GWPF takes up Sir Paul Nurse’s suggestion – Offers to host climate debate

Popcorn futures explode. But joking apart, I think (hope) this will be productive. Tim Palmer is realistic about model uncertainty (apart from being clueless about the magnitude of uncertainty around solar caused climate variation). Brian Hoskins is candid (though behind the curve on the latest findings).

GWPF INVITES ROYAL SOCIETY FELLOWS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE DISCUSSION

London, 22 May: In response to a suggestion by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited five climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society to discuss the current state of climate science and its wider implications. 

In a letter to Lord Lawson, the GWPF chairman, Sir Paul stated that the Royal Society “would be happy to put the GWPF in touch with people who can offer the Foundation informed scientific advice.”

Sir Paul suggested that the GWPF should contact five of their Fellows: Sir Brian Hoskins; Prof John Mitchell; Prof Tim Palmer; Prof John Shepherd and Prof Eric Wolff.

The GWPF has now invited the five climate scientists to a meeting with a team of members of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council and independent scientists and has proposed a two-part agenda:

Kevin Trenberth: ” the science is just beginning”

From Nature.com blogs, indications that Keven Trenberth is returning to the scientific method. Hopefully, he’ll get real about the toa energy balance uncertainty too.

Predictions of climate
Kevin Trenberth

I have often seen references to predictions of future climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presumably through the IPCC assessments (the various chapters in the recently completedWorking Group I Fourth Assessment report ican be accessed through this listing). In fact, since the last report it is also often stated that the science is settled or done and now is the time for action.

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.

Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.

Sir John Houghton: Objective scientist or driven ideologue?

Sir John Houghton, an ex-boss of the IPCC, and the hockey stick graph, visually demonstrating that the flawed hockey stick graph has never played any important role for the IPCC statements. H/T Lubos Motls
http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/sir-john-houghton-is-liar.html

Wikipedia tells us:

He was the lead editor of first three IPCC reports. He was professor in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, former Chief Executive at the Met Office and founder of the Hadley Centre.

He is the chairman of the John Ray Initiative, an organisation “connecting Environment, Science and Christianity”,^[1] where he has compared the stewardship of the Earth, to the stewardship of the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve.^[2] He is a founder member of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is also the current president of the Victoria Institute.

Jon Jones alerted me to a press cutting this morning. I was amazed:

Nicola Scafetta: Major new sea level study – finds C21st rise likely to be less than a foot.

Congratulations to Nicola Scafetta, who has successfully published a new paper on sea level rise Multi-scale dynamical analysis (MSDA) of sea level recordsversus PDO, AMO, and NAO indexes in the  journal Climate Dynamics. This is a major paper, which undertakes a comprehensive review of recent studies, which diverge widely in their findings. He finds that the main reason for divergence is the length of records used in studies, and shows that the quasi-cyclic oscillations of the major ocean basins largely account for the differences in those studies conclusions. Developing a powerful analysis technique with strong visualisation, it is shown that the periodicity of the major oscillations, being 60 to 70 years, require a minimum record length of around 110 years in order to prevent polynomial fitting of long term secular trends being contaminated with shorter term quasi-cyclic variation. Using tide gauge records going back as far as 1700, Nicola compares the trends in sea level rise acceleration at widely spread geographical locations once the quasi-cyclic components are removed and finds the long term global average to be very small – around 0.01mm/yr. Very little difference is found between acceleration rates between the pre and post industrial eras. It is suggested the acceleration is a natural variation due to the recovery from the little ice age as part of a quasi millennial cycle which may continue until the mid C21st. In conclusion the study suggests that sea level rise during the C21st will be around 277+/-7mm, or about 9 inches.

Fig. 10 a Global sea level record (Jevrejeva et al. 2008) (left) and its
MSAA colored diagram (right).

Our Children Won’t know What ‘Peak Oil’ is.

a remarkable new oil and gas find that has gone almost unremarked:

U.S. Reserves up to 2010. The balance sheet now looks much healthier, but extraction costs are rising.

