Bishop Hill Diary dates, moving on edition
Dec 18, 2014 Bureaucrats Climate: MetOffice Julia Slingo is to give the Cabot lecture in Bristol on 4 February (details here). Here's the trailer:
The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear: with the IPCC stating that “Human influence on the climate system is unequivocal”. It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory and changing the risk of extreme weather and climate events. Our exposure to these risks is also changing as a result of changes in how we live and a rapidly growing global population.
Climate science is now moving beyond questions of global average surface temperature change, and is now responding to questions about whether extreme weather such as heat waves, wet winters or flash flooding will become more or less frequent as the climate changes. This change in thinking requires the science to move on to more complex and high resolution simulations of what our climate is likely to be like across timescales from decades to centuries ahead.
This information allows society to make informed decisions about climate change mitigation and adaptation, and will help communities to prepare for weather and climate extremes across timescales.
Professor Dame Julia Slingo, Met Office Chief Scientist, will give this Cabot Institute lecture co-organised by Bristol Festival of Ideas and part of Bristol 2015. The talk will include a panel discussion from some leading Cabot academics and an opportunity for questions from the audience at the end. Julia Slingo will be made a special Cabot Institute Distinguished Fellowship in honour of her work in climate science at the event.
You have to laugh at the idea of global warming science moving beyond such simplistic questions as whether the globe's surface is actually warming. No doubt this change of emphasis is unconnected to the failure of the said surface to actually, erm, get any warmer.
The correspondent who alerted me to this event wondered if the Q&A session would consist solely of planted questions, as was the case for Mann's appearance. It's more than likely. Public servants are not there to be questioned by mere members of the public.
Reader Comments (120)
Bristol is fast becoming the new hotbed for climate alarmism - eat your heart out University of East Anglia.
So what we need is more complex computer models to predict what might happen based on AGW assumptions, instead of more focus on understaning the here and now. By that I mean: what really is happening now, and if anything of concern, what are the causes?
My question to Slingo would be: Why are all warming scenarios - based as they are on a mere tenth of a degree or so of warming - deemed to be catastrophic for the planet? What other catastrophies accompanied previous periods of similar warming?
A little OT
Greg Laden has found the reason for the divergence problem. It's caused by changes in temperature:
“change in regional (and global) temperature is increasingly implicated as the cause of the divergence problem”
http://www.gaiagazette.com/new-research-on-tree-rings-as-indicators-of-past-climate-greg-ladens-blog/
There's something of the climate night, about Bristol
which 'sceptic' said this about the 'pause' - (trick question)
“…it’s a great presentation about 15 years being irrelevant, but I think, some of us might say if you look at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and it’s timescale that it appears to work, it could be 30 years, and therefore I think, you know, we are still not out of the woods yet on this one. …
If you do think it’s internal variability, and you say we do think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a key component of this, and it’s now in it’s particular phase, but was previously in the opposite phase, could you not therefore explain the accelerated warming of the 80s and 90s as being driven by the other phase of natural variability?”
- See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2014/01/10/oops-trenberth-concedes-natural-ocean-cycles-contributed-to-1978-1998-warming-after-all-co2-diminishes-as-a-factor/#sthash.vM8IouDk.dpuf
What do you expect from Julia Slingo?
Is the Pope a catholic? Is CAGW science or a belief system? ( it can't be a religion as there are't any relics to revere - yet).
If anybody bothers to go there please ask for any reason any regional climate models be any good any time soon
I used to get upset when people like here made such ridiculous comments, now I just feel sad that they either can't or won't accept the truth which most other people now recognise.
The simple fact, that almost everyone else knows, is that whilst there are year to year changes, their own local weather has not changed significantly since they were a child.
Yes occasionally there's a storm or whatever, and there's a fuss and people ask is "this the change people like Sligo are talking about". Then we go back to normal, the one-off severe storm fades into memory and the expected change fails to materialise and as this goes on more and more people are getting more and more resistant to the idea that there is currently any actual change in the climate irrespective of what the likes of Sligo say.
The change in thinking obviously involves believing the opposite of observation.
"It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory....."
MWP would suggest otherwise.
We all take the "weather" for granted and unless we suffer a major "setback" we forget about it pronto(weather buffs excepted). The general public have "weather amnesia" for good reason, it isn't that important most of the time. On the other-hand there is no excuse for the Met Office, as holding the archives, to forget.Despite their great work in this area, spinning extreme stories to a forgetful public does them no favours whatsoever.
The most unusual thing about our current warmest CET is the complete lack of extremes
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_act_graphEX.gif
Let's see the spin on this, should there be any. 2014 mostly pleasant?
Pretty obvious why Slingo was elevated to "Dame" and it was certainly not "services to science".
"Climate science is now moving beyond questions of global average surface temperature change"
I wonder why? Maybe because global average surface temperature has gone 'off-message'.
