Bishop Hill Goreballs
Oct 8, 2011 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Myles Allen has an interesting piece up in the Guardian, putting Al Gore right on what climate models really tell us (theoretically) about extreme weather.
The claim that we are "painting more dots on the dice", causing weather events that simply could not have occurred in the absence of human influence on climate, is just plain wrong. Given the paucity of reliable records and bias in climate models, it is quite impossible to say whether an observed event could have happened in a hypothetical pristine climate. Our research focuses on quantifying how risks have changed, which is a much easier proposition, although addressing all the uncertainties still makes working out these "relative risks" a painstaking affair.
He also has some interesting things to say about policy:
Enthusiasm for doing anything about climate change seems to have given way to resignation that we will simply have to adapt. For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.
If mitigation efforts have indeed stopped, that's good. There are still the subsidies we give to renewables, of course, but I think most people would agree that these are meaningless gestures rather than mitigation.
Reader Comments (57)
You have to wonder at the sheer cheek of climate scientists sometimes. It was only 8 months ago that Myles Allen himself was trying to convince us all that climate change had caused recent flooding in the UK and that he had the model results to prove it. Within days of publication this research had been debunked by blog review.
As I said back then with my tuppence worth;
This is not simply about Al Gore being an embarrassment this is about the activism by climate scientists embarrassing science itself.
Everyone beating up poor Al because he is completely wrong on attribution cannot hide the fact that people like Myles Allen stand guilty of doing so themselves under the name of science.
Goreballs
The post heading is class [sic]
Mac
I very much doubt that Myles and his co-authors were "trying to convince us all that climate change had caused recent flooding in the UK and that he had the model results to prove it."
The Pall et al Nature paper (I assume that's what you're talking about) is about estimating the change in risk - and changes in risk do not necessarily translate into changes in actual events for a long time. For rare events you need a long dataset to see if their frequency and magnitude is changing.
An analogy might be changes in the odds of you winning the lottery when the number of people playing changes. If it starts off as a million players you have a one-in-a-million chance of winning. If it drops to a hundred players you have a one-in-a-hundred chance. But you still might not win unless you keep playing for ages, so the odds have changed but the outcome has not (yet).
Unfortunately, as BH pointed out, it is indeed all theoretical. If the models are wrong, the Pall et al paper is wrong. (I think the models are good enough to be useful here, but you may think differently).
I agree with Myles about it being dangerous for Gore and other activists to overstate the case. Whipping up hysteria risks leading to bad planning decisions in the context of adaptation - eg: building new sea defences or new reservoirs decades too early, wasting billions.
What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.
How right we are, then, not to spend on them taxpayers' money which we haven't got anyway.
Richard, I will defer to you concerning the question of intent from Myles Allen and his colleagues who did the Pall et al. study and published it. But the study was certainly portrayed as showing that climate change had played a large role in causing the floods in 2000 - e.g. Richard Black's article, Climate change raises flood risk, researchers say. Mac's paraphrase is not that wide of the mark, then. And Mac has a good point that rainfall trends, at least in the UK, do not appear to support the oft-repeated claim (I quote from Black's article):
Myles Allen's article in the Guardian is a good one, but he can't deny that some of the responsibility for overstating the case rests with researchers, not just with Gore.
Jeremy Harvey
We (researchers) do need to take more responsibility for direct communication of our science and what it means (and doesn't mean). That's why I'm here, and I suspect that's why Myles wrote that article!
I very much doubt that Myles and his co-authors were "trying to convince us all that climate change had caused recent flooding in the UK and that he had the model results to prove it."
Richard, if some says the risk of an event is increased how can you not infer that they are saying that that recent examples of that event are not connected, The comment is always *We cannot say this particular event is due to global warming but the models show these type of event will be much more frequent" knowing full well the inference is made and gets connected.
