The IPCC climate science crisis looms…
The timing of the fifth assessment report falls into this critical juncture where a lot of momentum has built up in favour of the current modelling practices which now prove so elusive. While the IPCC tries to make last minute rhetorical adjustments in order to accommodate anomalies, some of its participants, looking beyond, already indicate that this institution may have run its course.
Story at Die Klimazwiebel
Pat Michaels bets on 25 years of ‘no warming’ in HadCRUT
Dr. Michaels is betting on no statistically significant warming (at the 95% confidence level) in the HadCRUTx data for the 25 year period starting in 1997. Scott is betting on at least that much warming.
Scott doesn’t want to bet more than $250 (he says he likes to spread his betting $$ around), so the potential value of the embarrassment to the loser is probably worth much more than $250 will buy in early 2022.
More at Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog
Solar activity drops to 100-year low, puzzling scientists
LONDON: Predictions that 2013 would see an upsurge in solar activity and geomagnetic storms disrupting power grids and communications systems have proved to be a false alarm. Instead, the current peak in the solar cycle is the weakest for a century.
Subdued solar activity has prompted controversial comparisons with the Maunder Minimum, which occurred between 1645 and 1715, when a prolonged absence of sunspots and other indicators of solar activity coincided with the coldest period in the last millennium.
The comparisons have sparked a furious exchange of views between observers who believe the planet could be on the brink of another period of cooling, and scientists who insist there is no evidence that temperatures are about to fall.
[Note- maybe not so puzzling after all, I may have a guest essay coming that explains most of this – Anthony]
An article published today in Nature offers a “mix of [natural] explanations” for the halt of global warming, including
solar activity [after previously claiming such small changes in solar activity could not affect climate], stratospheric water vapour, “which warms the surface, has been relatively low since 2000″ [climate models instead predicted an increase]
and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, based on a paper from which Dr. Judith Curry concluded, ”no matter what, I am coming up with natural internal variability associated accounting for significantly MORE than half of the observed warming,” which is contrary to the central premise of the IPCC.
“A mix of explanations has been offered for the recent hiatus: the minimum in solar energy output in the latest 11-year sunspot cycle lasted longer than usual [after previously claiming such changes could not affect climate]; stratospheric water vapour, which warms the surface, has been relatively low since 2000 [models predicted an increase]; and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle of warm El Niño and cold La Niña phases in the equatorial Pacific, which is known to affect global mean temperature and not just the temperature of the equatorial Pacific, has favoured the La Niña phase since the major El Niño event of 1997–98. Empirical models that fit the observed hiatus have generally relied on La Niña-related cooling to offset a large fraction of the greenhouse- induced warming. Consistently, analyses of the heat being taken up by the oceans have pointed to an increase in this heat uptake, predominantly in the Pacific, as underlying the hiatus.”
Nature editorial: “The IPCC’s mega-assessments are out of date by the time they hit the streets”
Instead, climate scientists should focus on smaller and more rapid assessments of more pressing questions that have a particular political interest and for which science is evolving quickly. These reports could look more like the panel’s recent special report on extreme weather [which concluded that there is no measurable impact of AGW upon extreme weather]; longer and more detailed assessments could be performed as needed, when there is sufficient interest from the governments that the IPCC serves.
Such a structure might also help to avoid an unfortunate consequence of the current framework, which ensures that the IPCC’s mega-assessments are out of date by the time they hit the streets.
Models get better with time?
Absent from next week’s report, for instance, is recent and ongoing research on the rate of warming and what is — or is not — behind the plateau in average global temperatures that the world has experienced during the past 15 years. These questions have important policy implications, and the IPCC is the right body to answer them. But it need not wait six years to do so.
A misleading infographic which falsely claims the climate models are getting better with time.
‘The data shows clearly that the observations are running cooler than the out-of-sample predictions of the IPCC from each of its past 4 reports’
1. The observations of global average surface warming are about half that predicted in the first IPCC report from 1990. Over the past 25 years, projections of rates of future surface temperature increase have clearly come down dramatically.
2. Subsequent IPCC reports reduced their projections, but global average temperature observations are still running lower than that projected in 1995, 2001 and 2007.
Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/09/global-temperature-trends-and-ipcc.html?spref=tw
From Ernest Moniz’s written testimony for today’s House hearing on Obama’s climate change plan: ‘The third part of the President’s Plan is leading international efforts to address climate change. Although we are still one of the largest emitters on a per person basis, U.S. emissions represent only about a fifth of the global total. As such, a global effort will be required if we are to avoid increasing climate damages in the future.’
More stupidity from The Rolling Stone. Trend That is Not A Trend: Rolling Stone Wildfire Article
Well what do you know? The number of fires and the acres burned in 2013 are not some sort of record high — in fact they actually are the, respectively, lowest and second lowest numbers of the last 10 years. In fact, both the number of fires and the total acres burned are running a third below average.
More at Coyote Blog
In case you have not seen it yet…