GCMs predict CO2 levels. Most don't. Most are run with observed CO2 (if post-dicting the past) or prescribed CO2 (either from an economic model or an idealised 1% increase, say) is predicting the future. Even a carbon cycle model would be run with prescribed anthro CO2 inputs. Most GCMs don't contain a glacier or icesheet model either, because the scales are incompatible: glaciers are too small, and ice sheets have millenial scales (HadCM3 has been run with a Greenland ice sheet, but only once, it took ages, and I think it was specially speeded up).

I'll add a forcings section at the bottom.

Discretisation and resolution

I'll only say a bit about this. This seems quite helpful.

For the atmosphere and the ocean the basic fluid dynamics equations need to be converted from their continuous (partial differential equation) form and discretised so that they can be handled by numerical approximation. For the atmosphere, this can take the form of a spectral or finite difference decomposition. I'm not going to talk about the spectral stuff, cos it will only confuse, and the end results are not much different. For the oceans you can't use spectral stuff anyway. What happens then is that instead of a continuous equation d(f)/dt=g(x,t) you end up with something like f_{x,t+dt}=f_{x,t}+G({x,t},{x-dx,t},{x+dx,t})... I'm handwaving for effect here (apart from anything else in a GCM the x's are 3D (lat, long and height)). The point is to end up with an expression for the values at time t+dt, in terms of things at time t (or use an implicit solution...). But anyway, this gives you two important parameters to choose: the timestep, dt; and the spatial discretisation dx.

Typical values for the atmosphere are 1/2 hour (or less) for the timestep; and 300 km for the horizontal; and about 20-40 levels in the vertical (not evenly spaced). At least for HadCM3 the ocean timestep is longer (1h) and the spatial less (1.25 degrees, about 100 km).

Space and time steps are related by the CFL criterion: as the space steps get smaller so must the time, to avoid instability. Note that there is resource/accuracy trade of in the timestepping: longer timesteps allow the model to run faster; shorter timesteps allow more accurate integration. In practice, I think, people take the largest timestep compatible with stability, since errors elsewhere mean the loss of accuracy from as large as possible timestep doesn't matter.

This pic gives you some idea of the grid cell size; this has refs and stuff.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere sort-of divides into two components: a dynamical core to handle the discretisation of the fluid dynamics; and a pile of physical parametrisations to handle things (clouds, for example) that don't get a fluid-dyn representation. Also radiation.

So the dynamical core handles the integration (i.e., getting from one time step to the next) of [u,v] (horizontal velocity and the various vertical levels) and p* (surface pressure) and omega (vertical velocity). Once the winds are known, other variables (q, moisture) can be advected around. It is generally reckoned that the GCM type scale (200-300 km gridpoints) is enough to resolve most of the energetic scales in the atmosphere.

At some point the bottom layer of the atmosphere needs to exchange fluxes (momentum and heat and moisture) with the surface, which is where the surface exchange scheme comes in, which counts as part of the atmosphere. Models typically have their lowest level at a few 10's of meters, which requires a parametrisation of the boundary layer exchange, point by point.

The radiation code handles the short wave (visible; solar) fluxes and the long-wave (infra-red) fluxes separately (since there is little overlap). The vertical column above each grid point is treated separately from the ones next door (since the cells are 100's of km wide but only 10's of km high, edge effects get neglected). SW comes in at the top, gets reflected, diffused, absorbed and generally bounced around of the atmos, the clouds and the sfc. Similarly the LW bounces around but also has sources. The radiation code, effectively, is the bit where enhanced CO2 (or other GHG forcing) gets inserted, by affecting the transmissivity of the atmosphere. In the real world radiation has a continuous spectrum (with lines in it...); in line-by-line codes thousands of lines and continua are specified; in GCM type codes each of the SW and LW radiation codes will deal with a small (~10) number of bands which amalgamate important lines and continua. Radiation codes are expensive: HadAM3 only calls the SW radiation 8 times a day.

There are separate schemes for the convective clouds and "large scale" clouds. LS clouds are those that are effectively resolved: if a grid box cools enough to get the cloud scheme invoked, then clouds form (once upon a time, this happened if the RH got above 100% (or perhaps 95%, with some ramping); nowadays I think its more complex). Convective clouds require a parametrisation: again this has evolved: once if a part of the column was convectively unstable it got overturned; now much more complex schemes exist. There is a lot of scope for different schemes I think. Ppn gets to fall as rain or snow according to temperature; it may re-evaporate on the way down if it falls through a dry layer. Once you have the clouds they need to feed into the radiation scheme. Clouds may be true model prognostics or get diagnosed at each timestep.

Ocean

I know less about the ocean code. The ocean is different in that it has boundaries. It also has (in the real world) more energy at smaller spatial scales and so is rather harder to get down to a resolution which properly resolves it. But still there is a dynamical core which solves for the transport.

Radiation pretty well gets absorbed in the upper layers so is less interesting than in the atmos case. Convection is rather less common, and mostly associated with brine rejection from sea ice (?), which needs parametrisation just like cumulus convection in the atmosphere.

Unlike the atmosphere, which exchanges interesting fluxes with the land surface, the bottom of the ocean isn't very interesting.

Sea ice

Sea ice is effectively an interface between atmos and ocean and insulates one from the other. It gets pushed by wind stress from the atmosphere, ocean-ice drag underneath, coriolis force and internal stresses (its is usually modelled as an (elastic) viscous plastic substance; the details of this are really quite interesting but complex).

In the Hadley models, it exists on the same grid as the ocean model. By affecting the albedo it also affects the ice-ocean interaction. If it has a different roughness length to the ocean, it will affect the momentum fluxes too.

Sea ice effectively splits into "dynamics" (moving it around) and "thermodynamics" (heat transfer through it, melting/freezing, albedo, etc).

