CCNet 16/01/13
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New
Met Office Botch
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Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere
Wrong
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How
did the Met Office get their data so wrong? Well there’s the rub. You see, the
methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in
the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing
“remain unknown.” Evidently the boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down
exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported.
Indeed, those who did the data manipulation seem to have mostly retired. This is
an egregious example of sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. How other
climate scientists blindly accepted the Met Office’s manufactured data, even
when their models could not be reconciled with nature, leads one to question the
scientific integrity of many of those in the field. This is not acceptable
behavior in any realm of scientific endeavor. -- Doug Hoffman, The
Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013
The steady, relentless
collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high
climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. And
if the climate campaign wasn’t already in denial about being abandoned by The
One, their media allies, and new carbon riches baron Al Gorezeera, a new
report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really harsh
their mellow. Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues that
environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their agenda. --
Steven Hayward, Power
Line, 14 January 2013
In an area where I have expertise on,
extremes and their impacts, the report by the US Global Change Research Program
is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very
literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably
won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became
captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific
literature — a phenomena that occurs repeated in the area of extreme events.
Given the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to
some effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. How is it that it got things
so wrong? --Roger
Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013
But
what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle
that
humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand
ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? --Zacharay
Karabell, “Climate
Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad", Reuters, 14 January 2013
The
gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken,
Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. Wedded to grandiose and
unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the panic button at every
opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an unworkable and unsustainable
policy agenda. It won’t work. The Al Gore path (alarmism, hypocrisy, dumb policy
solutions, green pig lipsticking or corporate subsidies disguised as green
breakthroughs) will not bend the curve. --Walter Russell Mead, Via
Meadia, 12 January 2013
1) New Met Office Botch:
Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong - The
Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013
2) How Did US Climate
Scientists Get Floods 100% Wrong? - Roger
Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013
3) The Relentless Collapse of
Climate Hysteria - Power
Line, 14 January 2013
4) Walter Russell Mead: Green Misread
The Climate Tea Leaves - Via
Meadia, 12 January 2013
1) New Met Office Botch: Climate
Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong
The
Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013
Doug Hoffman
Time and again
the proponents of catastrophic climate change use the mantra of “settled
science” to shout down their critics. This is nothing less than blind faith that
science actually knows what is going on in the complex environment that
regulates this planet’s climate. Imagine a part of that system that is literally
only 10km from anywhere on Earth, a component of our environment that science
thought it understood quite well. Now imagine the embarrassment when a major
review in a noted journal finds that previous datasets associated with this
component are wrong and have been wrong for more than a quarter of a century.
Yet that is precisely what has happened. The area in question is Earth’s
stratosphere and the impact of this report is devastating for climate scientists
and atmospheric modelers everywhere.
Scientists have been launching
instrument packages into the upper portions of Earth’s atmosphere for a long
time. Instruments used for such research were standardized decades ago and
programs to collect such data on a world wide basis put into place. If any part
of atmospheric science was considered well in hand, if not actually “settled” (a
phrase seldom used by real scientists) it would be the long term monitoring of
global stratospheric temperatures. However, a report in the 29 November 2012
issue of Nature, “The
mystery of recent stratospheric temperature trends,” says that things are
not so.
The perspective article by David Thompson, et al.,
reports that what we thought we knew well we hardly knew at all. A new data set
of middle- and upper-stratospheric temperatures indicates that our view of
stratospheric climate change during the period 1979–2005 is strikingly wrong.
Furthermore, “[t]he new data call into question our understanding of observed
stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the
stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting
substances.”
What is particularly troublesome about this report is the
scope of the damage done. The problem involves two different sets of historical
data from two respected agencies: the UK Met Office and America’s National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). How significant the error and the
puzzlement over what to do about it is shown in the article’s title, where it is
referred to as a mystery. The background of the problem is stated by the authors
this way:
The surface temperature record extends for over a century and
is derived from multiple data sources. In contrast, the stratospheric
temperature record spans only a few decades and is derived from a handful of
data sources. Radiosonde (weather balloon) measurements are available in the
lower stratosphere but do not extend to the middle and upper stratosphere. Lidar
(light detection and ranging) measurements extend to the middle and upper
stratosphere but have very limited spatial and temporal sampling. By far the
most abundant observations of long-term stratospheric temperatures are derived
from satellite measurements of long-wave radiation emitted by Earth’s
atmosphere.