There it was, a remarkable stat buried among many that should have made everyone at the Dallas Convention Centre take a deep breath. According to the source, just one oil play in the Texas Midland Basin, the Spraberry/Wolfcap shale, may have a total recoverable resource of up to 50 billion barrels using new tight-oil extraction technologies. This revelation presents us all with an arresting number, if indeed that much oil is producible from a region already famous for its hydrocarbon potential. For one thing, supplementary data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency shows that only 1.3 billion barrels have been produced from the legacy region since its original discovery in 1949. So tapping into the multizone Spraberry/Wolfcap with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing processes is a like finding a virgin oil field – a very big one at that.

EU rejects ‘backloading’ of CarbonCreds – Price immediately falls to barrel bottom

Psst, wanna buy some junk bonds?

North Sea fisheries making a recovery: Cooler seas, busier plankton?

Roger Harrabin has spotted this report on Scottish North Sea Fish Stocks which is of interest to us climateers. The American fisheries organisation the FAO produced a longer time span report some years ago which found certain fish stocks around the Americas correlated quite well with changes in Length of Day (LOD) and detrended global temperature. Maybe this Scottish fisheries report is telling us something about the upper ocean heat content and the abundance of biota further down the food chain.

New journal: Uncertainty Quantification

This could be one to keep an eye on. Free in 2013, the Journal of Uncertainty Quantification aims to draw together communities relevant to policy formation relying on model output. H/T Tamsin Edwards.

More here http://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/130973363

Published online: 27 March 2013

ISSN (online): 2166-2525Publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
James Berger, Donald Estep, and Max Gunzburger

Dear JUQ Reader,It is a pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification. The journal exists because of the increasing importance of uncertainty quantification (UQ) in science and society, and the vision of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) in recognizing the need to work together to create a journal to address UQ.UQ’s increasing importance is a consequence of the central role of mathematical, statistical, and computational modeling in scientific discovery, engineering design, risk assessment, and decision making in almost every area of human activity.

Modeling results are subject to errors and uncertainty emanating from a variety of sources, including uncertainty in input data obtained from experiment and observation, limitations of physical modeling, discretization and approximation, and problems in computer codes. Quantifying the effects of these errors and uncertainty is critically important in the context of decisions bearing practical consequences and expenses.

BBC nags Met Office for horseracing form book

Over on Talkshop Suggestions Gray quotes nicely so here it is

By Roger Harrabin

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21967190

Last spring’s forecast has been obtained by BBC News under Freedom of Information.

The Met Office three-monthly outlook at the end of March stated: “The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June, and slightly favours April being the driest of the three months.”

A soul-searching Met Office analysis later confessed: “Given that April was the wettest since detailed records began in 1910 and the April-May-June quarter was also the wettest, this advice was not helpful.”

In a note to the government chief scientist, the Met Office chief scientist Prof Julia Slingo explains the difficulty of constructing long-distance forecasts, given the UK’s position at the far edge of dominant world weather systems.

She says last year’s calculations were not actually wrong because they were probabilistic.

The Met Office explained it this way: “The probabilistic forecast can be considered as somewhat like a form guide for a horse race.”

Something does not compute, the BBC using FOI with the end effect of mocking the Met Office?

Steven Hayward: Climate Change Endgame In Sight?

This is a repost from the Powerline Blog of an article summarising the implications of the piece published by ‘The Economist’ a couple of days ago, which recognises the serious problems the co2 driven climate theory faces:

Steven Hayward: Climate Change Endgame In Sight?

In my Weekly Standard cover story about the fallout from the “Climategate” email scandal three years ago, I offered the following question by way of prediction:

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases?

The article then went on to survey emerging research (U.S. government funded!) casting doubt on high estimates of climate sensitivity, along with alternative explanations on some climate factors, such as “black carbon.” The question in my mind the time was how long this would take to begin to break out into the “mainstream” scientific and media world.