Similar to this is the Met Office/CRU reporting before the end of a year that this years temps are going to be a record. They know full well its based on assumptions on the remaining months figures meeting their expectations but they are after the headline, when the real figures come out and there is no record the orginal headline is still there and gets quoted.
The renewables subsidies are there to bribe rich people to build Temples to Mother Gaia on behalf of anguished greenies.
Such futile gestures are common in primitive societies. The Heads of Easter Island are a fine example.
We now do exactly the same with windmills. The hope is that liberal guilt for existience will be assuaged by erecting a string of follies across the countryside they claim to wish to preserve.
Like in Easter Island they are useless. Like in Easter Island they are ugly monstrosities. and like in Easter Island, future generations will wonder why the f..k any bunch of supposedly intelligent creatures would waste so much time and effort on such a pointless exercise.
Progress anyone?
Weasel words, on the part of climate scientists, especially academics -- saying, "no, we can't say this event or that was caused by climate change" but "such events are more likely, due to the human-caused climate change". Translation: "We can't even say there has been a climate change, from the observed number and severity of weather events of any given kind, so of course we cannot say there has been human-influenced climate change, but we can say there has been human-influenced climate change (because we have said it, over and over, and thus staked our professional credibility on it), so clearly [non-sequitur alert] storms and other weather events have been made more likely by that (theoretical) climate change--whether they actually show up or not (and when any one of them do show up, we will moan and say we told you this would happen, see, here are our scientific-like risk scenarios...see, see?). In the name of humanity, we have to DO SOMETHING, before we are forced to go through this explanation of the settled science yet again. So just pay up, people, and let us do our criticallly important job. We don't need no stinking debate."
Richard perhaps you could explain to me why increasingly violent weather events should occur at all when the poles are warming in relation to the tropics because the earth is warming? Surely the reduced temperature gradient should make the climate less tempestuous, not more, as was seen in the Eocene According to Stanley.
Don't break a leg over the answer I don't suppose it is of interest to anyone else. You could also maybe explain why a scientist, like Myles Allen, has his science misrepresented by the BBC doesn't write to them and ask them to correct it?
I agree with those who point out that published papers are frequently bent by either side of the argument to show what they want, to support their own agenda.
The recent paper showing that a move to shale gas would worsen "global warming" in the coming few decades is a case in point, since coal burning particulates would be reduced allowing in more solar radiation. This could be true, at least it has a ring of a likely outcome. It was of course jumped on many to show that we should not make use of the huge amount of shale gas that is now on the horizon.
It seemed to be lost completely on these people, in their dash to discredit shale, that wind and solar generation would suffer the same short-coming.
I agree with Mac - far too often the reality in real data does not support any of the hype in the ravings of those with the religion, whether it is floods, hurricanes, glaciers or insert your own facet of climate here " ".
Bring back science and proper un-bastardised peer review.
breath of fresh air
I see what you mean - but what I'm trying to say is that attribution of individual events is never cut and dried but you can make estimates of changes in risk.
Let's see if the following analogy works: smoking and cancer. Some people who smoke get cancer. Other people who smoke do not get cancer. Some people who do not smoke get cancer. You can never say for sure that any particular smoker who gets cancer has got it specifically because they smoke - they might have got it anyway. However, we know that they increased their risk of getting cancer by smoking.
How do we know this? It's because we've been able to study very large populations of smokers and non-smokers and looked at the statistics as well as understanding the physiology. The difficult with the climate is that we can't do that because of course we have only one Earth. What Myles and colleagues try to so with their "fraction of attributable risk" work is to use the climate model as a "virtual Earth" and simulate the present-day climate many times, both with and without AGW, thus providing a large "populations" on which they can then do the statistics and estimate the changes in risk. So again you can never say that in any one of these "virtual Earths" the occurrence of a particular flood was due to AGW, but by comparing the two "populations" you can see whether the AGW "population" tends to get more flooding events than the non-AGW "population". Then if you can assume that the model is a reasonably good representation of the real Earth, you can infer that the model results tell you something about the changes in real flood risk.