The longest-running records of remotely sensed stratospheric
temperatures are provided by the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU), the Advanced
Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), and the Stratospheric Sounding Unit (SSU). The
SSU and MSU instruments were flown onboard a consecutive series of seven NOAA
polar-orbiting satellites that partially overlap in time from late 1978 to 2006;
the AMSU instruments have been flown onboard NOAA satellites from mid-1998 to
the present day.
The widely accepted, continuous record of temperatures
in the middle and upper stratosphere going back to 1979 was based exclusively on
SSU data. The SSU data were originally processed for climate analysis by
scientists at the UK Met Office in the 1980s and further revised as newer
satellite data became available in 2008. Here is were things begin to get a bit
dodgy.
There are rules that scientists must follow in order for their
work to be judged valid. The work must be done openly, transparently—there can
be no secret steps or hidden incantations. This is because the work must be
reproducible, not just by those who originated it but by outsiders as well.
Things began going off the rails when NOAA recently reprocessed the SSU
temperatures and published the full processing methodology and the resulting
data in the peer-reviewed literature. This is as it should be, NOAA followed the
rules. But it soon became obvious that there were grave discrepancies between
the new NOAA data and the older Met Office data.
Time
series of monthly mean, global-mean stratospheric temperature
anomalies.
The
global-mean cooling in the middle stratosphere, around 25–45 km in altitude, is
nearly twice as large in the NOAA data set as it is in the Met Office data set
(see the figure) The differences between the NOAA and Met Office global-mean
time series do not occur in a single discrete period of time, but begin around
1985 to increase until the end of the record. According to
the Nature article: “The differences between the NOAA and Met Office
global-mean time series shown in Fig. 1 are so large they call into question
our fundamental understanding of observed temperature trends in
the middle and upper stratosphere.”
How did the Met Office get their data
so wrong? Well there’s the rub. You see, the methodology used to develop the Met
Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and
certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.” Evidently the
boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down exactly how they were massaging
the raw data to get the results they reported. Indeed, those who did the data
manipulation seem to have mostly retired.
“The methodology used to
generate the original Met Office SSU data remains undocumented and so the
climate community are unable to explain the large discrepancies between the
original Met Office and NOAA SSU products highlighted here,” Thompson et
al. summarize. And the damage doesn’t stop there.
The data from the
erroneous dataset has been used widely to help drive and define computer climate
models, the same models used to prop-up alarmist claims of impending
catastrophic climate change. According to the report: “Two classes of climate
models commonly used in simulations of past climate are coupled
chemistry–climate models (CCMs) and coupled atmosphere–ocean global climate
models (AOGCMs). By definition, the CCMs explicitly simulate stratospheric
chemical processes, whereas the AOGCMs explicitly simulate coupled
atmosphere–ocean interactions… A key distinction between the model classes that
is pertinent to this discussion is that in general the CCMs resolve the
stratosphere more fully than do the AOGCMs.”
One of the predictions made
by climate models is that as surface temperatures rise temperatures in the
stratosphere should drop. Precisely why this should be so is complex and not
important to the point being made here. Suffice it to say, the Met Office
version of the SSU data suggests that the models overestimate the observed
stratospheric cooling, whereas the NOAA SSU data suggest that the models
underestimate it. As the authors put it:
If the new NOAA SSU data are
correct, they suggest that the stratospheric mass circulation is accelerating at
a rate considerably higher than that predicted by the CCMs, at least in the
middle and upper stratosphere (that is, at the altitudes sampled by the SSU
instrument). Again, it is possible that the models are correct and that the SSU
data are in error. But the fact that the discrepancies between the magnitudes of
the simulated and observed cooling in the tropical stratosphere extend to MSU
channel 4, which samples the lower stratosphere and exhibits trends that are
fairly reproducible from one data set to the next suggest that model
uncertainties should not be discounted.
The bottom line
here is that models based on this almost universally accepted data are wrong.
“If the NOAA SSU data are correct, then both the CCMVal2 and CMIP5 models are
presumably missing key changes in stratospheric composition,” the report plainly
states. The article goes on to suggest corrective actions to prevent such a
travesty being repeated in the future. Alas, the damage has already been
done.
What is documented here is simply astounding. That which was
thought to be understood is found to be misunderstood. Readings thought to be
accurate are shown to be inaccurate. How the data were derived is found to be a
secret now lost. The impact of the bogus data ripples through past results and,
in particular, climate models, rendering old assumptions invalid. What was that
line again about “settled science?”