Land surface

The land surface scheme needs to allow us to calculate the fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum with the atmosphere; and the radiative fluxes. Fortunately it doesn't move so doesn't need any dynamics so is often not a separate model.

Fluxes of heat are done by calculating the temperature at various depths in the soil which gets you a surface temperature, together with a surface roughness length (which depends on...). Fluxes of moisture are done by knowing the "soil" moisture based on some more or less sophisticated scheme (see PILPS) which will also affect the way falling precipitation is handled. This includes representations of evapotranspiration etc etc. Momentum just needs a roughness length, the stability or otherwise of the atmos BL, and possibly some representation of the unresolved orography.

Most such schemes have prescribed vegetation; but more exciting ones can have interactive vegetation schemes (the UKMO is called TRIFFID).

Any of this gets affected by an overlying snow cover; which obviously affects the albedo, but also insulates.

Forcing

This will be short, since I suspect you can find it better elsewhere.

A fully coupled model needs an initialisation state (usually 1860 or thereabouts if its to be used from simulating 20C and the future, to avoid cold start and stuff), prescribed CO2 (and other minor GHG) concentrations which vary through time; solar forcing (variable or not); volcanic and other aerosols. It may also get a varying land use. And thats about it (did I forget anything?). The point being to let it get on with it.

People occaisionally suggest that it would be a good idea to run them in semi-NWP mode and assimilate weather obs along the way, so that they track 20C temps as accurately as possible and predict the future as well as poss. This is plausible (in some ways) but not done.

Output

At the end of all this, you end up with values of temperature, velocity, humidity, cloud at 2*10⁵ atmospheric gridpoints (or thereabouts) together with more in the ocean and many another variable besides, every half hour, for 200 years (or however long). Assuming you bothered to save them.

Oddly enough that level of detail is often not what you want. So the first thing to look at tends to be an area-average (often global) and time average (monthly; yearly) values of one variable of particular interest.

Blur on climate change

2005-11-02T22:23:00.000Z

Our glorious leader has been saying things about the politics of climate change again, which have been generally interpreted as weakening of Kyoto-type stuff. See the Grauniad. In fact he has been talking mostly about post-Kyoto (ie post 2012) so in some ways the question must be: why should he bother? He will be well out of it by then. BTW, I've ventured to spice this post up with a nice picture of a cloud from the Pictures blog by way of advertising.

Lets quote the Grauniad:

He said when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012, the world would need a more sensitive framework for tackling global warming. "People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you ... to restrict your economic growth," he said. "I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem." His words come in the build-up to UN talks in Montreal this month on how to combat global warming after Kyoto. "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge," he said.

Well, so far so politics so who cares? FOE do (different article):

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "We need to understand immediately what he means by that. His role at the moment is pivotal. He's the only world leader who's pushing climate change as an issue that has to be dealt with. So what he says is going to carry particular weight and he's basically just rewritten the history of climate change politics."

First of all, the request for clarification is unlikely to be met: ambiguity is what is being aimed for. Second, if TB really is "the only world leader who's pushing climate change" then nothing will be done: one against so many obviously won't work. Third I don't understand the re-writing bit: this is future not past.

The article continues...

Mr Blair has been seen as a strong supporter of the Kyoto protocol and was thought to be keen on working towards finding a successor to the treaty... As part of his support, the prime minister made tackling climate change his priority for the presidency of G8 and the EU this year, describing it as a greater threat to the world than terrorism.

Terrorism: did he? I thought that was Bob May. Although since terrorism kills so few people ranking X above terrorism as a threat hardly says much about the importance of X. Anyway, this now lines up a possible explanation, that Blair is angling to lead the post-Kyoto organisation in retirement from being PM. Farfeteched perhaps. Anyway, although Blur has been seen as a Kyoto supporter, thats mostly rhetoric and practical action is thin (Stoat passim). Nothing came out of G8 (Stoat passim). We (the UK) have Kyoto targets that look unattainable and voluntary additional targets (reaffirmed in the last election) that look even less attainable.

Second minister resigns for second time

2005-11-02T17:31:00.000Z

David Blunkett has resigned again. So thats him *and* Mandleson who have resigned twice. Not bad for a goverment that promised to be whiter than white. The grauniad quotes Blur as saying: Mr Blunkett left office "with no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever" which is... err... why he resigned, of course (just like Mandleson). And in a stunning piece of irrelevance Blunkett apparently said having investments and holding shares in modern Britain is not a crime. Stuff likes that makes it hard to be sympathetic.

But... little sympathy as I have, the "crimes" here seem to be far less than those of people in Bush's administration. And the witch hunting (was it?) bears a certain resemblance to the M&M stuff.

Meanwhile (and probably more importantly) the terrible terrorism bill goes through by one vote (actually its not through yet: the even more controversial detention without trial for 3 months is yet to come and may well go down, hurrah).

Coming soon: Blair on climate change.

The Big Picture

2005-11-01T20:33:00.000Z

Its become pretty clear that many people are losing sight of the wood for the trees, or even the twigs, in the latest rounds of the Hockey Stick Wars. Fortunately some of the more intelligent watchers of the debates have realised they need help. So here it is.

What it the Big Picture? From the point of view of climate change, the top level is

The world is getting warmer, we're causing it, and it will continue to get warmer in the future. This is pretty well universally agreed on now.

Going down a level, the point at issue is then the various palaeoclimatic reconstructions of the [[temperature record of the past thousand years]] (or, now, two thousand). Here the important point is ...the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years... and so on: which you'll doubtless recognise as a quote from the TAR. But more than that, all the headline points that the TAR made about the MBH record it used are true of all the other reconstructions too. So all the nonsense about whether the fall of the Hockey Stick would disprove global warming or whatever is just nonsense. Because there is plenty of backup. The other point that the septics do their best to push is the idea that all the attribution of climate change arises from the palaeo reconstructions. That too is nonsense, & discussed at RC. Or just read the TAR.