No actual weather events attributable to climate change. > No changes in frequency of weather events documented. > Models say that there will be both changes in frequency and extremes. > The odds are very long on an ACC(AGW) event occurring. > No actual weather events attributable to climate change. > No changes in frequency of weather events documented. > Models say that there will be both changes in frequency and extremes. > The odds are very long on an ACC(AGW) event occurring. > No actual weather events attributable to climate change.........
And people get paid for this?
HDH, ther has been human induced climate change through land clearance, etc. I don' t believe anyone doubts that, in fact the ever shifting Mike Hulme is on record as saying that 55% of the temperature rises in the 20th century were a result of humans other the burning if fossil fuels which means that humans were responsible for all the 0.5C rise but burning fossil fuel was responsible for only 0.225C of the rise, if it's true. There isn't any doubt that all living things affect the planet's climate, it's just that the rest of the ecosphere is bereft of creatures who want to control other people's lives and have, to their everlasting shame, found a bunch of scientists more than willing to help them in their crusade by exaggerating the effects of fossil fuels on the climate. The sad partis that once this charade is understood by the politicians and the people ALL scientists will be lumped in with these "hide the decline" charlatans. In a sense so they should given that 1700 of them signed a letter of support, paid for out of taxpayer's money, for the Team UK, before they'd read the emails.
geronimo
I think it is indeed more complicated than simply expecting "increasingly violent weather events" across the board. For example, while we expect convective storms to generally be more intense (by being driven by a warmer surface below) I believe it is also expected that overall Atlantic hurricane activity may decrease because of greater wind sheer aloft.
Some scientists do complain when their work is misrepresented! See the recent Times Atlas Greenland ice incident.
simpleseekeraftertruth
Actually changes in extremes have been documented - see the papers cited here and the figure shown.
Signing off for the moment now I'm afraid - it's a nice day and I need to get one with some work in the garden - all that CO2 has made everything grow out of control.... :-)
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. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor 9any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized."
Kevin Trenberth, Nature Blog 4 June 2007
How can anyone be sure they have a good representation of the earth in a climate model?
I think Myles has only himself to blame here, as there have been plenty of opportunities for him to rein in over-enthusiastic journalists such as Richard Black. It is only when someone like Gore who is completely without credibility gives him a name check that he realises that the tacit encouragement of alarmist inferences is starting to blow up in his face.
Can I join in with geronimo in wondering why we should expect more extreme weather events if the models are predicting a flattening in the temperature gradient? I suspect that extreme events have been forced into the models so that when they happen the modellers can claim them in support of their arguments, rather than for any coherent scientific reason.
geronimo
Paul Dennis didn't sign it, -
'Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because "science isn't done by consensus"
and then got questioned by the Norfolk police.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/04/climate-change-email-hacking-leaks
Oct 8, 2011 at 10:28 AM | Jeremy Harvey
Re floods in Hambledon from this BBC guff to which you kindly linked:
e.g. Richard Black's article, Climate change raises flood risk, researchers say.
When this cropped up before on BH, it took me 20 minutes at that time to find this:
http://www.leics.gov.uk/flood_risks_in_parishes.pdf
----------------------------------------
"Each of the specific rainfall events caused widespread disruption due to surface water overwhelming land and highway drainage systems and watercourses inundating flood plains.
Additionally, as winter rains continued ground water levels became very high in the chalk catchments. This resulted in a number of villages being flooded directly from the rising groundwater.
Ordinary watercourses where a lack of appropriate maintenance could cause significant risk of flooding are being agreed between the operating authorities as ‘Critical Ordinary Watercourses’ and will receive a higher standard of inspection.
Hambledon is located at the bottom of a chalk valley, along the course of an ancient river. The village has suffered frequent groundwater flooding since records have been kept.
Hambledon has had 4 serious groundwater flood events – ground floors of properties under water in the last 40 years (report dated 2002)."