This is an egregious example of
sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. How other climate scientists
blindly accepted the Met Office’s manufactured data, even when their models
could not be reconciled with nature, leads one to question the scientific
integrity of many of those in the field. This is not acceptable behavior in any
realm of scientific endeavor, and when the results of research are used to
inflame the public and drive questionable socioeconomic programs the malfeasance
could be considered criminal. This is what happens when the race for fame,
government funding and political advantage collide with science—the validity of
the science is destroyed.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay
skeptical.
2) How Did US Climate Scientists Get Floods 100%
Wrong?
Roger
Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013
The US Global Change Research Program has
released a draft national assessment on climate change (here
in PDF) and its impacts in the United States, as required by The US Global
Change Research Act of 1990 (which incidentally was the subject of my 1994 PhD
dissertation). There has been much excitement
and froth in the media.
Here
I explain that in an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts,
the report is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the
very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but
probably won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently
became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific
literature — a phenomena that occurs repeated in the area of extreme events.
Yes, it is a draft and could be corrected, but a four-year effort by the
nation’s top scientists should be expected to produce a public draft report of
much higher quality than this.
Since these are strong allegations, let me
illustrate my concerns with a specific example from the draft report, and here I
will focus on the example of floods, but the problems in the report are more
systemic than just this one case.
What the USGCRP report
says:
Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected by
phenomena associated with climate change, including sea level rise, storm surge,
heavy downpours, and extreme heat… Floods along the nation’s rivers, inside
cities, and on lakes following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid
melting of snowpack are damaging infrastructure in towns and cities, farmlands,
and a variety of other places across the nation.
The report clearly
associates damage from floods with climate change driven by human activities.
This is how the draft was read and amplified
by The New York Times:
[T]he document minces no
words.
“Climate change is already affecting the American
people,” declares the opening paragraph of the report, issued under the
auspices of the Global
Change Research Program, which coordinates federally sponsored climate
research. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or
intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and
droughts.”
To underscore its conclusion, the draft report includes
the figure at the top of this post (from Hirsch and Ryberg 2011), which shows
flood trends in different regions of the US. In a remarkable contrast to the
draft USGCRP report, here is what Hirsch
and Ryberg (2011) actually says:
The coterminous US is divided
into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the
patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what
would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are
independent of GM [global mean] CO2. In none of the four regions defined in this
study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with
increasing GMCO2.
Got that? In no US region is there strong
statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This
is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which
relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion.
Want
more? Here is what IPCC SREX, the recent assessment of extreme events, says (here
in PDF):
There is limited to medium evidence available to assess
climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at
regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge
stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of
changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this
evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the
sign of these changes.
The SREX is consistent with the scientific
literature — neither detection (of trends) nor attribution (of trends to human
forcing of the climate system) has been achieved at the global — much less
regional or subregional — levels. Yet, USGCRP concludes otherwise.
The
leaked IPCC AR5 SOD reaffirms the SREX report and says (here
in PDF), in addition to documenting a signal of earlier snowmelt in
streamflows, no such signal of increasing floods has been
found:
There continues to be a lack of evidence regarding the sign of
trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global
scale
The IPCC has accurately characterized the underlying
literature:
Observations to date provide no conclusive and
general proof as to how climate change affects flood behaviour
Given
the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to some
effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. In areas where I have expertise,
the flood example presented here is not unique in the report (e.g., Hurricane
Sandy is mentioned 31 times).
Do note that just because the report is
erroroneous in areas where I have expertise does not mean that it is incorrect
in other conclusions. However, given the problematic and well-documented
treatment of extremes in earlier IPCC and US government reports, I'd think that
the science community would have its act together by now and stop playing such
games.
So while many advocates in science and the media shout "Alarm"
and celebrate its depiction of extremes, another question we should be asking
is, how is it that it got things so wrong? Either the IPCC and the scientific
literature is in error, or the draft USGCRP assessment is -- But don't take my
word for it, check it out for yourself.
3) The Relentless
Collapse of Climate Hysteria
Power
Line, 14 January 2013
Steven Hayward
The steady,
relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the
sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s
re-election. Obama promises that a price on carbon is a main objective of his
second term, but given that it is an Obama promise, climate campaigners
should understand they’ve just been given the kiss of death.