Going another level down, we come to the various arguments about the details of the Hockey Stick. Thats the level of the recent RC post Hockey sticks: Round 27, where we discuss two recent GRL papers. This is interesting stuff - if you're keen on statistics. If you're not, and you're baffled by the claims and counter claims, then you have two options: hop back up a level, because you've got to a too specialised for your understanding; or improve your understanding. Don't misunderstand me: there is a lot of interesting work to be done at this level. There are, as shown by the graph, a whole pile of records that agree on the main points but disagree in detail. Resolving this is an active and valuable area of research. If you're interested in policy, though, you've gone too far down. Go back.

Some people think that that the debate over the so-called "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction is a distraction from the development and promulgation of climate policy. And I agree (though I would replace "policy" with "science" cos I'm more interested in the science). And this is what we've been saying in the recent comments at RC. So if anyone were, hypothetically, to enquire why *others* should continue to care about it... Why is this fight important to the rest of us? the answer is: you shouldn't. It isn't. There: that was easy.

Oops: I forgot something and blew my dramatic ending. Sigh. There is (yet another) odd inversion about: the idea that if we were to switch from, say, MBH (less variance) to Moberg (more) that would somehow imply a reduction in expected future warming. That is completely wrong. If the past temperatures varied more, it implies a *higher* sensitivity to forcing, and therefore a *higher* future change.

[Updated to fix broken href; nothing new to see; move along now folks... :-)]

Our pumpkin

2005-10-31T20:10:00.000Z

Here we see our pumpkin, it being halloween.

I used to rather dislike halloween, but now we're used to it its quite fun. Miranda went out; Daniel stayed in.

Elsewhere: an image of Miranda: in the dark; running; wearing a fairy costume; carrying a toy shopping trolley full of sweets.

In praise of moderation

2005-10-30T20:27:00.000Z

One of the reasons the various blog fora are valuable is because they moderate comments: which is to say, some are deleted/not posted. The obvious advantage is that this keeps out spam from the porno and online poker folk, rude and abusive nonsense, and the nutters. The obvious disadvantage is that none of the nutters think they are nutters and tend to whine about censorship. This is difficult: no-one is going to spend time and effort writing interesting comments if they think they will be blocked. But my spam/trolling/incivility threshold may be different to yours.

To use an example thats deliberately not the one you're thinking of, over at RC recently one John Dodds has been pushing his own wacky theories of GHE (or lack thereof...); see comments on this thread - 16, 18, etc. RC has probably been too gentle in handling him (nonetheless we (I) got bored in the end). The problem with that stuff is it disrupts the flow of sense.

James Annan suggests posting to sci.environment. If you have no proper newsfeed, go to groups.google.com and its fairly easy. Sci.env has the advantage (?) of being unmoderated, and of course it could aggregate stuff across many blogs, instead of the balkanised blogscape that exists. Why not try it? If your comments here are sufficiently valuable, post them there too, and watch them drown under a sea of junk. An interesting reverse experiment is being tried by mt, who has tried copying a posting from sci.env to his blog to try to have a more sensible debate there, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Shaken by Tossers. Or not.

2005-10-29T21:04:00.000Z

Eli Rabbett is laying into Taken by Storm. He has a link to their "briefing" if you really want to read it (I found this via Tim Lambert, who provides you with a link to his earlier demolition).

But what I wanted to discuss was not their arguments, but why they have been totally ignored. And they have been. Not even the knee-jerk septics have done more than nod in their direction.

Firstly, because their idea that global mean temperature is meaningless is such obvious pap that anyone can see that.

Secondly, because their arguments to try to prop up this assertion are sufficiently convoluted that there is not the slightest chance of non-specialists understanding them.

The latter I think is important. If you want to sound off as a GW septic, you need a good sound bite that appears to make sense. Waving your glass at a party saying "of course, global temperature doesn't exist, because..." and then trying to spout pages of gobbledegook that you can't remember is just going to make you sound like a fool.

The obvious contrast is with the M&M attack on the MBH hockey stick stuff. Here, instead of trying to replace the bleedin' obvious with some subtle convolutions, they are trying to attack a fairly subtle technique and pick nits in it. This is far easier to sell, and it has.

Exxonmobil title-tattle: www.europeanvoice.com

2005-10-28T18:05:00.000Z

EuropeanVoice (which appears to be a business of The Economist) is running a meeting "Climate Change Now: what can Europe deliver?". The blurb sayeth;

With climate change at the top of the G8 and UK Presidency agendas, how can real progress be made in achieving the necessary reductions in CO² [sic] emissions? What can governments and industry do now to deliver cleaner solutions to our energy and transport needs?

The most recent scientific assessments suggest that the climate is changing even faster than previously thought and the pressure is even greater to develop and deliver new technologies which can dramatically reduce greenhouse gases now and in the short- to medium-term.

What more should governments be doing through fiscal or other financial measures to support R&D and innovation and help industry boost the process?

In the run-up to the COP-11 Kyoto talks in Montreal, this conference aims to assess the EU's key objectives going into the talks and policy-makers' and industry's response to the challenges.

Nothing especially weird there (though t' Economist would normally downplay recent scientific assessments suggest that the climate is changing even faster than previously thought and the pressure is even greater to develop and deliver new technologies) until you notice that the sponsor is... Exxonmobil. Exxon used to be heavily anti-GW (this from 2000 is distinctly mendacious, but still I must admit on the cautious side), now its hard to find their views. This from 2003 pushes uncertainty and says nothing really about the state of the science; not much change from 2001. And by 2005 nothing much has changed: they have no position at all on whether the world has warmed and how much it might in the future.

