Judith Curry ejects herself from a tribe that exists only in her own mind

by ...and then there's physics, November 26, 2015

David Rose has a new article about Judith Curry called I was tossed out of the tribe. Well, here’s problem number one. There is no tribe. If you’re a scientist/researcher, then you should be aiming to do research that is honest and objective, the results of which should not depend on who you regard as being your contemporaries. If you think there’s some kind of tribe to which you need to belong, then you’re doing it wrong.

Apparently, also, Judith Curry’s record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none. Sorry, but this is simply not true. It’s pretty decent, but it’s not second to none. The article also says: Warming alarmists are fond of proclaiming how 97 per cent of scientists agree that the world is getting hotter, and human beings are to blame. Ignoring the term Warming alarmists, the reason people say this is because it is essentially true.

Judith Curry apparently also says

‘…..A sensitivity of 2.5 ˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2 ˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’

Firstly, a sensitivity (ECS, I assume) of 2.5 oC does not make it much less likely that we will see 2 oC during the 21st century. Not only do the ranges of projected warming already include the possibility that the sensitivity might be 2.5 oC, but what we will see depends largely on how much we emit. Also, the target is fixed in the sense that it is defined according to giving us some chance of keeping warming below 2 oC; normally a 66% chance. It already includes the uncertainty about climate sensitivity and uncertainty about carbon cycle feedbacks. Maybe when Judith questions this, she gets slagged off for appearing to not understand this basic concept; something a scientist with a record that is apparently second to none should be able to understand.

Judith Curry also added that

her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2˚C warmer would be even further into the future.

Well, yes, but there are many reasons why their ECS estimate is probably too low. Just because you’re proud of your own work, doesn’t mean you get to dismiss everything else. That climate sensitivity could be lower than we currently think is likely, does not mean that it probably will be.

There are numerous other examples of nonsense, such as

Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected.

No, it’s not.

And,

solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’

Firstly, there isn’t some lag in work on the solar-climate connection, and the solar experts were rather clueless about climate.

The article finishes with

She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede:

Rather than it receding, Judith Curry appears to be helping it to start.

So, as far as I can tell, Judith Curry gets criticised because she says things that – for a senior scientist who has a record that is apparently second to none – are embarrassingly wrong. She also appears to have ejected herself from a tribe that only exists in her imagination. Good thing there are credulous journalists, like David Rose, who are willing to write supportive articles.

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/there-is-no-tribe/

Judith Curry suggests poor folks should buy air conditioners

Let them eat curry

by tamino, Open Mind blog, July 2, 2015

It has often been rumored that when Marie Antoinette was told that the people of France faced starvation because they had no bread, she replied “Let them eat cake.”

The story isn’t true, but it does encapsulate the kind of cavalier, thoughtless, arrogant thinking that makes people want to cut your head off.

If the people of India and Pakistan were facing starvation, what would we recommend? “Let them eat curry”? Fortunately, they aren’t presently facing terrible food shortages. But thousands of those people — human beings — died as a result of recent killer heat waves. What advice does Judith Curry offer? This:

Looks like they need more air conditioning in Spain and France and also South Asia.

Does it make more sense to provide air conditioning or to limit CO2 emissions. I vote for more air conditioning in these susceptible regions.

Let them buy air conditioners! Never mind that they’re poor and can’t afford it. Ignore the fact that the energy use would make global warming worse. And be sure to paint it as an “either/or” proposition whether it is or not. Just don’t make us do anything like limit CO2 emissions.

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/let-them-eat-curry/

American Meteorological Society Objects to Congressional Investigation of Its Anti-Science Members

by Brad Johnson, Hill Heat, February 28, 2015

AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter

The American Meteorological Society's executive director, Keith Seitter, has condemned a Congressional investigation of the potential corruption of scientific testimony on climate change by AMS members.

The investigation was launched by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) following the revelations that the research of Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory was secretly financed by the fossil-fuel industry, including Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and Southern Company. Soon testified before Congress in 2003 questioning the scientific consensus on fossil-fueled global warming.

