Friday
Feb072014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Royal Met Soc on AR5
Feb 7, 2014 Climate: IPCC Royal Met Soc Audio recordings of this week's Royal Meteorological Society Conference on the Fifth Assessment Report are now available here. Featuring a bevy of top climatological names, this should make for interesting listening.
Reader Comments (6)
A "psalter of climatologists" might be ill received by our host, but a "bevy"? Shurely shome mishtake.
Surely a "coven" would be more appropriate....?
A "shower" of climatologists? (spoken like Terry-Thomas)
...although maybe it should be a shower of weather forecasters.
Perhaps a clamour, as rooks. Although in the end, no doubt, some will become knights.
A pile of s***? :)
I have listened to most of it now. Actually a very interesting listen. Lots and lots of self congratulations about how well they are doing and very little self doubt, very little concentration on places where the narrative is failing.
No discussion of observationly based estimates of climate sensitivity versus model based. Mention of the pause, but no sense that thinking might have to change if it continues. Antarctic sea ice dismissed with a hand wave etc.
The seemingly thorough evaluation of the models was somewhat undermined when a questioner from the floor said :
http://www.rmets.org/sites/rmets.org/files/presentations/05022014-senior-cox.mp3 About 25:30
"The AR5 models still share some horror stories: lousy monsoons, double ITCZ's ( Intertropical Convergence Zones I think SB) wrong placed cold tounges etc etc. Investing more time, effort into fixing those should be the direction to reduce this spread? ( in the range of climate sensitivity sb) "
That did not go down well. Funny how those little problems were skated over in the preceding talk.
The whole thing came across as an attempt to present a monolithic structure of certainty, it failed for this listener.