---------------------------------
In other words, the flooding might have been made worse because the many (at least 6) authorities with responsibility for maintenance probably assumed that somebody else was cleaning drains and clearing watercourses, consequently nobody did it.
Also, also note that serious groundwater flooding had occurred in Hambledon 4 times since 1962, i.e. well before CAGW was invented.
As I pointed out yesterday, Myles Allen has previously challenged some of the strong claims made for the climate/severe weather link:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/10/07/climate-dissent/
I should have included this crucial piece of the puzzle just now:
Yeah, 15 and over. Exactly as it felt. The propaganda is filtering through.
Richard, you're obviously not a betting man!
In November!The odds of winning the lottery are 1:14,000,000 (give or take!). Those odds remain the same regardless of how many people play because the game depends on a subset of numbers not on a fixed number of tickets.
Which of the two analogies works in this context I'm not sure but as Mac says, your own organisation has produced figures that show no (significant) variation in autumn rainfall in the UK in (essentially) the last 50 years.What is less easy to find these days (I was on page 3 of Google results before I found what I was looking for) is a context into which to put some of these "extreme" events.
http://tinyurl.com/66plkct is a study of the effect on Tewkesbury of the floods of 1770 which was
Emphasis mine.
Prior to that there was a flood as serious as 2007 in the 1480s so let's stop pretending that 2007 was "the biggest ever" or "the worst ever" or "unprecedented" without adding the essential qualification "since ..."
Whether or not we should be blaming Myles Allen is largely beside the point. He is tainted by the scientist-activists' necessity to play up out of the ordinary events in order to convince the people and even more the politicians that these events are a concomitant of global warming, that they can only get worse, and that action is needed to mitigate the coming disaster.
As breath of fresh air points out the connection does not need to made directly. The implication that the 2003 heatwave was the "result" of AGW was widely accepted just as the last three winters have been either loudly dismissed by activists as "just weather" or, slightly less loudly, as being "consistent with" the global warming theory.
The question is often asked, "What pattern of events would cause you to change your views on AGW?" It is apparent that the answer — at least from the activist-scientist — is "there isn't one."
Hmm, an earlier post was lost, it seems. Was referring to "Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil, poll shows".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/07/europeans-climate-change-poll
Was commenting on the economic illiteracy on show. It's one thing to pay a massive economic price through climate 'mitigation' with one's eyes open. It's another to believe that it's going to be an economic blessing. This is magical thinking. Together with the real debt crisis (which was not being faced to at all in June) it spells disaster. But the dire reality now may just save us.
Could someone apologise to Dr. Trenberth for me and tell himm I've resigned my post forthwith.
Mike Jackson - how very dare you imply that there were floods in Tewksbury in the 19th century - or worse still in 1480..!
You know very well that 'climate' only started in 1980 - anything before that was 'weather'....
David
Dinnae blame me, son!
It's the University of Gloucestershire wot done the research. One of they "new" universities (aka "polys") so no doubt the "real" scientists can debunk it all.
But try a chat with those who make their living up and down the Avon and Severn. They will tell you that flooding is a natural part of their lives and always has been. Take a trip up the Severn from Tewkesbury. At least as far as Kempsey it's as boring as hell. Why? Because the banks are so high you can't see over them. Why would that be? Three guesses.
Sorry but when you start with the idea that all results prove your case and none can disprove it , you no longer doing science but religion. So Allen's catch all approach ,what ever it is , is not science. Meanwhile given its the PR and political aspects of AGW that has seen this 'science' expanded massively, form its obscure and poor standard as a relation to the physical sciences, and has brought in vast amounts of research funds , its a bit rich to hear them complain about it .
@Richard Betts 11:32
Thanks for the link. I left out the 'anthropomorphic' adjective in my post as superfluous as the subject is apparent. I note in your link that it is also absent. I do not see how lists of places found to be becoming wetter/colder/hotter/dryer can have any effect on breaking the circularity of an argument based on mankind's actions in burning fossil fuels other than to introduce another circular argument;
^T=^CO2xSenstivity where sensitivity is derived from ^T/^CO2.