Grijalva sent letters to the universities of seven other academics who have been Republican witnesses challenging the climate-science consensus, asking for testimony-related financial disclosure. Seitter responded by condemning the investigation.

"Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources — and thereby questioning their scientific integrity — sends a chilling message to all academic researchers," Seitter wrote in the AMS response. "Further, requesting copies of the researcher’s communications related to external funding opportunities or the preparation of testimony impinges on the free pursuit of ideas that is central to the concept of academic freedom."

Not mentioned by Seitter is that six of the seven targets of the Grijalva investigation are AMS members.

Judith Curry was elected a Fellow of AMS in 1995 and a councillor of AMS in 1997. John Christy received a Special Award from AMS in 1996, and was elected a Fellow in 2002. David Legates has been the faculty advisor to the Student Chapter of AMS and is an AMS certified consulting meteorologist. Richard Lindzen has received AMS's Meisinger and Charney Awards and was a member of the AMS Council. Robert Balling is a member and frequent presenter at AMS conferences. Roger Pielke Jr is an AMS member.

Pepperdine and American Enterprise Institute historian Steven Hayward is the only investigative target not in the American Meteorological Society.

These AMS members are notable for their public denunciation of the scientific community and specific scientists, including other members of AMS.

Below are some examples.

"The problem is that Obama is listening to scientists that are either playing politics with their expertise, or responding to a political mandate from the administration (probably a combination of both). Not just administrators in govt labs (e.g. [Gavin] Schmidt, [Tom] Karl), but think of the scientist networks of John Holdren and John Podesta: to me the scariest one one is [Michael] Mann to [Joseph] Romm to Podesta." - Judith Curry, 1/21/15

"When you're an alarmist, being wrong, lying, cheating, misleading the public and killing jobs simply do not count against you — even when the allegedly human-caused global warming stopped in 1996." - David Legates, 10/16/13

"[The hacked University of East Anglia email correspondence] is clear proof of what we have suspected: That these thugs have strong-armed and subverted the peer review process by demanding they be reviewers of papers critical of their work, removing editors who are not predisposed to their views, and even threatening to boycott journals that publish papers with which they disagree.” - David Legates, 1/18/10

"Because this issue has policy implications that may potentially raise the price of energy significantly (and thus essentially the price of everything else), the U.S. Congress should not rely exclusively on the U.N. assessments because the process by which they were written includes biased, false, and/or misleading information about one of the most murky of sciences – climate." - John Christy, 3/31/11

"[The Draft National Assessment on Climate Change] is much closer to pseudoscience than it is to science. . . . History tells us that when scientists willingly endorse sweeping governmental agendas fueled by dodgy science, bad things soon happen." - Robert Balling, 4/15/13

"It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going." - Richard Lindzen, 9/28/13

"Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating." - Richard Lindzen, Congressional testimony, 11/17/10

Hill Heat has previously compiled a list of dozens of attacks made by Roger Pielke, Jr., a political scientist, against climate scientists.

Roger Pielke, Sr., Pielke, Jr.'s father and another climate scientist who has testified before Congress rejecting the climate science consensus, was elected a Fellow of AMS in 1982. Pielke, Sr., was a member of the AMS Committee for Statements on Weather Modification, which issued AMS's official statement on climate change in August 2012, after significant delay. Pielke, Sr., was a likely source of such delay, as he strongly advocated for changes to weaken the statement. Pielke, Sr., has accused fellow AMS members including Tom Karl, Ben Santer, Tom Peterson, Tom Wigley, and Peter Thorne of "inappropriate" behavior, "collusion," and "conflicts of interest" to suppress dissenting views [his].

This is not the first time the executive director of the AMS has criticized efforts to hold climate deniers publicly accountable.

Seitter previously criticized the science-activist organization Forecast the Facts for "apply[ing] public pressure" on "broadcast meteorologists who are identified as 'deniers' based on views they have expressed with respect to climate change."

Dozens of television weather reporters who have attacked climate science and scientists are AMS members. At least twenty television weathermen who publicly reject basic climate science are AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologists, the society's seal of approval granting them scientific legitimacy in their role as weather and climate communicators.

