[jules' pics] 11/06/2009 06:18:00 PM

Kamakura beach, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Our week of Let's Internationally Climate Science (=we had visitors) ended yesterday evening. Last session, oceanography.

--
Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/06/2009 06:18:00 PM

Roy Spencer debunks LIndzen and Choi

Roy Spencer has weighed in here (thanks tb) with some analysis of the Lindzen and Choi study that I briefly covered before. It seems that RS has investigated the difference between CMIP (coupled atmosphere-ocean) and AMIP (atmosphere with prescribed sea surface temperature) runs and found that they give completely different answers. In other words, the analysis of AMIP output that LC performed is not relevant to diagnosing the properties of the fully coupled climate system. Which is what I suspected but had not checked. RS also has various other criticisms about how the data were processed, and his alternative analysis shows a much closer agreement between models and data. Although his wording tries to be gentle (because he wants to believe LC's overall conclusion that the models are too sensitive) it is quite clear that he thinks the LC paper is wrong.

The sad thing about this is to see Lindzen getting his claws into some young post-doc and teaching them how to do (and get published) shoddy analyses without doing obvious checks. I hope this person learns how to not fool himself so easily in future.

[jules' pics] 11/04/2009 08:31:00 PM

Old Faithful Inn, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

What's the integral of one over cabin dcabin?

[Old Faithful, Yellowstone]

--
Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/04/2009 08:31:00 PM

[jules' pics] 11/03/2009 07:49:00 PM

Opal Pool, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

[Midway Basin, Yellowstone]

--
Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/03/2009 07:49:00 PM

Shorter Romm v Kloor

Miaow.

(but am I supposed to care?)

I don't read Romm when I can avoid it. I have come across Keith Kloor's name a few times but not enough to really know what he thinks and how good he is (sorry). I see mentioned that he hadn't even read Superfreakonomics before getting embroiled in the argument, which seems a touch foolhardy to me. However he promised a week ago (28/10) that he would read it "in the next week" so assuming he's as good as his word we can all look forward to his informed commentary shortly...

[jules' pics] 11/01/2009 08:30:00 PM

One of the futago ike (twin ponds), originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

ommmm..

--
Posted By jules to jules' pics at 11/01/2009 08:30:00 PM

No, global warming hasn't stopped (part 94)

Fashionably late to the party as always, but (in contrast to Stoat's snark) I thought this was a pretty well-done piece by Seth Borenstein:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

No prizes for guessing which "provocative book" he is talking about, and of course the "global warming has stopped" meme has been kicking about the delusionosphere pretty well for ever (eg see here). What he did was quite neat - sending off the time series of temperature data to a bunch of statisticians without telling them what it was, and asking them for their analysis. I would have preferred to disguise the data in some way (any linear transformation) but that's a bit of a nit to pick. Of course the statisticians gave the same answer that all competent climate scientists have already given, cos this stuff is hardly rocket science and there is no evidence for a marked drop in trend (mind you, the models suggest the trend should be accelerating, not just continuing). Cutting-edge science it is not, but it is an interesting and well-constructed news feature.

Best comment prize goes to Deep Climate, in the thread to Stoat's post

RP jr didn't write about it, so it must be right.

Sad but true.

Gavin Schmidt can be spotted highlighting the chances of a new temperature record next year. Obviously he's been reading McLean et al's ground-breaking paper where they show for the first time that ENSO affects global temperatures :-)

I've been keeping an eye on the ENSO forecasts recently myself, not because I care about ENSO itself - I don't think it has much of an effect here (cue Japanese scientists telling me how important it is) - but rather due to its likely effects on global temperature. The Hadcru temperature anomaly has been about +0.5C for the last few months, and the old 1998 record was +0.526C. The weekly pdf updates presented on this page give an accessible summary of recent ENSO status and predictions. According to it, the ENSO is "expected to strengthen and last though Northern hemisphere winter". It is almost certainly late now for this year to break any records, but given the lag of about 6 months in ENSO's effect, every extra month of positive ENSO index from here on means additional warmth next year.

[jules' pics] 10/30/2009 09:03:00 PM

bicycle cleaning day, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Beautiful day, 18C and sunny.

--
Posted By jules to jules' pics at 10/30/2009 09:03:00 PM

"The Cove" now on TV/internet

I mentioned this film about Japanese dolphin-hunting before, but now it's made it to the small screen. You can get it on the web here.

A Stern talking-to

That name really is a bit of a gift to unimaginative headline-writers.

As jules mentioned, we attended another set of Asahi Blue Planet award talks recently, which you can find out about here. This time both of the award-winners were economists, albeit of a rather different flavour. The first, Uzawa-sensei, gave a rather rambling (but interesting) account of the birth and growth of the concept of Social Common Capital, his idea of how to account for the natural environment and social infrastructure that supports society but was basically ignored in standard economic theory. His talk started with the Papal encyclical of 1891 (!) and got about as far as the Papal Encyclical of 1991 before he sort of ran out of steam (and time) and sat down to rapturous applause. There hasn't been a Japanese winner for some time, and the lecture hall was packed, though this may be due to the fact that climate change is high on the agenda these days. I couldn't help but think that mt would have enjoyed the talk (and blogged more usefully about it), it seemed to be right up his street. There are more details about his work on the web page I linked to above, but it seems that the lectures have not yet been published (they will be eventually, judging from previous years).

Lord Stern was rather more down-to-earth, focussing on facts (ish) and figures relating to the economics of climate change, which will be fairly familiar to people who have read (about) his Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. It seemed to me that he was rather too quick to rattle off lists of numbers, probably losing the (general and non-scientific) audience in the process. However, he did provide some pretty clear statements (eg calling for an 80% reduction in emissions from developed countries by 2050, and also pointing out that we'd better start acting rather sooner than that) that probably challenged the (usually docile) audience's complacency and resulted in an unusually lively question and answer session. I'm not talking about riots here, anyone who has been to Japan will realise that the standard experience is a stony silence and at best a couple of anodyne "can't we all get along" suggestions.

I've already complained about the excessively pessimistic approach to climate change that Stern took, and again he included numbers like a probability of 69% that a CO2 level of 550ppm would result in a warming of more than 3C relative to pre-industrial. He also quite clearly talked at one point about the future world being poorer than at present after 2050, despite the fact that all of his analysis is explicitly predicated on compound growth of about 5% per annum for the foreseeable future (specifically, 2.5% in developed, 7% in developing countries). That leaves the world about 4x richer in only 40 years, and none of the climate science credibly suggests mass destruction of the global economy over that sort of time scale and likely ~1C warming. There was also a fair amount of (IMO) magic wand-waving, ie the expectation that all we have to do is impose some tax or cap on carbon (he didn't promote one over the other) and the new technology would come along and save the day. Well, it might do...but it might not! There was also lots of praise for Japan's bold and courageous promises on carbon emissions. I use the terms bold and courageous in the Yes Minister sense, but I think Stern was being encouraging :-) Of course the Japanese are now rowing back as hard as they can (or at least laying the groundwork for a hasty retreat), which should be no surprise to anyone...

In the questions, Lomborg came up, which Stern quite clearly and deliberately dismissed as based on "undergraduate errors" (he used the phrase twice) - specifically, the false dichotomy of Lomborg's either/or approach to addressing the world's problems. On this, I agree with Stern of course. People who suggested that it was unfair for developed countries to take the lead were also given short shrift, though Stern pointed the finger pretty firmly at the USA as the worst offender, and didn't put so much emphasis on the large cuts that Japan (and the rest) would need. However he did not shirk the India/China issue, and dealt with it quite fairly, I think.