One wonders if there is an argument for global ACC/AGW which is not circular in its reasoning.
Please do not use the cancer analogy, Richard Betts! There is a known, understood (carcinogens) epidemiological link of long standing between smoking and various forms of cancer. There is no such causal link established between CO2 and extreme weather.
It is extremely disingenuous for people who lay claim to be using the scientific method to resort to this analogy. The point is, I believe, that you CANNOT actually come up with a convincing analogy between two other phenomena because there isn't one! Any pair of correlates which really mimicked the status of the relationship between CO2 and weather would be as totally unconvincing as that of the parallel it seeks to throw light on.
How about using the correlation between storks' nests and the birth rate in Denmark if you want a similar degree of established connection between two variables as between CO2 and extreme weather? That was the example of a spurious correlation that was always used when I was a girl studying statistics.
You are also guilty of the supposition that changes in extreme weather can be computed on a global scale over time. The number of smokers and number with cancer can be established with relative ease and this KNOWLEDGE is the basis of the computation of risk. No such data exists for CO2 and weather of any type, let alone "extreme" weather.
This is a very big game. The fake CAGW scam was created to justify carbon trading, another banking scam like mortgage-based securities. Those behind it are the Mafia linked up with the Marxist EU bureaucracy which has its own group in the UK and US, Common purpose. These people have been brainwashed with the CAGW scam.
Ask why Cameron on 22 July wrote to Julia Gillard praising her carbon tax plans. Look at the attack on Huhne. Then perceive the real reason these people [probably not Cameron - he's an empty vessel for others], who intend to make us serfs, are being taken out.
Mafia+Marxist EU+Common Purpose.
Don't we have enough to be bothered without that sort of conspiracy theory?
Since I keep asking for empirical evidence from the warmists that their positive feedback theory will drive global warming to the alarmist levels we have been warned about, I feel it only fair to ask if you can provide me with any empirical evidence for your theory?
"For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much."
What I can say is that these two statements contradict each other entirely!
Cheers,
Big Dave
Richard Betts said
"I agree with Myles about it being dangerous for Gore and other activists to overstate the case. Whipping up hysteria risks leading to bad planning decisions in the context of adaptation - eg: building new sea defences or new reservoirs decades too early, wasting billions."
What did Myles Allen's Climateprediction.net say
"The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is 2C, ranging up to 11C."
Last Updated: Wednesday, 26 January, 2005, 19:14 GMT
E-mail this to a friend Printable version
Alarm at new climate warning
By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent
Global temperature simulation climateprediction.net
The study used a programme that ran on PCs around the world
Temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run.
This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested.
Scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows that a "safe" upper limit for carbon dioxide is impossible to define.
The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.
Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime.
More than 95,000 people have registered, from more than 150 countries; their PCs have between them run more than 60,000 simulations of future climate.
Each PC runs a slightly different computer simulation examining what happens to the global climate if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double from pre-industrial levels - which may happen by the middle of the century.
The factors that vary most between the simulations are the precise nature of physical processes, such as the extent of convection within tropical clouds - a process which drives the transport of heat around the world.
Lowest rise
So no two simulations will produce exactly the same results. Overall, the project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the present state of scientific knowledge.
The lowest rise which climateprediction.net finds possible is 2C, ranging up to 11C.
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The timescale would depend on how quickly the doubling of CO2 was reached, but large rises would be on a scale of a century at least from now.
"I think these results suggest that our need to do something about climate change is perhaps even more urgent," the climateprediction.net chief scientist David Stainforth told BBC News.
"However, with our current state of knowledge, we can't yet define a safe level in the atmosphere."
