Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Diagnosing the IPCC

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It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:

Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.

Read the whole thing.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

95% Certainty From The IPCC

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Thoughts from Judith Curry:

Yesterday, a reporter asked me how the IPCC came up with the 95% number. Here is the exchange that I had with him:

Reporter: I’m hoping you can answer a question about the upcoming IPCC report. When the report states that scientists are “95 percent certain” that human activities are largely to cause for global warming, what does that mean? How is 95 percent calculated? What is the basis for it? And if the certainty rate has risen from 90 n 2007 to 95 percent now, does that mean that the likelihood of something is greater? Or that scientists are just more certain? And is there a difference?

JC: The 95% is basically expert judgment, it is a negotiated figure among the authors. The increase from 90-95% means that they are more certain. How they can justify this is beyond me.

Reporter: You mean they sit around and say, “How certain are you?” ”Oh, I feel about 95 percent certain. Michael over there at Penn State feels a little more certain. And Judy at Georgia Tech feels a little less. So, yeah, overall I’d say we’re about 95 percent certain.” Please tell me it’s more rigorous than that.

JC: Well I wasn’t in the room, but last report they said 90%, and perhaps they felt it was appropriate or politic that they show progress and up it to 95%.

Reporter: So it really is as subjective as that?

JC: As far as I know, this is what goes on. All this has never been documented.

JC conclusion: Well, I have no idea what goes on in the sausage factory. 95% – take it with a grain of salt (or a stiff whiskey). That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. Uncertain T. Monster is not happy.

I don’t know what this is, but sure as hell isn’t science.

[Update a while later]

A round up of initial reactions, for policy makers.

The general theme of obscurantism runs across the document. Whereas in previous years the temperature records have been shown unadulterated, now we have presentation of a single figure for each decade; surely an attempt to mislead rather than inform. And the pause is only addressed with handwaving arguments and vague allusions to ocean heat.

It was a blown opportunity to set the record straight.

[Update a few minutes later]

From comments: “SPM in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.”

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The IPCC’s Quandary

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On the eve of the official release of the latest report, Steve McIntyre has some thoughts.

This is indeed disturbing:

German ministries insist that it is important not to detract from the effectiveness of climate change warnings by discussing the past 15 years’ lack of global warming. Doing so, they say, would result in a loss of the support necessary for pursuing rigorous climate policies.

Yes, we can’t let empirical reality get in the way of our policy agenda.

[Update a while later]

Desperate times in climate alarmism:

Confronted with all this truly disastrous news on the eve of their upcoming global warming summit, IPCC politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists are trying to figure out how to cover up the bad news. Germany wants all references to the absence of warming deleted from the IPCC report. Whereas 20 years of mild warming were enough to demand immediate drastic action to avoid a climate cataclysm, now the Germans say 17 years of no warming is “too short” and thus “misleading.”

Hungary doesn’t want the IPCC to give “deniers” more ammunition. Belgium wants the “world’s most authoritative climate body” to manipulate the data and graphs, by using a different starting year that cleverly creates a more noticeable upward temperature trend. The Obama Administration wants the IPCC to explain away the absence of warming, by saying the mysteriously missing atmospheric heat was somehow absorbed by the upper 1.2 miles of oceans waters, which have not actually warmed, according to ARGO project data, or perhaps somehow in the really deep ocean, where we have no data.

In other words, if the models and evidence disagree, the evidence must be wrong. The IPCC is infallible.

Need I remind? This is not science.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Ocean Heat

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The relentless increase:

Lubos Motl has done the arithmetic in this post Ocean heat content: relentless but negligible. This is a good post, check it out. The punchline of his calculations: the heating in the layer 0-2000 m translates to 0.065 C +/- 20%. His calculations are essentially confirmed from this ARGO page where they confirm that since the 1960s, the warming of that layer was 0.06 °C.

So, can anyone figure out why 0.06C is a big deal for the climate? Or how all that heat that is apparently well mixed in the ocean could somehow get into the atmosphere and influence weather/temperatures/rainfall on the land? Or is sequestering heat in the ocean a fortuitous ‘solution’ to the global (surface) warming problem?

It’s “relentless” in the same (and harmless) sense that a glacial advance is.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Reply To “Bad Astronomer” About Climate Skepticism

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…that Slate refused to publish:

The argument I made was that climate change has benefits as well as costs and that the benefits are likely to be greater than the costs until almost the end of the current century. I maintain that the balance of evidence supports the conclusion that up to a certain level of warming — about 2 degrees Celsius — the benefits of climate change will probably outweigh the costs. Plait admits that there will be benefits, but he assumes that they are smaller than the harm however small the warming and that I am somehow foolish for not sharing his assumption. He gives no source for this claim, which flies in the face of peer-reviewed sources.

Sadly, that’s Phil’s style. His claims are essentially faith-based.

[Update a few minutes later]

Climate moron David Suzuki doesn’t even know what the data sets are.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The IPCC

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…and its inconvenient truth:

Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it. The IPCC has failed to convincingly explain the pause in terms of external radiative forcing from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar or volcanic forcing; this leaves natural internal variability as the predominant candidate to explain the pause. If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.

Nevertheless, the IPCC appears to be set to conclude that warming in the near future will resume in accord with climate model predictions.

Why is my own reasoning about the implications of the pause, in terms of attribution of the late 20th century warming and implications for future warming, so different from the conclusions drawn by the IPCC? The disagreement arises from different assessments of the value and importance of particular classes of evidence as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence – my reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of observational evidence and understanding of natural internal variability of the climate system, whereas the IPCC’s reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of climate model simulations and external forcing of climate change.

The models are utterly useless, as a basis for public policy. In fact, to the degree that people don’t understand this, they’re worse than useless.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: no ice-free Arctic this year. Mazlowski is falsified.