"The AMS maintains that peer-review is the appropriate mechanism to assess the validity and quality of scientific research," Seitter wrote, "regardless of the funding sources supporting that research as long as those funding sources and any potential conflicts of interest are fully disclosed."

The pursuit of that disclosure is, of course, the stated purpose of Grijalva's investigation, as the scientific community failed to ensure such disclosure in the case of Willie Soon.

According to the AMS bylaws:

Members should conduct themselves in an ethical manner and reflect dignity and honor on their profession.

Members should base their practice on sound scientific principles applied in a scientific manner.

Members should not direct their professional activities into practices generally recognized as being detrimental to, or incompatible with, the general public welfare.

Members should refrain from making exaggerated or unwarranted claims and statements.

Either the claims made by AMS and the rest of the global scientific community are exaggerated, unwarranted, and detrimental to the general public welfare, or the claims of the academics under investigation are. Either the burning of hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels is disrupting the climate and threatening the public welfare, or the global scientific community has been corrupted into deceiving the general public into policies that would unnecessarily transform global energy production through massive government intervention. Either the climate conspiracy theorists are ethical AMS members, or all of the other members are.

For decades now the AMS has looked the other way and pretended this fundamental conflict within its ranks does not need to be resolved.

The American Meteorological Society seems uninterested in maintaining the ethical standards of its members and defending scientific integrity. Its executive director is compounding the error by criticizing Rep. Grijalva for taking action to do just that.

http://www.hillheat.com/articles/2015/02/28/american-meteorological-society-objects-to-congressional-investigation-of-its-anti-science-members

Seth Borenstein, AP: Earth warms like a broken record; for 3rd time in 10 years, globe sets mark for hottest year

by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, The Republic, January 16, 2015


FILE - In this July 25, 2014, file photo, a roofer works under the mid-day sun in Gilbert, Ariz. Federal science officials announced Friday that for the third time in a decade, the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that in 2014 the world had its hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping. Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an independent group out of University of California Berkeley also measured 2014 as the hottest on record. (AP Photo, File)

WASHINGTON — For the third time in a decade, the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record, federal scientists announced Friday.

Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that in 2014 the world had its hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping. 

Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an independent group out of University of California Berkeley also measured 2014 as the hottest on record.

NOAA said 2014 averaged 58.24 degrees Fahrenheit (14.58 degrees Celsius), 1.24 degrees (0.69 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.

But NASA, which calculates temperatures slightly differently, put 2014's average temperature at 58.42 degrees Fahrenheit (14.68 degrees Celsius) which is 1.22 degrees (0.68 degrees Celsius) above the average of the years 1951-1980.

Earth broke NOAA records set in 2010 and 2005. The last time the Earth set an annual NOAA record for cold was in 1911.

NOAA also said last month was the hottest December on record. Six months in 2014 set marks for heat. The last time Earth set a monthly cold record was in December 1916.

"The globe is warmer now than it has been in the last 100 years and more likely in at least 5,000 years," said climate scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, who wasn't part of either research team. "Any wisps of doubt that human activities are at fault are now gone with the wind."

Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler and other experts said the latest statistics should end claims by non-scientists that warming has stopped. It didn't, as climate denial sites still touted claims that the world has not warmed in 18 years.

2014's heat was driven by record warmth in the world's oceans that didn't just break old marks: It shattered them. Record warmth spread across far eastern Russia, the western part of the United States, interior South America, much of Europe, northern Africa and parts of Australia. One of the few cooler spots was in the central and eastern United States.

"Every continent had some aspect of record high temperatures" in 2014, said Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

Nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 1 in 650 million, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. Two other statisticians confirmed his calculations.

Climate scientists say one of the most significant parts of 2014's record is that it happened during a year where there was no El Nino weather oscillation. During an El Nino, when a specific area of the central Pacific warms unusually and influences weather worldwide, global temperatures tend to spike. Previous records, especially in 1998, happened during El Nino years.

Every year in the 21st century has been in the top 20 warmest years on record, according to NOAA.