On Monday, the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by the British MP Stephen Byers, claimed it had shown that a carbon dioxide concentration of over 400 ppm (parts per million) would be "dangerous".
The current concentration is around 378 ppm, rising at roughly 2 ppm per year.
Dangerous warming
Next week, the UK Meteorological Office hosts an international conference, Stabilisation 2005, announced by Tony Blair late last year.
Its aim is to discuss what the term "dangerous" global warming really means, and to look at ways to stabilise greenhouse gas levels.
Myles Allen, the principal investigator of climateprediction.net, said the focus on stabilisation might not be appropriate.
"Stabilisation as an exclusive target may not be adequate," he told BBC News. "Stephen Byers claims to know that 400 ppm is the maximum 'safe' level; what we show is that it may be impossible to pin down a safe level, and therefore we should not focus exclusively on stabilisation."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4210629.stm
Good job Myles Allen never says anything alarmist then isn't it - yeah 11 C blah blah
I was talking to a greenie the other day and he was saying ' We've just had the hottest October day in 165 years so even you must agree it's global warming'.
I just said ' Well no. It means it was warmer 165 years ago'
Seemed to leave him thinking.
The Poohbahs are undergoing re-education in 'climate science communications research' camps. Allen's camp director has suggested that Al Gore is a poor model to follow, what with snow falling in his footsteps and all. Baby steps, folks; fear when they learn it all.
====================
Bob
... and the coldest summer since 1993!
See my posting of 11.59 - if it's hot it's global warming; if it's cold it's weather. I've given up arguing with them.
"Information cannot communicate with a closed mind." [Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in]
OT
But I noticed that Baroness Worthington, lately of this parish, seems to be making ready to cast off her ermine for her bovver boots and take to the streets - judging by a recent tweet
http://twitter.com/#!/bryworthington
Fictitious conversation , HoL cellars bar-
Baron -That climate impacts report, with the increased severities, well received my boy round here. The old Lloyds names, got hung drawn and quartered a while back. Can't let that happen again, its our childrens inheritance after all. You deserve one of our best clarets, I'll ask the steward.
Fictititious scientific advisor Beddoes- It wasn't really such a blinder. Do have a soft spot for fine claret, I must say. In fact I was in Bordeaux in 76, tasting one of the 61's in Latour, never forget it, first time I ever caught sight of Concorde. A test flight they told me. Boy that year was hot. Forest fires all up the French coast. Got home standpipes and scorched grass. Haven't seen the likes of it for many a year. Oops, I didnt say that! Cheers, Thats not quite a 61, but not far off.
Baron- We drank the cellars right out of 61's a way back, we're slumming it these days, its the 87 I'm afraid. By coincidence, my last 61 was on a Heathrow- Washington Concorde flight! Nice plane, like a sports car. Small windows though. Nice hostess.
Fictititious scientific advisor Beddoes- Not the Michael Fisher, Oh dear. At least the Met Office learned their lesson. A puff of wind now, and its a red alert. We can close down airspace within seconds now.
Baron- Anyway, your report. Its just the fillip the re-insurance market needed, a real solid justification for bringing the premium risk market in line with our uncertain future. Another one?
Fictititious scientific advisor Beddoes- Why not.
Richard Drake 12.01pm:
The poll you mention (a bit O/T here) is the subject of an interesting article by Ben Pile at
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2011/10/the-poverty-of-opinion-polls.html
"Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil, poll shows".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/07/europeans-climate-change-poll
Oct 8, 2011 at 12:01 PM | Unregistered CommenterRichard Drake
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A prime example of angling the questions to get the results you want:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/10/sacre-bleu-eees-climate-change.html
Bish
good to see Richard Betts commenting here. He has also posted a comment on Judith Curry's blog on USGCRP draft strategic plan where he refers to something called 'natural variability' (not a phrase normally associated with the Met Office) and 're-educating the client' which kinda sounds like the science may not be settled.