Change of direction at the Met Office? They are going to concentrate on modelling weather systems! So 1970s!
Quote Climate science is now moving beyond questions of global average surface temperature change,'
This is one dame with no shame! And not much choice. She and her chums will have to find something else to keep their self-importance supported, and paid for, along with no end of opportunities for portentous remarks now that the pesky 'global average surface temperature change' is not doing what they told us so gravely it would not so long ago, e.g.
September 2007:
The hapless Vicky Pope on a roll.September 2008:
September 2009:
Intermission for more grounded material:
Andrew NeilJanuary 2010
I guess the Met Office answer now to Neil's question, nearly 5 years on, is that there is more to climate science than temperature and, indeed, CO2. Took them a while to get there. But what harm have they caused en route? Dame Julia will no doubt provide much elaboration to the 'Met Office answer now' in February, but I fear that to my question, answer there will be none.
"The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear "
Okay, can anybody point me to the chart that shows time across the bottom and "clarity" along the vertical axis, that shows the evidence or consensus or polling data or whatever metric is used to establish "clarity" not only trending upwards, but CURVING up? Otherwise, how do we evidence the "increasingly" clear aspects and characteristics of the trend?
A good question for Dame Julia Slingo might be, please explain why the climate has changed when there has been no warming to cause that change for 18 years?
“The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear.” What, apart from models, is giving a clearer AGW signal? No hot spot, no air temperature rises to speak of, no change in the rate of other metrics, nothing bar stuff we’d already observed well over 20 years ago.
The models produced since 1988 have all been saying it’s clearly man made, even if the models were right they cannot be more certain than certain. The fundamental science hasn't changed. So therefore they cannot have clearer evidence of the impact of human activity on climate. LIE.
“Climate science is now moving beyond questions of global average surface temperature change, and is now responding to questions about whether extreme weather such as heat waves, wet winters or flash flooding will become more or less frequent as the climate changes.”
I thought they’d ‘found’ those signals on countless occasions… only for them to turn out to be false trends. Were they lying then or they lying now, or both.
They’re suffering from the same accounting issue Tescos is in trouble for. They pre-empted actual successes so that they’ve got nothing new to report. It’s way past time someone called in a regulator.
Professor Dame Julia Slingo, Muppet Office Chief Scientivist
If the observations in the real world do not match the outputs of our models, then reality must be wrong.!
PS they need much more powerful computers and then they will be even more accurate with their predictions!
This is like when the early Christians had to explain away the fact that Jesus was not coming back but still keep the faith alive- they had to move past the literal promises that the second coming would be in the lifetimes of those earliest believers and come up with more symbolic explanations.
But it was clearly a religion, not science.
Sort of like how the climate obsession is clearly a social mania and is not science.
This is also advertised in the side bar of the Julia Slingo piece:
http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/2015/events/the-coleridge-lectures-2015-george-monbiot/
which will be on 25th Feb.
I would be able to get to the Slingo talk, if anyone else was going, but will be away for Monbiot's. Is anyone interested? I don't particularly want to go on my own.
I think we can see where this is going.
Some scientists are sticking to their guns and saying the temperature observations will catch up with the models. Dame Julia and the like are taking a different tack and refocussing on different measures of how disastrous it all is.
As the Lee essay pointed out the move from refutable global warming to non refutable climate change was a calculated one. However climate change is a slow moving (non)disaster and does not instil the proper sense of urgency.
Extreme weather is an even more diaphanous construct. It is useful though because you can take pictures of it and run headlines right now, it has immediacy. Any weather event can be hyped up as more frequent and unprecedented. Even the benign, like a mild winter in the UK. Forget correlation, let alone causality, they are no longer needed. Look at what we are doing to the weather, it's right outside your window. Will nobody think of the children?
All the evidence says a Colder Climate is conducive to more "Extreme" weather, so they can't even get that right with their "More Heat = More Energy" when it should be More Heat Differential = More Energy.
All this money spent, and they can now forecast (with a higher degree of confidence) whether you should pack an umbrella to watch a 5 day cricket match starting tomorrow.
Wimbledon fortnight, remains in the lap of the gods, however, if you forget your umbrella, sod's law states that you will probably regret it (with a high level of confidence)
Now, if they could agree on a reason for the pause in global warming, AND when it will restart, I might have a higher degree of confidence in climate science.
It is not like they are just guessing, is it?
Relevant news from a year ago: "BBC whistles up return of The Clangers: Cult children's show to return to screens in £5million remake."
That's much cheaper than the ~£100million for the newest Met Office super computer/model. And you get a real Soup Dragon to talk gibberish.
"The worst in living memory" weather weirding narrative is a complete joke, given the last 15+ year pause. If late 20th century AGW were everything Slingo purports to believe it is, we'd be well on our way to hell in a handbasket and living memory would already be long-peppered with unprecedented catastrophic weather.