Temperatures have risen by about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the mid-19th century and pre-industrial times, said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where the space agency tracks warming temperatures.

"We are witnessing, before our eyes, the effect of human-caused climate change," said Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann.

Some non-scientists who deny man-made global warming have pointed to satellite temperature records — which only go back to 1979 — which show a warming world, but no record this year and less of a recent increase than the longer-term ground thermometers. 

But Mann, Dessler, Francis and others say there have been quality and trustworthy issues with some satellite measurements and they only show what's happening far above the ground. 

They said ground measurements are also more important because it is where we live.

University of Alabama Huntsville scientist John Christy, who measures temperature via satellite, puts 2014 in a cluster of warm years behind 2010 and 1998. He said he is "puzzled that this difference between surface and deep atmosphere continues to occur as it has now for 36 years. Our theories can't explain it. I don't know what is going on."

Georgia Tech professor Judith Curry, who is not in the mainstream of climate scientists, wrote that talk about the record implies that temperatures will get warmer, something she says won't happen for at least another decade. But she added in a blog post in response to the NOAA announcement: "I'm not willing to place much $$ on that bet, since I suspect Mother Nature will manage to surprise us."

NASA's Schmidt says temperatures will continue to rise with year-to-year variations and he wouldn't be surprised if 2015 breaks 2014's record: "The increase in greenhouse gases is unrelenting and that in the end is going to dominate most things going on."

This was the 38th year in a row that the world was warmer than the 20th century average, according to NOAA data. Most people in the world and the United States were born after 1976 and have never lived in a cooler than normal year.

"You want to understand what that (cooler) world is like and you wonder are you ever to going to experience that," said Victor Gensini, a 28-year-old meteorology professor at the College of DuPage in Illinois.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/d7375a310ef6475c9841accc756c4ba4/US--SCI--Hottest-Year

MUST SEE VIDEO! Better than anything Cameron has done!

Readers, please go to this link to see one of the best climate videos produced -- it really is an outstanding job (it is about 14 minutes long, and well worth it):

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4107264.htm

From 1975 to 1998 the world saw a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. But for the last 16 years the rate of rise has slowed dramatically leading skeptics to question predictions of catastrophe. In this episode we find out 'what happened to global warming?'

Anja Taylor, ABC (Australia), October 16, 2014

GLOBAL WARMING PAUSEI

TRANSCRIPT

download video: mp4

NARRATION
17 years ago, a warm wind was blowing across the Pacific. As it blew, it pushed sun-warmed waters westward, piling them high to the north-east of Australia. When the winds eased, the warm waters washed back across the vast ocean, releasing masses of heat to the atmosphere in what became the mother of all El Nino events.

Richard Morecroft
The Florida storms are being blamed on El Nino.

News Reporter
..wild storms and heavy rain in South America...

News Reporter
A man-made permanent drought is...

NARRATION
It was 1998 and the climate seemed set on a frightening trajectory.

News Reporter
What the world is experiencing could be part of a climate shift.

NARRATION
But the years that followed didn't live up to predictions, leading to a crisis of confidence.

Christopher Monckton
They have been deliberately exaggerating the evidence, over-stating the case, frightening people, frightening even children.

Professor Judith Curry
The globally average surface temperature hasn't increased in any significant way since 1998.

Maurice Newman
In fact, can be argued since 2003 it has cooled off somewhat.

NARRATION
It became the most important question to answer in climate science today - what happened to global warming? It's a cold and blustery day in Boulder, Colorado. It seems a fitting start to a story on what's become known as the 'global warming pause'. It's a well-established fact that people are less likely to believe the world is warming when there's cold weather about. But it was also here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that a distinguished senior scientist found himself at the centre of a climate conspiracy storm.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
This related to what was subsequently called Climategate in which a whole bunch of emails were stolen.

NARRATION
Among the Many hacked emails in the 2009 Climategate scandal was one from Dr Kevin Trenberth to a colleague. Sceptics seized on one particular sentence as written proof that climate scientists were involved in a large-scale cover-up.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
It was picked up as me saying that there was no global warming, somehow or the other, and completely misinterpreted and it just propagated all over the place - it was amazing to see.