The
media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game. The New York
Times has decided to break
up its entire environmental unit and reassign reporters to other beats. A
lot of climateers are striking their best Kevin Bacon “All-is-well” poses
(from Animal House), but this looks to me just like what happened
around the time of 9/11, when urban affairs reporters who couldn’t stop churning
our five-part features on how suburban sprawl was ruining St. Louis (or plug in
your own local metropolis) were reassigned to other beats. I went from getting
two or three calls a month from reporters working on sprawl to none almost
overnight. Andy Revkin, one of the better Times reporters, is trying
to be upbeat but is concerned.
James Delingpole can’t resist a
beatdown, in “Now
Even Pravda Admits the Global Warming Jig Is Up”:
Rumours that
the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be
recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al
Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil
interests are as yet unconfirmed. What we do know is that it’s very, very sad
and that all over the Arctic baby polar bears are weeping bitter tears of
regret.
A spokesman for the New York Times, quoted in
the Guardian, has reaffirmed the paper’s commitment to environmental
issues.
“We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever.
We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a
structural matter.”
Absolutely. It’s what newspapers always do
when they’re committed to a particular field: close down the entire department
responsible for covering it.
Not to be left behind, Reuters has
decided that it may as well switch sides completely, with a feature today that
“Climate
Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad.” Reuters’ Zacharay Karabell
writes:
But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but
instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and
creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately
improves life as we know it?
Keep writing like that and Reuters will
be attacked for joining the “S” (skeptic) team. Expect more of these kind of
“contrarian” news articles to appear as the media covers up the fact that it is
saying, “Never mind.”
And if the climate campaign wasn’t already in
denial about being abandoned by The One, their media allies, and new carbon
riches baron Al Gorezeera, a
new report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really
harsh their mellow. Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues
that environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their
agenda. (Hmmm, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by
just reading Power Line.) Here’s some of Skocpol’s
assessment:
Meanwhile, political consultants and public relations
wordsmiths urged environmentalists to redouble euphemistic locutions already
deployed during the cap and trade battle – to talk about “green jobs,” “threats
to public health,” and the need to “reduce dependence on foreign oil to bolster
national defense,” anything but the threat of global warming and catastrophic
climate upheavals. Such advice tailed off during the record heat-waves of the
summer of 2012; and after Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast shortly
before the November elections, the New York media openly connected global
warming to the unusual late autumn mega- storm. Some environmentalists declared
that politicians are now bound to take up the issue.This almost certainly
overstates the likelihood of sustained official attention.
It’s that
last sentence that really hurts. Just how many Green Weenie Awards can these
guys win? I’m sure this won’t be the last.
4) Walter
Russell Mead: Green Misread The Climate Tea Leaves
Via
Meadia, 12 January 2013
The gravest danger to Earth these
days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green
policy imagination.
In recent days we’ve been hearing a lot of
hysterical chatter, from the NYT,
the National
Geographic, and other mediaoutlets—about
how 2012 was the hottest year ever for the continental United States. Obviously,
this is evidence that global warming will soon destroy
us all:
Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly
played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them
expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the
backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And
they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing
warming makes heat extremes more likely.
Meanwhile, in China,
the FT reports the country is having its
coldest winter in thirty years, leading to a sharp rise in food prices.
India too has had a terribly cold winter. And in the Middle East, a snowstorm
has been sweeping across the region and even hit
Saudi Arabia, in an usually cold and wet winter for the area.
As
we’ve said
before, whenever it’s especially warm out, alarmists take that as decisive
evidence of our impending doom. When it’s cold or normal, they dismiss it as
mere “weather,” if they mention it at all. For much of the green movement,
weather only counts as climate when it proves their arguments. A heat wave in
Australia is proof that immense disasters are about to strike; cold waves in
Eastern Europe and India that kill hundreds of people mean nothing at
all.
Via Meadia accepts the growing consensus that human actions
are playing
a role in climate change, but the habit of reading every warm spike and
every storm as fresh confirmation of the coming apocalypse needs to stop. It’s
bad science and it’s bad politics. Green hysteria is more likely to paralyze us
then help us take the kind of steps we need to take towards
sustainability.
The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate
skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination.
Wedded to grandiose and unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the
panic button at every opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an
unworkable and unsustainable policy agenda.
It won’t work. The Al Gore
path (alarmism, hypocrisy, dumb policy solutions, green pig lipsticking or
corporate subsidies disguised as green breakthroughs) will not bend the curve.
Until the green movement internalizes this lesson and moves on, it will waste
its energy on foolishness like the failed Kyoto Protocol and ethanol subsidies
and greens will have little constructive impact on a planet they claim to
love.
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