Perhaps they are dipping their toe in the water... to see how warm it is?

Butterflies: notes for a post

2005-10-26T20:09:00.000Z

[Updated: see end]

This is more in the nature of notes for a proper post, but I'll put it here. If you want to read some sense, check James Annan: still flapping. If you want some nonsense, then follow the link therein to RP :-)

But first: something completely different:

So, I took HadAM3 (64 bit version) and did two runs: one standard, and one where I perturbed the surface pressure at a single grid point (I forget where: somewhere in the Arctic I think) by a tiny amount (1e-10, or was it 1e-12?).

The graph below shows the growth in global-mean area-weighted RMS of the difference of the MSLP field between the two runs:

The x-axis is time in days (48 timesteps per day): 0-5 (top); then 0-15 (mid); then 0-89 (bottom). By day about 25, and definitely by day 60, the difference between the runs has saturated: their weather is totally different, so no further growth in RMS occurs. The 5-10 day oscillations in the last month are, I think, what you'd expect to see from weather evolution.

The y-axis is in Pascals. 100 Pascals is an hPa, ie 1 mb. Standard weather charts tend to plot pressure in contours of 4 hPa, so in real weather terms the diffs are sort-of negligible out to about day 15 (although this is a global value, so locally there will probably be bigger values).

There are clearly different phases in the difference growth. After day 25-ish there is a slow rise to saturation. From day about 10 to about 25 there is exponential growth. From day 2 to 10 ish there isn't much growth. And from the start to about day 1 there is another exponential phase.

If you look carefully, you'll see that the diff appears to be zero for the first few timesteps. This isn't really true. But the model output (as opposed to its internal variables) has been converted from 64 to 32 bit floats; and the difference is identically zero at 32 bit (but not 64).

Meanwhile, its interesting to look at the pattern of the diffs.

The top pic is about day 4 (in the not-much-happening phase). The middle, day 15 (in the exp growth). The bottom, day 31 (saturated). Note that the pics have a different contour interval. By days 15/31 we're into "real meteorology" and hence the MSLP field is most different in extratropics, as it always is (its tropical dynamics, folks). The fact that the biggest diffs on day 4 are in the tropics (is this convection being jigged?) says we're in a different regime, but I'm a bit unsure.

So there we are for now. Over to you, James.

[The original post was oct 15. I've updated the timestamp.

Update: I've been playing with the timestep-dependence of this. In the pic below, the black line (solid) is run "a" (std) minus run "b" (small pert); black dashed is a-c, where "c" is a different small pert. Blue is the same but for with all three runs done at 1/2 the timestep. Red also, but for 1/4 the timestep. The std timestep is half hour. There are plenty of caveats here: firstly, that this is really only playing. Secondly, that all I did was change the value marked timestep (actually, the value marked "steps per period" from 48 to 96 to 192) without checking that anything was going hideously wrong elsewhere. Thirdly, that if you compare this to the previous plot you'll notice that its spikier: because its 6-h data (instantaneous) not timestep data. Fourthly, that even if nothing is going hideously wrong, changing the timestep does give a different model (is the climatology the same? I don't know. Maybe). For example, the atmos is fourier-filtered at the poles for CFL reasons. A smaller timestep means less area if filtered.

Also: to answer JA's q: does the pert grow one-box-per-timestep (ie, unphysically?). Well no. It grows faster than that, because, ha ha, the perturbation is within the filtering zone so it grows into the entire northern polar cap within a few timesteps.

But: the plot below shows that the initial growth is *slower* with smaller timestep (well even this is complex: the 1/2 timestep run grows faster up to day 1; but then the "plateau" level reached by it is lower between days 2 and 10; and the 1/4 timestep plateau is lower again. Does this mean that a very very small timestep (arguably, as physical reality has?) would have a very low (zero?) plateau? I must try some even shorter timesteps. BUT then you end up in territory where the model was never designed for and it becomes rather dodgy.

Having 3 different runs at each timestep (more would be nice of course) allows you to see that during the day 15-30 growth phase, the timestep doesn't matter. But earlier, it clearly does.

Curious. I wonder what it means...

ps: sorry James. I'll get back to it :-(

The political post

2005-10-26T18:10:00.000Z

I do one every now and again. The Steve Bell cartoon in todays Grauniad triggers this one...

I don't know if that will work past tomorrow... If you're wondering about the ?, then maybe you need Deltoid.

Also, I just found (via Dynamics of Cats) this.

WSJ: Yet more Jolly Hockey Sticks, and Barton, et al.

2005-10-26T08:58:00.000Z

There is a WSJ article "Global-Warming Skeptics Under Fire" (love the title...).

Anyway, the initial point is that it contains some quotes from various parties:

One study, from researchers at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, confirmed "a glitch" in Dr. Mann's work but "found this glitch to be of very minor significance" when applied to some computer-generated models of climate history, according to a statement released by lead author Hans von Storch.

The other study, by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution fellow Peter Huybers, argued the Canadians had overstated the effect of the problem. "The truth is somewhere in between, but closer to Dr. Mann," Dr. Huybers said. Both Dr. Huybers and Eduardo Zorita, a collaborator of Dr. von Storch, agreed they had yet to address all of the Canadians' criticisms.

The complex debate, which turns on statistical technicalities, isn't likely to end soon. In replies published in the same issue of the journal, Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick defended their conclusions. "We are not withdrawing an inch," Mr. McIntyre said in an interview.

The dispute was the subject of a page-one story in this newspaper in February.

Some scientists believe the dispute has more political weight than scientific significance. That's because, they say, other studies of past temperatures also indicate they are higher now, on average, than at any time in past 1,000 years, and perhaps far longer. "A number of studies all come to the same conclusion," Dr. Mann said.