NARRATION
Yet, the world didn't seem to be warming... at least not much. While the period from 1975 to 1998 had seen a rapid rise of global average air surface temperatures, in the years since, the rate of rise has slowed dramatically, leading a vocal minority to question predictions of catastrophe.

Professor Judith Curry
So we're getting this growing divergence between the observations and the climate model simulations.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
You have at least to consider the possibility that the models are not reliable for one reason or another.

Anja Taylor
On one point the sceptics were right - none of the models used in future climate projections predicted the hiatus. And while the slowdown for the first few years was written off as natural variability, lately it's become something to explain.

NARRATION
From the data he's been analysing, Dr Trenberth sees a planet heating up just as fast as ever.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We can look at the energy budget of the Earth by looking at information from satellites that are flying above the atmosphere, which can actually track the incoming solar radiation from the sun, how much is reflected and how much the Earth is radiating back to space. It's not absolutely accurate, but it does track the year-to-year variations very well.

NARRATION
His calculations show our budget is continually in surplus - more energy coming in than leaving the atmosphere.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
Given that there's an energy imbalance, where does that energy go? How much has gone into the oceans? How much has gone into melting Arctic sea ice? Warming the atmosphere, warming up the land, changing evaporation and therefore changing clouds which can also change the brightness of the planet. And when we first did this, there was some quite substantial discrepancies that in some years we can't account for where the energy has gone.

NARRATION
And that was the cause of the frustration expressed in Kevin's email. Monitoring systems simply aren't sophisticated enough to track all of the heat exchanges on the planet.

Anja Taylor
The main focus in global warming has been air temperatures, because it's the easiest to measure and it's the temperature we feel. But it's a tiny fraction of the planet's total heat content and it's also highly variable.

NARRATION
As greenhouse gas emissions have risen over the last century, the long-term trend in air temperatures is obvious. But zoom in on the chart and you'll see fluctuations. These swings are put down to natural variability. The current hiatus is no different. But this time, climate scientists have been under pressure to pin down the exact cause. There have been several.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
So the sun went into a relatively quiet phase. In addition, there have been a number of small volcanoes that put debris into the stratosphere that blocked the sun. And what about the air pollution? China has been developing enormously - what has that done?

NARRATION
In total, aerosols and solar activity are thought to account for about 20% of the pause, but the biggest contender for where the rest of the heat is going is the one that's hardest to measure. The oceans absorb a whopping 93% of the world's excess heat.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
I've been working with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and they have developed an ocean-monitoring system that synthesises all of the information - sea-level measurements, the measurements from the floats, sensors that are measuring sea-surface temperature and so on - and that we've found is that after about 1999, a lot more heat is going deeper into the ocean. And this is unprecedented. Is this just a consequence of the change in the observing system or is it real? And I think we have good reason to believe that at some of this is real.

NARRATION
Multiple lines of evidence converge here in the Pacific, the largest and deepest ocean in the world.

Professor Matthew England
If you rotate the globe around, that's all you see for part of this hemisphere is just a big fat piece of ocean. The Pacific Ocean is a huge influence on climate.

NARRATION
Professor Matthew England has been key to nailing down how the Pacific has been dragging down world average temperatures.

Professor Matthew England
We had to look for something about the climate system post-2000 that was dramatically different to the climate system in the '80s and '90s, and one of the most dramatic things you see in the system is this flip in the Pacific Ocean. If ever you travel to the tropics in the Pacific Ocean, there's a prevailing wind from the east towards the west, and these easterly winds push a lot of the surface water across the West Pacific Ocean. If they remain for long enough, this water starts to get subducted into the ocean interior. During the '80s and '90s the winds were quite weak, not a lot of heat was getting subducted into the Pacific Ocean during that time and a lot of heat was remaining in the atmosphere.

NARRATION
Then came the massive El Nino event 17 years ago.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
In 1997-1998 there was a tremendous amount of heat that came out of the ocean, and we can measure it, and so the ocean actually cooled quite substantially. And so, we think that this may have then kicked the whole behaviour of the Pacific Ocean into a different mode.