You really don't have to be at all cynical these days to find Slingo's narrative laughable. The overt politicking of the Met Office is sadly making it as distrusted as any political party and making the British public no less disaffected.
Surely this is a circular argument we are seeing here. When did it become sensible for Climate Scientists to effectively quote the SPM (unequivocal), which even the Graun managed to notice was spiced up by politicians way beyond anything stated in AR5 W's.
I guess now we will have politicians (and of course true believers) taking Dame Julia's words and stoking them up even more and the whole circus begins another round of confirmation bias.
Will all this come home to roost? Reality is beginning to crowd in on the politicians now, even DECC having to admit that 40% will be added to energy bills by 2020. Germany in melt-down and most of the world not giving a damn. At some point more politicians will ask for some evidence that all the cost is worth it. At that point some Climate Scientists are likely to have a hard time, because politicians will require handy scapegoats. Always worth remembering that Italy put volcanologists in prison.
The current GWPF front page has global sea ice at record high levels, CO2 emissions at record high levels
The only thing that will help the false prophets is the fact that the government will need to keep taxing us the £60bn pa that is now Green Taxes, which is why they were sexing-up the SPM in the first place. I suppose they could just relabel them "miscellaneous".
I saw the dear Dame give a lecture in Cambridge recently. Amongst other things, she said that if you disagreed with her climate models you were disagreeing with "the immutable laws of physics". What surprised me was how un-sceptical her audience (of intelligent, scientist-type, people) were. I think we need more questions asked to try to start people thinking for themselves.
If anyone goes along to this talk I would urge them to try to ask a succinct question of the sort that the audience can understand, check and verify. It needs to be able to be put in less than 15 secs talking. Any suggestions peoples?
Gareth
"The immutable laws of physics"
Could someone ask the Dame (it is panto season)
"Why are all the models wrong?"
She might reply "Oh no they arenot!"
We can all have a great laugh, forget the billions wasted, and live happily ever after
Climate science appears similar to growing roses... if you don't get the results you want, simply apply a bit more BS!
Direct question for Richard Betts.
Do you believe that your Boss (Slingo) is correct when she states:
"The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear: with the IPCC stating that “Human influence on the climate system is unequivocal”. It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory and changing the risk of extreme weather and climate events. Our exposure to these risks is also changing as a result of changes in how we live and a rapidly growing global population.
Climate science is now moving beyond questions of global average surface temperature change, and is now responding to questions about whether extreme weather such as heat waves, wet winters or flash flooding will become more or less frequent as the climate changes. This change in thinking requires the science to move on to more complex and high resolution simulations of what our climate is likely to be like across timescales from decades to centuries ahead."?
This stood out for me?..
"...questions about whether extreme weather such as heat waves, wet winters or flash flooding will become more or less frequent as the climate changes"
Surely an admission that we could be looking at less frequent severe events (instead of catastrophe) is new from these quarters?
I can only ever recall hearing the potential downsides.
Can you blame her , this approch has recently brought to the MET 97 million new reasons why its the 'right' if dishonset approch to take.
Time to re-google bomb the name Senna the Soothsayer
Hmm - shades of Clinton, Monica & that cigar.
"Move on" is progressive speak for "this is all getting embarrassing - can we talk about something else?".
Personally, I intend to remain exactly where I am until the satellite temperature record shows a significant increase.
"It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory."
Think of the poor grandchildren. They may have to suffer winters that are a occasionally a bit 'wet & windy'. Poor things!
It might be just me but I can't seem to spot these ever more noticeable impacts.
Dame Sligo will be OK regardless of what she says. She moves in the right circles. Don't forget that when Cameron ventured into climate science and stated that the rains a year ago in SW England were due to climate change and caused by man made CO2 emissions, Dame Sligo came riding to his defence despite the MET Office issuing a paper backing IPCC that there was at present not compelling evidence to back her view (without actually mentioning her by name). I think that she has a problem identifying reality in amongst all the models that seem to surround her.
She won't even suffer from the policies created on the back of her Department's fanciful statements about global warming leading to escalating consumer costs as enumerated here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/17/decc-forced-to-release-data-showing-impact-of-climate-policies-on-energy-prices/
Might eventually help to reduce the cost of providing state pensions.
John Peter (or anyone): please provide a link to the Met Office "no compelling evidence" paper. (Or to the IPCC report re extreme weather.) Thanks.