However the WSJ, as is traditional, makes the usual mistakes: The new findings are the latest round in a politically charged dispute over the "hockey stick," a widely publicized graphic showing that temperatures during the late 20th century were likely higher than at any time in the past 1,000 years.. *All* the reconstructions show this, not just the MBH versions.

But also interesting is a statement from Bartons committee:

Mr. Neal said the committee staff hasn't yet begun a detailed analysis of the information it collected from scientists.

Hasn't yet begun? What are these people up to? They demand all this stuff and then do nothing with it? Well, OK, so the answer is obvious: having been slapped down by various people, including and number of scientists and by Boelert (sp?), Barton issued an aggressive statement some while back... and then ran away. However, if anyone has sightings of Barton actually doing anything on the GW/MBH front, do post a comment.

von S on the Hockey Stick

2005-10-24T17:35:00.000Z

There has been a certain amount of argy-bargy between von Storch and MBH which has lead some people, I think, to mistake von S's position. A recent GRL paper goes some way to clarifying things. Read the RC post on this for refs, and the pdf etc.

As far as I can see, Von S and Zorita basically re-do the stuff from their Science paper, but trying the different centering techniques. And they discover... that it doesn't make much difference. I could have told them that (here though obviously I never quite finished it...). They say:

Our results, derived in the artificial world of an
extended historical climate simulation, indicate therefore
that the AHS does not have a significant impact but leads
only to very minor deviations.

All is, of course, not sweetness and light. There is more to come, I think.

Gems from sci.env

2005-10-23T21:03:00.000Z

Some gems from sci.environment. First, on the good-old global cooling stuff, someone (mynym) has managed to find some old newspaper cuttings that are relevant, all the way back to 1956! This is interesting, because its far earlier than previously suspected. But, its newspapers not science.

Elsewhen, someone who I will be kind enough not to name said:

> Momentum is not conserved in the same way as mass and energy.

And James "take no prisoners" Annan replied:


You just broke my...

   +--------------------------------------------+
   \         1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9         /
    \     0                            10 /   /
     \                                   /   /
      \           CRACKPOT METER        /   /
       \                               /   /
        \                             /   /
         \___________________________/___/
          \                             /
           \.........................../

Your comment was denied for questionable content...

2005-10-22T18:56:00.000Z

...so I'll post it here. The blog in question is RP Jr, the post this which he entitled "Tag Team Hit Job".

My comment was:

Roger, you complain too much. Curry says you say "Let's not worry about *why* we have climate change" and you don't defend yourself against that, but against something else.

and his software says... "Your comment was denied for questionable content. If you believe a legitimate comment was blocked, you may contact the administrator of this site. This site actively blocks or moderates messages with questionable content. If you feel your message is being blocked unfairly, please contact us. Moderated comments will generally be reviewed within 6 hours."

In fact I will contact him too, but I'm putting it here because (a) it was a good excuse for a post and (b) it illustrates the problems with fragmented conversations in the blogosphere. Mind you, RC also filters for content, but AFAIK doesn't tell you that you comment has been sent for moderation.

Congratulations to Ross Chandler

2005-10-19T19:49:00.000Z

This one won't mean a lot to most people.

For years, Coton village has had a slowly degrading pavillion barely adequate for cricket, football, etc. Various inconclusive repair/refurbish/rebuild plans were mooted, funders approached: nothing worked due to lack of drive, energy and ambition. A few years ago Ross got elected to the Parish council and has been doing his best to drive the project through, against a degree of conservatism (small C) and a decided lack of ability to take risks, even small ones.

Finally, tonight, he has what he needs: permission to rebuild the thing, demolishing the interior structure, and make a bonfire of the burnable bits. Which I think will make it inevitable that the whole thing will go ahead.

This, and my experience of trying to run an after school club despite the thicket of government regulations, is coming close to converting me to the values of entrepreneurship...

Antarctic sea ice trends

2005-10-18T18:14:00.000Z

After all the excitement about Arctic sea ice trends its time for that far more interesting region, the Antarctic.

I was going to write this the very next day, but had some odd results which took some time reconciling to reality. So this is using the Comiso (Bootstrap) data. Its also using extent, not area. And its 1979 to 2003, because the Bootstrap data at NSIDC is a bit behind the times (this is a good thing: it means its had extra QC checking for weather clearing and other stuff I don't understand).

So what does it look like? Oh, hold on... before I show you, read this:

The usual caveats apply. I've checked my pic a bit but I did this all in an hour at home tonight after spending some time worrying about Ofsted (and if you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky), so if anything looks madly wrong to you, you may well be right.

So the pic looks like this:

What you're seeing is decadal trends, by month. In the top pic they are expressed as a percentage of the average for that month; in the bottom, they are expressed as absolute (in millions of square kilometers).

I need to emphasise one important point, which is that the Antarctic ice cover has a very strong seasonal cycle. So the percentage figures can be a bit misleading. The biggest % change is in March (the ice minimum) at about 6%; but the biggest absolute change is about 300,000 km sq in May, with a % change of only 3%. This distinction exists for the Arctic too but is rather less important, because the seasonal cycle there is smaller.

Also, if you are looking at the previous post note that the data there is Team not Bootstrap and is area not extent.

In the Arctic (refer previous post), the main features are:

Trends are always negative (ie, losing ice) all year round
They are largest in late summer and autumn (I would naturally say summer, but september is autumn)

In the Antarctic, the main features are:

Trends are mostly positive, but near zero and sometimes negative in spring/summer
They are largest in (southern hemisphere) autumn (mar-apr-may)

In absolute terms, the largest (mar-apr-may) trends are about half the Arctic ones (reading off the nsidc press release). As to (statistical) significance... my software thinks that March and May are, but only just (95%).

And spatially they look like... in March and September (scale in fraction per decade):

Mixed.