NARRATION
The ocean once more began to build up heat. The change in the way the ocean either releases or draws in heat is part of a regular long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Each phase lasts around 15 to 30 years. When Dr Gerry Meehl from Boulder studied climate models with hiatuses, he discovered they linked closely with the negative phase of this pattern.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And sure enough the extra heat was going into the deeper ocean. So that was kind of the first tie we had, a tangible link to where the heat was going during these hiatus periods. And this connected then to stronger trade winds.

NARRATION
It was Matthew England who found these winds were unprecedented in strength this century.

Professor Matthew England
The winds are that much stronger than we'd ever seen before in the observations.

NARRATION
The winds are, in fact, being turbo-charged by abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic, as air races from high pressure to low, the winds push the warm surface waters west.

Professor Matthew England
So, over the last 20 or so years, the sea level over the West Pacific has risen quite dramatically above the global average sea-level rise, whilst in the East Pacific it's declined.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
And in this case, it's been piled up to such an extent that there's been a 20cm-rise in sea level compared with the Eastern Pacific. And that, to me, seems like a very large number.

Professor Matthew England
It's sort of reaches a breaking point perhaps where that heat then sloshes back to the East Pacific.

Dr Gerald Meehl
And that then adds to the warming from the increasing greenhouse gasses and you get real sudden increases of temperatures globally. Last time that happened was in the mid-1970s. Global temperatures warmed almost a half a degree Centigrade, which is almost half of the warming we got in the whole 20th century.

NARRATION
What that means is we're currently in the phase before the next global temperature jump.

Professor Matthew England
There will be warming out of this hiatus at some point in time - whether it's this or in five years' time, there's gonna be warming - and unfortunately, what we're seeing in the models is that the warming out of the hiatus is gonna be rapid, regardless of when that hiatus ends.

NARRATION
But a small minority of scientists disagree.

Professor Judith Curry
That's where I break with my colleagues. I just think there's a lot more uncertainty. We're now in the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and I think that is the major thing that's causing the pause. And my understanding of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is that we could stay in the cool phase for another two decades. So where does that leave us in terms of thinking that this sensitivity that we've deduced, largely based on this warming in the last quarter of the 20th century, during that period we were in the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge
And this is a thought which is, for about 30 years people have tried to ignore because it takes away from the thought that most of the rise in temperature is due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Professor Matthew England
Look, I agree that the warming in the '80s and '90s certainly would've had a component of Pacific natural variability to it. But it was beyond just that. So, if you think about the natural system without greenhouse gasses, it would see cooling of the atmosphere globally then warming in the positive phase, and we'd be flatlining over 100 years. We don't see that - we're seeing hiatus decades.

Professor Judith Curry
And there is one other possibility - that there is no missing heat. Changes in ocean circulation have changed the pattern of the clouds, which is reflecting more solar radiation and so the Earth isn't heating as much. So, unfortunately, the observations aren't quite good enough to distinguish between those two ideas.

Professor Matthew England
There's no evidence that clouds can account for this hiatus. Many things have occurred over the last 15 years that should've given us one of the coolest decades over the last 100 years. It's actually the warmest on record.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
We've seen that in Australia, we've seen that in the United States, all kinds of thousands of temperature records were broken.

Dr Gerald Meehl
A lot of the continental regions have continued to warm up. and we've seen an increase in, for example, heat extremes over a lot of continental areas, all the while that the global average temperatures haven't been doing much.

Professor Matthew England
Arctic Sea ice has declined dramatically, way beyond the projections. Sea level is rising faster than we projected even just five or ten years ago.

NARRATION
All things considered, there's been global warming pause.

Dr Kevin Trenberth
The whole of the climate system is really warming - it's just that the warming can be manifested in different ways.

Professor Matthew England
For some people, it's very easy for them to get this, but there are other people who are just absolutely obsessed with derailing the basic physics of climate change, and for them this poses a great little story that global warming's paused. I wish they were right but unfortunately they're wrong.