Compare this to some of the tosh that the Met office has issued over the years, then the times may really be a changin
keep up the good work Richard
but probably too late to stop the idjt Cameron from completely f**king the country
the writer, John Garnaut, is the son of Ross Garnaut, tho the paper doesn't disclose it. consequently, there's some mocking of what would appear to be extremely perceptive statements by Zhand Musheng:
8 Oct: Sydney Morning Herald: John Garnaut: As China's emissions rise, so too does sceptics' hot air
"Global warming is a bogus proposition," says Zhang Musheng, one of China's most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to a powerful and hawkish general in the People's Liberation Army, Liu Yuan.
Mr Zhang told The Age that global warming was an American ruse to sell green energy technology and thereby claw its way out of its deep structural economic problems...
Mr Zhang, whose father was secretary to China's former premier, Zhou Enlai, blasted Chinese policymakers for encouraging Chinese companies to buy foreign intellectual property in order to manufacture renewable energy equipment. The Chinese-made equipment helps the environment in other nations while leaving China with financial and environmental costs, he said.
"The low-carbon economy, carbon politics and carbon taxes are actually driven by the West as the foundation for a new cycle of the virtual economy,'' he added...
http://www.theage.com.au/world/as-chinas-emissions-rise-so-too-does-sceptics-hot-air-20111007-1ldvl.html
I see Richard Betts is getting a good reception on the current WUWT “…somebody had to say it” post. And so is Judith. Pioneers engaging sceptics without condescension. Took many a long year, but right. Legacy of the winter 2009-10, the environmentalist's perfect storm.
"Pioneers engaging sceptics without condescension. Took many a long year,"
And because it has it will take many, many more long years before the estabilshment and their political lackeys engage their thought processes.
For far too long the "Pioneers" have enjoyed their position with little or no thought of their responsibilities to the wellbeing of mankind as a whole, in this real, not virtual, world.
Responsibility means the ability to respond, if they do not respond then who the hell can? Time for a lot more to get off their stools and to state where we are, what is actually happening, and not imply that their latest "model" prediction is fact.
Listen to a voice of reason:-
"The path that we seem to be on, whereby the science is settled and all we need is better communication and translation of the science to policy makers, not only has the potential to seriously mislead decision makers, but also to destroy atmospheric and climate science in the process."
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/08/usgcrp-draft-strategic-plan/
The Peace & Physics Prizes should have gone to Viscount Monckton and Lubos Motl for modulating cosmic rays with neutrinos from the iron sun to end faster than light climate change in 11 dimensions.
Richard Betts Oct 8, 2011 at 11:17 AM concludes
“Then if you can assume that the model is a reasonably good representation of the real Earth, you can infer that the model results tell you something about the changes in real flood risk.”
Let me make an analogy. Suppose a drug company was able to make a model that “reasonably good representation” of the human body, and used this to verify that the drug did its job, without any harmful side effects. Should the authorities accept this as sufficient evidence of the drugs efficacy? Or should they, at a minimum, rigorously and independently test the representation thoroughly against real world data? In particular to make sure the models accurately simulate real world responses to existing drugs, rather than over forecast a drugs benefits and understate real world side-effects.
The best way to test climate models is to back-fit them to real-world data. In terms of surface temperatures, the only way they fit real world data is by unsubstantiated assumptions about aerosols. (Warren Meyer http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2011/07/return-of-the-plug.html). The basic conclusion is that the models are too sensitive. Like tree ring data for recent temperatures, climate models tend to provide a poor proxy for real world data.
ManicBeancounter
The best way to test climate models is to back-fit them to real-world data.
I can "back-fit" just about any data you can point to with a polynomial i.e aX + bX**2 + cX**3....
The ONLY way to test a climate model or any model is does it PREDICT. Tell me what the weather will be and I will listen.
So far the squirrels up in my pine trees are doing a better job of predicting a cold winter by eating every pine cone they can. The weather is about 20 degrees F lower than "average" and we have snow in the Sierras.