The following appears as a footnote in the Summary for Policy Makers ( SPM) of the recently published IPCC 5th Assessment Report
“The long-term scenarios assessed in WGIII were generated primarily by
large-scale, integrated models that project many key characteristics of
mitigation pathways to mid-century and beyond. They are simplified,
stylized representations of highly-complex, real-world processes, and the
scenarios they produce are based on uncertain projections about key
events and drivers over often century-long timescales. Simplifications
and differences in assumptions are the reason why output generated
FROM DIFFERENT MODELS, OR VERSIONS OF THE SAME MODEL AND
PROJECTIONS FROM ALL MODELS CAN DIFFER CONSIDERABLY FROM
THE REALITY THAT UNFOLDS ." ( my emphasis)
Translated using my jargon buster this says:-
"The IPCC knows that the Climate Models it uses to generate its warnings about climate change bear no relationship
to reality and is aware that their output is neither internally consistent nor does it provide any useful information about future Climate Change"
I wonder why this was not more prominently stated in the main body of the SPM.
Why does it not seem to have been noticed by the, amongst others, the Obama Administration, the US EPA, the EU Commission, the DECC, tens of thousands of politicians, climate bureaucrats, the FoE, the WWF, the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice and catalogues full of UN agencies, NGO's, environmental pressure groups, wind and solar industry lobbyists and most of the MSM - not to forget Julia Slingo, Richard Betts, the BBC, the Grauniad and other adherents of the CAGW storyline all of whom insistently tell us that IPCC assessment reports are the " gold standard" of climate science. If this is the gold standard please protect us from the bog standard!
Is it not just that fomenting Climate Change hysteria is the tool they all need to support and protect their own agendas?
This change in thinking…This change to thinking…
Not much chance. It would be nice, but that hasn't really fixed it.
-----
Gareth
"The immutable laws of physics"
Aristotle's Laws? Er, no.
Descarte's Laws? Er, no.
Newton's Laws? Er, approximately.
Einstein's Laws? Er, getting better, but try fitting it with quantum theory.
As immutable as the prehuman climate,it seems.
A change to thinking seems even less likely.
"It’s a bit like watching a ball bouncing down a rocky hillside. You can predict some aspects of it behaviour but not others. You can predict it will generally go downhill, and if you see a big rock in it’s path you can be reasonably confident that it will hit it and bounce off, but you can’t predict the size and direction of all the little bounces in between."
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/display/Search?searchQuery=slingo&moduleId=1282578&moduleFilter=&categoryFilter=JournalEntry&startAt=0
I would love to see an Alan Sokal type spoof on this. The MO (and supporters) are so keen on confirmation bias that they would surely miss the clues in a diatribe of catastrophic prognostications about soaring temperatures/sea level/acidification, with lots of references to hokey sticks and related SkS/Lewandowsky nonsense...
Bitter&Twisted
Those two paragraphs seems fine to me. Let's take it sentence by sentence:
Agreed - see here.
Yes. The climate is already starting to become different to that previously seen in the instrumental record - not enormously different yet, but changes are becoming evident. And its clear that change (to some extent or other) will continue.
And if you go back beyond the instrumental period, it's still probably different to anything seen before by humans, and possibly even different to anything ever when you look closely. Even though global mean temperatures have been warmer than now in the distant past, there's no exact analogue for the changes we're driving now (different combinations of GHG concentrations, land cover, arrangement of continents etc).
I don't see how anyone can object to this. We have more & more people and their circumstances (wealth, lifestyle, settlements) are continually changing.
Global mean temperature in itself doesn't actually affect anyone directly - changes in it are just one indicator of changes in the climate system. What we need to understand more is regional and local weather and climate and how these are (or aren't) changing.
Current models can't capture all the details for the things discussed above, so if those questions are to be explored then we need to improve the models.
Which particular points do you disagree with, and why?
"Amongst other things, she said that if you disagreed with her climate models you were disagreeing with "the immutable laws of physics". [...] It needs to be able to be put in less than 15 secs talking. Any suggestions peoples?"
Has it been mathematically shown that representing the atmosphere as a set of blocks tens or hundreds of kilometres across will always gives an answer close to the solution to the exact aerodynamic Navier-Stokes equation it is approximating? If so, where?
Are clouds modelled using the immutable laws of physics?
If the models implement the same set of laws of physics exactly, why do different models have different sensitivities, yield different average global temperatures, differ in their ability to reproduce ENSO, precipitation, and so on?
Bishop Hill
So are you going to go along and sit in silence and not put your hand up to ask questions, like you did for Mann's talk? ;)
I very much doubt that the questions were planted. It was more a case that nobody who would have asked him a challenging question actually did so. It was all a bit of an anti-climax to be honest!
Gareth
"The immutable laws of physics"
One of the most demeaning epithets for an earlier person is that they are "of their time."
Of course, the implication is that the user of the epithet is not of their time, but 'of eternity.'
Can anything be more arrogant?
Is the state of climate science, now the worst on record?
Much like watching a bouncing ball, it keeps going downhill.
Geospeculator
WGIII use 'Integrated Assessment Models' which are very different to the GCMs that Julia is talking about. They have much simpler representations of the climate, eg. they don't model the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere for example.