WCC4 Rome: Interview with Nikolov and Zeller

I got back from Rome last night following the highly successful World Climate Conference. Quite a number of CO2 sceptics gave presentations, which were politely received and discussed by all present. We even made a few converts. Here’s a short interview I made with Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller where they give their impressions and some insight into their paradigm shifting discovery of the temperature-pressure relationship which holds good across the entire solar system.

Ned and Karl’s two papers are here:

New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse
Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model

On the average temperature of airless spherical bodies and the magnitude of Earth’s atmospheric thermal effect

They show that the uplift in temperature on Earth’s surface due to the presence of the atmosphere is not 33K as the current greenhouse theory states but 90K, and is due to atmospheric pressure at the surface, not the back radiation from ‘greenhouse gases’.

We’ve been following Ned and Karl’s work since 2010 here at the Talkshop. They are finally getting heard in a wider forum.

Mike Haseler: The importance of supra-national institutions for nurturing paradigm shifts in scientific development

My thanks to Mike Haseler, head of the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum, and co-participant at the Royal society workshop on Handling Problems With Uncertainty in Weather and Climate Prediction which we attended earlier this month. he has written this paper in response to the event, which he has kindly given permission for publication here.

Climate changes: The importance of supra-national institutions in nurturing the paradigm shifts of scientific development.
BY MIKE HASELER BSC MBA

 Scottish Climate & Energy Forum, 7 Poplar Drive, Lenzie, UK

Those present at the Royal Society meeting in October 2012 were left in little doubt about the importance of climate and weather prediction and its power to save lives. Whilst numerical modelling provides this invaluable information on daily to seasonal/regional forecasts, this meeting revealed a new paradigm emerging regarding longer term forecasts. This paper shows the learning curve suggests current methods could take 24,000 years to reach the maturity needed to be the basis for public policy. We examine whether problems of communication of probabilistic forecasts may indicate a lack of a “mental model” or shared understanding in numerical modelling and that more scientific structure may both improve communication and utility of weather and climate projections. Although climate is uncertain and numerical predictions immature, there is high confidence that climate will continue to vary, that this will have profound impacts and that e.g. doubling CO₂ is likely to add to the natural variation. So, the message to policy makers as the Kyoto Commitment comes to an end, should be that whatever the cause of climate changes, we should continue to fund lifesaving climate research.