And what (I hear you say) about the climate interpretation of this? Well (I answer) I didn't interpret the Arctic trends and no-one complained. Perhaps because it was all obvious to everyone. You may want to read the start of this old post too.

...the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years...

2005-10-12T17:27:00.000Z

The IPCC TAR SPM said:

New analyses of proxy data for the Northern Hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year (Figure 1b).

naturally, this was a red rag to the septics. Its was based, as it says, on Jones et al., 1998, Mann et al., 1998, 1999 and Briffa, 2000. How does this stack up, when compared against more recent reconstructions?

The answer is, extremely well. There is a nice pic on wikipedia (and I've inlined it above) which shows 10 different reconstructions. Looking at this pic we see that

the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years is true for all of them (and for those that go back further, it looks true of the previous 1000 years too)
It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade is also true
and 1998 the warmest year also true (it happens not to have been exceeded since 1998, and most likely not earlier)

Another interesting feature of those graphs is that they all pretty much agree on the temperature at the peak of the MWP as being about 0 on a scale that has "now" as about 0.4 (with the caveat of resolution). The major differences are on the depth of the LIA - about 1600, there is little agreement.

Which is why (you just knew I was coming to this didn't you) all the ho-ha over MBH98 is interesting statistically (perhaps) but irrelevant scientifically. It also ought to be irrelevant politically.

To debunk another couple of myths: idiots sometimes assert that the Hockey Stick (ie, MBH98/99) underpins Kyoto. This is nonsense for any number of reasons, but the most obvious is that Kyoto was negotiated in 1997 and you need to believe in reverse causality to think that a 1998 paper underpinned it.

Another one is pointed out by this RC post: The famous conclusion of the IPCC, “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate”, does not depend on any reconstruction for the past millennium. It depends on a detailed analysis of 20th Century data. In fact, this conclusion is from the 1995 IPCC report, and thus predates the existence of quantitative proxy reconstructions like the “hockey stick”.

Septics focus on MBH98 because they think they have something to say about it. People, naturally, respond. All this tends to give a rather unbalanced view of where the science is. The palaeo reconstructions are important, but only one strand. There is lots and lots of D+A (DAtDA?) that people tend not to discuss much, rather in the same way that few people discuss detailed solutions of GR much: its just too complex for anyone except specialists.

Note, BTW, that "likely" is defined thus: In this Summary for Policymakers and in the Technical Summary, the following words have been used where appropriate to indicate judgmental estimates of confidence: virtually certain (greater than 99% chance that a result is true); very likely (90-99% chance); likely (66-90% chance); medium likelihood (33-66% chance); unlikely (10-33% chance); very unlikely (1-10% chance); exceptionally unlikely (less than 1% chance). The reader is referred to individual chapters for more details.

Pictures at an Exhibition

2005-10-11T18:34:00.000Z

Sometimes I wonder if I focus a bit too much on this climate stuff... Another question is the intrinsic worth of things. And how to judge their relative value. Which in most cases is impossible.

I've been listening a lot to [[Sviatoslav Richter]] playing [[Picures at an Exhibition]] (specifically the recording in Sofia, 1958, if it matters). This is a wonderful recording which I can listen to again and again. The tone and depth of the piano is marvellous; it sounds far better and fuller than an orchestral version we have.

So how to you balance the relative life-worth of simply learning a pile of notes and how to play them in the right order, as against doing science? Who knows.

And now for our daily dose of climate: "I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing." (Chao mugger via PF).

The picture has no particular relevance to the post, but I felt it needed one of some sort. Its a grey wood in winter, somewhat below Les Deux Alpes, in february 2002.

My office

2005-10-08T20:43:00.000Z

I know you must be wondering... what does the office of a famous climate modeller look like? Well, I can't tell you that, but I can show you a picture of mine.

Notice whats on the screen. Of course I'm not actually "in work" at this point.

I'm currently fighting a losing battle against getting the place redecorated and pointless modern plastic desks to replace the nice wooden desks (out of shot). There do seem to be limits to my powers.

On the window, you see one of my hobbies: collecting sugar paper wrappers. I hate restaurants which have sugar cubes in a bowl or those sugar shakers. No, I dont take sugar in my coffee. Also just visible behind my keyboard is the rubber chicken which lays an egg. Everyone finds it oh-so-tasteful.

A paper tiger!

2005-10-08T14:24:00.000Z

The post title is stolen from John Quiggins post. And his post just about says it all: does this new agreement have any substance? Probably not.

So its time for - ta da - prediction time, since predictions made in advace are always more convincing. I predict: that JQ is right: the Asia-Pacific climate pact will turn out to be empty.

There's a wiki page [[Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate]].

Repeatability of GCMs

2005-10-04T16:16:00.000Z

Somewhere in the discussion around and after a post of mine on Junkscience is junk I realised that people just don't understand repeatability in GCMs, or indeed much about them at all. This may be in part because they have assumed "telling us precisely which model you used, which initialisation files and what forcing values you supplied (so we can indulge that repeatability thing" (from http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Model_Request.htm) made some kind of sense. Sadly now I can't find where the comments were, so I'll try to make it up.

So... although I'm fairly sure much of this is the same for most modern atmosphere-ocean GCMs, I'm actually talking specifically about [[HadCM3]].

There are two sorts of repeatability: you run the model again, and you get *exactly* the same results down to the last bit. This is call bit-reproducibility. Or, you run the model again, and you get *scientifically* the same result (the same climate; probably the same response to forcing within statistical error) but the exact details of the weather differ. Because the climate is chaotic (in the sense that small initial perturbations rapidly amplify) and GCMs reproduce this well, if your model diverges even slightly from bit-reproducibility it will diverge strongly from it, because the details of the individual weather will be totally different. But the climate (statistics of the weather) will be the same.