Judith Curry Advocates Against Action on Climate Change

by Michael Mann, Huffington Post, October 17, 2014

Georgia Tech's Judith Curry has authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that "there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now" than in the past. This could not be further from the truth.

She ties her argument to a new study she has co-authored, as well as the global warming speed bump (or faux pause). Neither offers a compelling reason to avoid reducing emissions. Her study looks at recent temperatures and uses them to try and determine how much the atmosphere will warm from our CO2 emissions.

The result is a figure low enough for contrarians to trumpet, but still not really that far from the official figures provided by the UN's IPCC, the gold standard of climate science. This is why the new study (and the others very similar to it) have elicited only a collective yawn from serious academia.

So the piece repeats the same tired claims about lowered sensitivity, using the "pause" meme and her own study as justification for delaying action. According to her (and of course the contrarians) a limited set of studies using a single incomplete methodology are reason enough to put off getting serious about climate change. One of us (Dr. Mann) addressed this misguided claim about climate sensitivity to CO2 earlier this year in a detailed piece in Scientific American.

To summarize the article, it turns out that even if one assumes these recent studies are correct, this buys us only a decade of extra time before crossing the internationally agreed-upon limit of 2 °C of warming. This means that even if Curry's correct, it may just be the difference between bad and terrible consequences of our inability to get emissions under control.

This understanding is shared by all the mainstream climate scientists who have examined the breadth of the scientific literature. For example, Oxford University professor and IPCC author Dr. Myles Allen told Carbon Brief that a reduction in climate sensitivity as presented by Curry and others "is hardly a game-changer" because it "would mean the changes we expect between now and 2050 might take until the early 2060s instead."

In a response from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Peter Frumhoff describes it even more eloquently, saying that Curry's call for delay "is like refusing to treat a patient because you can't tell if their fever is 103 or 104 degrees."

Esoteric and academic arguments about the response of the atmosphere to a doubling of CO2 may be interesting for those steeped in the peer-reviewed literature, but for the public and policy makers the important and unfortunate fact is that climate change is continuing unabated. This was the hottest September on record, after the hottest August on record (yielding the hottest summer on record), and the oceans continue to warm rapidly. In fact, some parts of the ocean have been shown to be warming even more rapidly than we thought.

In the end, Curry's claims fly in the face of what we know. Quite literally, according to the largest scientific organization in the world and publisher of the journal Science. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released this year a report titled "What We Know" that shows that taking action now reduces both the cost and the risks associated with our warmed world.

Regardless of whether Curry is right about the climate being slightly less sensitive to CO2 (something that hundreds of thousands of years of paleoclimate records suggest is false) the fact remains that the sooner we reduce emissions, the less damage we will endure. And interestingly, Curry admits that the only substantial worry is from a high emissions scenario. But if we listen to her argument for inaction, that high emissions scenario is exactly what we'll get.

Ultimately, we all wish that Curry is right, and climate change won't be as costly as the mountain of evidence suggests. Unfortunately, the science so far shows that if anything, we've been underestimating the scale of the impacts. The Wall Street Journal does its audience a disservice by portraying a ten-year reprieve (at best) as though it was a full pardon.

Signed,

Professor John Abraham, University of St. Thomas
Dr. Peter Gleick, MacArthur Fellow, hydro climatologist
Professor Scott Mandia, Suffolk County Community College
Professor Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University
Professor Richard C.J. Somerville, University of California, San Diego

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/judith-curry-climate-change_b_6000636.html

Wave goodbye to Judith Curry's stadium wave - global warming still caused by humans

A new study refutes the hypothesis of a pattern in climate changes much like a stadium wave

Global warming can't be explained by teleconnections behaving like a stadium wave. Photograph: Christof Koepsel/Bongarts/Getty Images

by John Abraham, "Climate Consensus - The 97%," The Guardian, April 24, 2014

Many people have spent a lot of time trying to show that much of our recentclimate change is just natural. So far, these studies have died as fast as they've been born.