Which is a good time to point out that GCMs are really weather forecast models run at a lower resolution but for much longer. When you *see* GCM results you normally see global-mean annual-mean data. Don't be confused by this (as some clearly are) into thinking this is what the model directly outputs. It directly outputs temperatures at each gridpoint (96*73 in the case of hadam3 at std res; and in fact at 19 atmos levels too; and of course all the other model variables too) at each timestep (1/2 hour) and this is then meaned up into what you see.

For scientific purposes, bit-reproducibility is not necessary. The weather isn't supposed to be any individual events anyway, so you don't care if you get different weather. But for computational purposes, its rather useful. Firstly, if you're looking for the bug that caused a model crash, its pretty hard to find if the model isn't going to follow the same path when run again. Secondly, the model runs on multiple processors. Bit-reproducibility means it will follow exactly the same path even if the number of processors is different, or if the decomposition is 2*4 instead of 4*2. Also, a good test of the correctness of the MPP decomposition is to run it on different numbers of procs to check you get the same answer.

But bit-reproducibility is only possible on the same processor type, with the same compiler (probably the same version) and the same compiler options, and exactly the same code, and exactly the same input constants, and exactly the same start files, which are themselves enormous. And of course you have to be competent, which lets out Junkscience right from the start. In theory, from the papers and documentation you can write a version of HadCM3 that would be scientifically equivalent. You have no hope of writing one that is bit-equivalent. Its also possible to run the model in non-bit-reproducible mode if you want to (its slightly faster; for example, for bit-r you need to manage the corss-processor calculations in a particular way to get them to come out exactly the same).

And sometimes you don't want bit-reproducibility. The figure that JS are too stupid to see (SPM fig 4) has an ensemble of model runs deliberately started from different initial conditions so that the weather would be different in each, to get a feel for the range of natural variability. If you started a model (assumed to be 100% correct) back at 1860 with 99.9999% accurately known initial conditions you wouldn't expect it to track the individual years accurately (which is why those stupid sci-fi novels about time-travel, where they wander around being careful not to toouch anything, and only get into trouble when they accidentally crush a butterfly, are nonsense. Just being there, standing in the way of the air currents, is enough to totally change the weather and hence all of history). Hence to know if your model is right, you need an ensemble of runs to bracket the natural variability (and you may get unlucky and find that the real world took an unlikely branch).

Happy Birthday to RealClimate

2005-10-03T20:54:00.000Z

RealClimate just topped 500,000 visits (ha ha watch out Deltoid we're coming to get you...) and has received a Science & Technology Web Awards 2005 award. They don't say if they're in order or not, but in the list we're 9th (out of 25 I think). Chris Mooney makes it too.

Our post on it is here.

Meanwhile, less noticed, Stoat celebrated its 30,000 visit, and even more importantly my google ads racked up my tenth dollar! Only a factor of 10 to go and I'll get my first cheque.

Arctic sea ice trends

2005-09-28T19:39:00.000Z

A week or so I posted about Global warming 'past the point of no return' ?!? which commented on a rather over-excitable piece in the UK newspaper the Independent. I was a bit skeptical of the newspaper; now RP sr has a post too, and he quotes Mark Serreze saying:

In conclusion, Mr. Connor [the Indie journo] has “jumped the gun.” I am firmly convinced that at least part of what we are seeing in the Arctic is due to human influences. However, sensationalist articles like Mr. Connor’s only serve to further polarize what is already a very polarized issue... I feel “ambushed” by Mr. Connor’s article.

So... whats up? Firstly, RP Sr seems to like the UI seaice data, I don't know why. As SB points out in a comment here they were wrong a while ago when they disagreed with NSIDC. To introduce yet another source, I'm going to use the NCEP product for this post (because its easily available; probably the answer to my RP question above is that the UI product is easily available for his purposes), though (as I pointed out here) I actually prefer the Bootstrap to the NASA Team product, at least for the Antarctic. also (for fans of important-but-boring detail) I'm going to use total area for my trends, not extent. Its all different ways of processing the same [[SSMI/SSMR]] dataset, anyway.

NSIDC has a press release out Sea Ice Decline Intensifies Summer Arctic sea ice falls far below average for fourth year, winter ice sees sharp decline, spring melt starts earlier which has some nice pics in it and some useful discussion by scientists (I'm doubtful about "The persistence of near-record low extents leads the group to conclude that Arctic sea ice is likely on an accelerating, long-term decline" early in the piece, I suspect that was put in by the PR folks. Its not really supported by the graph just next to it, which shows 2005 as low, but not really far below the trend line. Having said that, if their fig 2 is correct, the ice does seem to be unusually late recovering this year). Why they felt the need to put it out today, rather than waiting a few more days until the end of september, I don't know. Anyway, sea ice doesn't change that much over a few days so their pic is probably going to be correct at the end of the month. RP says that NSIDC haven't made sept available: but the NCEP GRIB is available in realtime from ftp://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/cdas/ for anyone with the patience to convert it (you want wgrib, if you want to convert it, which you don't want to do...).

So *my* contribution to this is the piccy here, which shows sea ice area trends (% per decade) from the NSIDC (thank you Bob) dataset from 1979-2004 (black) and -2005 (blue) up to august. Because in all this the fact that the trends are quite seasonal is being missed a bit. Note that my trend for september is about 10%; NSIDC say about 7-8% depending exactly on which year you stop. The difference is probably due to me using area rather than extent (a quick test says that switching to extent reduces my trend by about a factor of 1.4).

Oh... and the usual caveats apply. I've checked my pic a bit but I did this all in an hour at home tonight, so if anything looks madly wrong to you, you may well be right.