A recent attempt was made to liken our climate to fans in a stadium, you know those annoying "waves" that fans make? Could our climate just be like that? Not likely; let me explain.

The so-called "stadium wave", as described by the scientists who coined the phrase, is "a hypothesized multi-decadally varying climate signal that propagates across the Northern Hemisphere." It is basically a signal that travels throughout the Earth's climate, in the ocean and atmosphere, and can be sensed by measurements. From author Dr. Marcia Wyatt's own website, you can find a more detailed description.

So, could our recent changes in climate be somehow associated with these "waves"? The great thing about science is these hypotheses can be checked. In fact, a very recent study did just that and found the stadium wave hypothesis lacking.

In the study, authors Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller estimate the low-frequency internal variability of the Northern Hemisphere (the stadium waves) by evaluating observed signals. These observations include the impacts of both forced (mainly human-caused) variations and natural variability (energy naturally "sloshing around" the Earth). They generated a set of alternative histories based on the statistics of past observations to show that the recent Northern Hemisphere variations are within the range of expected uncertainty.

The authors then show that past analyses which have been used to estimate internal variability have failed to find appropriate variability when it was known ahead of time. These methods errantly show natural variability which is too high and which has a biased phase. As a result, the claims of stadium waves are made based on an incorrect methodology; they are likely an "artifact of this flawed procedure."

To get into the weeds a bit, the primary natural fluctuation that was focused on is called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO for short). The recent studies promoting large natural climate variability deduced the AMO by detrending the time series of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and then interpreting the left-over low-frequency variation as the AMO. This means they removed a linear variation. Prior works (here and here for instance) have shown that this method causes artifacts to appear. For instance, if you aren't careful, you might conclude that atmospheric aerosol cooling was actually a natural climate fluctuation. That is, you might confuse human-caused cooling effects with natural fluctuations.

Northern Hemisphere variability comparing differenced, detrended, and forced temperature anomalies.

The researchers Mann, Steinman and Miller, further showed that the detrended AMO method yields a climatic variability that is approximately twice as large as prior estimates and outside the 95% error range. They also found that the detrending method got the timing wrong (biasing error in the phase). They compared the true AMO signal and the detrended AMO signal. The detrended signals have amplitudes which are too large by a factor of 2 and they are all in phase. As the authors write, this suggests, "an artifact of the common forced signal masquerading as coherent low-frequency noise."

As I've written about before, studies which purport to show that significant recent climate variability is just natural are taken seriously by the scientific community. In fact, I think we would all like to conclude that the current climate change is just natural. During the course of scientific investigation, these claims are given their fair hearing. Unfortunately, they have not borne scientific scrutiny well. Distinguished Professor of Meteorology Michael E. Mann told me,

"Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO. The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.

We conclude that the AMO played at least a modest role in the apparent slowing of warming during the past decade. As the AMO is an oscillation, this cooling effect is likely fleeting, and when it reverses, the rate of warming will increase.

Initial investigations into the multidecadal climate oscillation in the North Atlantic were hampered by the short length of the instrumental climate record which was only about a century long. And some of the calculations were contaminated by long-term climate trends driven or "forced" by human factors such as greenhouse gasses as well as pollutants known as 'sulphate aerosols.' These trends masqueraded as an apparent oscillation."

My own view is that a bit too much is made of these "waves." Humans like to find patterns and give names to patterns that are either real or imaginary. Certainly there are teleconnections between various parts of the climate and certainly those connections might manifest in slow (low frequency) climate variations. But we have a very short history of measurement. In order to be certain, we need measurements of multiple recurrences of the oscillations. We just don't have a long enough period of data.

We also need a clear articulation of the physical processes which cause fluctuations. We do not have that either. Until then, we are just whistling in the breeze (or "yodeling in the broccoli," as we say in Minnesota).

With that said, this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue our search for such important fluctuations. When scientists propose natural variability as a climate-change mechanism, it makes the science better. Either they are right (and we are all better off) or they are wrong (as happened here). Regardless, at the end of the day, our understanding is deeper than before.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/apr/24/global-warming-human-caused-not-stadium-wave