[Update: and the *other* thing I was going to say which I forgot was... this is all pretty well in line with the model results, as far as I can remember them. I'm thinking of Recent and future changes in Arctic sea ice simulated by the HadCM3 AOGCM by Gregory, J. M.; Stott, P. A.; Cresswell, D. J.; Rayner, N. A.; Gordon, C.; Sexton, D. M. H. So the attribution of the trend to GW seems reasonable.]

Why are we having a hearing that features a fiction writer as our key witness?

2005-09-28T19:24:00.000Z

The headline for this post is the rather plaintive quote from minority leader senator Jeffords' statement at the US Senate EPW committee hearings today. The fiction author is the egregious Crichton.

This question is a reasonable one. The answer is obvious: that Inhofe has totally lost the plot. The details however remain to be seen.

There doesn't seem to be much else available yet, but I'll update this when there is.

Note that this is the Inhofe hearings, not the Barton hearings, which seem to have been wimped out of for the moment.

[Update: there is now an RC post on this with some more detail. Wonkette and Think Progress also take the piss. Note that we need to be careful: Crichton deserves dishonour and (slightly contradictarily) contempt (I like Hobbes and his definitions). The point at issue is not C's worthless opinions, but the apparent waywardness of a (presumably) powerful US senate committee.]

Welcome to RC readers...

2005-09-28T18:21:00.000Z

A welcome to any RealClimate readers who have follwed the new link across... my humble personal blog having been deemed link-worthy at last!

Perhaps this is a good time to re-state the blogs purpose. Mostly, its for climate science type things, though generally at a lower level of detail and quality than RC aims for. However this may lead to a slightly faster response time and I also comment on things "beneath" (or too personal) for RC. And then of course theres the odd bit of politics or misc.

Don't forget to check out my blogroll on the banner...

Some highlights from the past

I'm in the process of constructing a whole "guide to stoat" (as a precursor to doing the same for RC), but in the meantime a few bits and bobs that I shall call highlights, mostly in reverse time order:

Junkscience is junk - no surprises there
A primer on GW sources also check the comments
Soil carbon losses
Not betting on Climate - anyone prepared to put their money where their mouth is? (Rumour that Gray has just said he will... could be interesting)
More myths of the near future
Ask Stoat - any questions...?

Meanwhile, radio4 news had a prominent item (including piece from Todd Arbetter, just appointed at BAS!) about the low sea ice this summer. Hmmm, must check up: is this reality or the over-efficient NASA PR machine? [The bbc r4 link is: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4290340.stm]

Killer Sudoku

2005-09-28T17:15:00.000Z

There is a new and interesting sudoku variant, the so-called "killer", in which you get no starting clues at all but you get to know the sums of certain boxes. Like this:

So far, its only available in the Times. If you want a hint on how to start, then: the sum of each 3x3 must be 45 (1+2+...9). So the middle-left box has a 36 and a 17 (sum = 53) with one box hanging out of the 3x3. Hence that one box must be an 8 (53-45). I'll leave you the rest, the guide time was 28 mins but I think thats a bit optimistic unless you're very good.

Misc stuff

2005-09-27T17:19:00.000Z

One of those tedious posts listing things the author has been reading recently. This is in part because I was going to write some politics stuff and discovered other people have said it all anyway... BTW, I find I had 22 tabs open to write all this, is that a record? Whats your maximum?

News just now is that Quark Soup has gone, somewhat earlier than promised. Space for a brief muse there perhaps... it was the first blog I read; perhaps DA somewhat lost his place when other climate-type blogs (RC mainly; perhaps even Stoat) took some of his niche. Deltoid was the next one I read... I trust they won't be going out in order.

So... capitalistimperialistpig (who I owe a response on energy balance... its coming... in the meantime, this) condems the US Policy of Torture. We don't do torture ourselves (at least not in public) but why do we need the Law Lords to decide should evidence extracted by torture abroad be admissible in the British courts? rather than the more obvious just-say-no. I'm wondering if terrorism is the new paedophilia is the new witchcraft... Mikael Hallendal finds a story about someone getting arrested in the London subway [ahem... underground] for no good reason, but you've read that through Planet Fleck already. Guantanamo is weird too but that piece is a slightly different slant.

Just like everyone else I read "Don't get stuck on stupid" though I seem to have taken a different moral from it than everyone else.

Meanwhile, over at Creek Running North, I discover the concept of Lurker Day (via, I think, John Quiggin). So, lurkers here, treat this as an invitation to say hello...

Dead trees: I'm reading A War against Truth - An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq by Paul William Roberts. I was lent it. So far I'm up to p73 and I have to say that while its interesting, its a little bit too much yes-yes-I-agree-with-that sort of stuff. And... its a bit too passionate, so I'm not sure all of it can quite be trusted.

For wacko science, I followed [[Zbigniew Jaworowski]] to http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf. He is, ostensibly, predicting cooling... so he should be up for a bet, yes? Ho ho. Speaking of wiki, Jimmy Wales has a blog but it doesn't get updated much.

Wacko maths is also available (no, not string theory (ho ho)) via the talk page of [[Cantor's diagonal argument]]. In some ways this is comforting: I spend a lot of time arguing with wacko GW septics, but at least in that case there is no definite mathematical proof. In the Cantor case, there really *is* definite proof, but the wackos still can't cope with it. Side note: check out the article itself, which points out (did you know this? I didn't) that "the diagonal argument was not Cantor's first proof of the uncountability of the real numbers, but was published three years after his first proof."

No space for this today, so I'll put a placeholder for we-are-rich-but-full-of-sh*t, by which I mean it seems that the amount of total twaddle (and I mean meaningless bureacracy, not GW wackos) generated by a society is related to its wealth. The richer you are the more parasites you can afford. Which, looking forward, is bad news.

Via CIP, I found "ecosystems" and discovered I am a Slithering Reptile (CIP is only a Flippery Fish :-).