Bishop Hill Lewandowsky and Oreskes: normal service resumed
May 15, 2015 Climate: Surface For those who have been following the unfolding saga of the latest Lew paper, the said work of art has now been published at Global Environmental Change. There is little that will cause anyone any great surprise - it's all out of the standard Lewandowsky playbook: strawman following nonsense following outright falsehood. Take the case he outlines for why there is no pause:
Claims about a “pause” typically invoke a period commencing in 1998; the top panel of the figure shows that that year saw particularly high temperatures owing to an extreme El Niño event. When this single outlying year is omitted (as illustrated in the bottom panel), the purported pause in warming is no longer apparent. Statistically, what one observes is a decrease in the rate of warming—a slowdown, if you will—but this slowdown is at most modest: during the last 15 years (1999–2013) the linear trend is .13 °C/decade, compared to the trend for the overall period (1970–2013) which is .18 °C/decade. It is only when 1998 is arbitrarily used as the starting point to define the “pause” that the recent rate of global warming has been appreciably lower (.10 °C/decade) than the long-term trend.
...
Thus, arguments about a “hiatus” or “pause” can only be sustained by ignoring the fact that the most recent trend is statistically nearly identical to that of other decades unless a single particular year is used as a starting point—in other words, only by cherry-picking.
I love the way the reviewers of the paper have turned a blind eye to Lew's failure to actually cite any examples of people picking 1998 as their start point, instead letting him set about this straw man with all of the rhetorical tools at his disposal, quickly beating him a pulp.
Then there are the outright falsehoods, for example this one:
Likewise, the positive fluctuation from the long-term trend leading up to 2007 was not used to re-assess (transient) climate sensitivity, in contrast to endeavours that have used the current departure from the long-term trend for that purpose (e.g., Lewis, 2013, Lewis and Curry, 2014, Otto et al., 2013 and Stott et al., 2013).
That statement is so completely divorced from the truth that it's hard to know where to begin. The whole point of the Lewis studies, and Otto et al as well, was to consider the changing climate from preindustrial up to the present day. Here is an extract from Lewis and Curry 2014, the main results of which put TCR in the range 1.22-1.33. I've bolded two alternative sets of results presented by the authors, based on periods that exclude the pause:
Although final periods with end dates considerably before 2011 provide less well constrained
ECS and TCR estimates, it is worthwhile investigating to what extent the low increase in GMST in the 21st century affects ECS and TCR best estimates. Accordingly, we estimated ECS and TCR using final periods from 1987 and 1971 to each of 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. As volcanic forcing is much higher than when 2011 is used as the end date, 1850–1900 is used as the best-matching base period. With a 1987 start date, the resulting ECS best estimates vary between 1.58 K and 1.70 K; those for TCR vary between 1.35 K and 1.37 K. With a 1971 start date, ECS best estimates vary between 1.45 K and 1.53 K; those for TCR vary between 1.20 K and 1.22 K. With a volcanic efficacy of 0.55 assumed, the ECS and TCR best estimates are all slightly lower.Extending the final year to 2012, and estimating changes from 2011 in radiative forcings and in
energy accumulation where necessary, has a negligible effect on ECS and TCR estimates.
So the Lewis and Curry results are almost entirely impervious to short-term fluctuations in surface temperatures. Yet here we have Lewandowsky and Oreskes and their motley band of co-authors telling their readers the exact opposite.
What kind of a journal lets this sort of thing get published?
Bishop Hill
Lew has a blog post up about the paper, which is more of the same really.
Reader Comments (64)
The consensus only acknowledged this later. Who can forget the email of Kevin Trenberth on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 to Micheal
Thank you Kevin Marshall.
"List the excuses" - [loud snigger] and all the excuses trotted out and under the sun without noticing the bleeding obvious!
And I could go on a long diatribe here but sufficed to say, I will note; despite all the bloviating from the likes of Met office civil servants, we know bu88er all about the dynamics of our atmosphere and interaction with external forces [ie solar, lunar, cosmic rays, dark matter et bloody cetera]. It must be also noted, that, at any point in time there are scores [hundreds if we include sub marine tectonic activity] of volcanic eruptions occurring all over the surface of the planet - inputs/outputs unquantifiable, however it should be recorded that, ±95% out gasing of CO² is from natural sources and it rises as Temperatures increase and not the other way about.
What we can say, if we refer to palaeo climate analysis, pretty much our NH climate warms and cools in relation to the great cyclic oceanic influences and in close relationship to by far the most important influence of the earth's climate - our Sun. There is no noise of man's atmospheric influence by way of CO² emissivity and to claim otherwise is just preposterous doom mongering from politicized climate shills who do not know of what they speak.
Always, when all excuses have been exhausted - stating and admitting the bleeding obvious can be the only answer.
Always check out the editorial board: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/global-environmental-change/editorial-board/
Declan Conway
Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Assistant Editor
N. Jennings
Correspondence and queries should be sent to: Neil Jennings, Managing Editor, Global Environmental Change, Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: gec@lse.ac.uk
R. Betts
Met Office, Exeter, Devon, England, UK
S Fankhauser
London School of Economics, London, UK (and Grantham Institute and UK Climate Change Committee)
B. Fisher
World Wildlife Fund, Washington, Washington, USA
M. Hulme
University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK
S Kovats (Google, Donna covered her IPCC involvement)
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, England, UK
C le Quere
University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK (and Director of the Tyndall Centre)
D. Liverman
University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA, but is from Oxford ECI, (Myles Allen et al) She is also on several other editorial boards of the main journals and she is now a fellow of the Center for American Progress, John Podesta's outfit, part funded by George Soros. Podesta managed Obama's transition in 2008 and is currently running Clinton's campaign to become the next Pres. Liverman was also on the panel of the US National Academies of Science "Advancing the Science of Climate Change". They get their own onto all these bodies and the word then comes out as yet more "independent" scientific opinion, giving us a "scientific consensus."
Athelstan, I cannot forget Travesty Trenberth's memo, and thank you for repeating it.
When it comes to infamous miscarriages of justice, it is often the case that there is a widespread belief that someone is guilty, and inconvenient evidence gets lost or amended to secure the 'guilty' person. Many innocent people then give evidence believing they are helping to condemn a guilty person, without realising how flawed everything else is.
Trenberth blames the data for being wrong, not the original theory. It is known as denial, but not in a way accepted by global warmists.
That memo was what helped me realise how deeply flawed, the science was. That shooting messengers for bringing bad news remains an essential skill in climate science, is all too evident today.
In fact the large double La Nina of 1999/2000 effectively cancel out the 1998 El Nino.
Even the Met Office accept this:
The start of the current pause is difficult to determine precisely. Although 1998 is often quoted as the start of the current pause, this was an exceptionally warm year because of the largest El Niño in the instrumental record. This was followed by a strong La Niña event and a fall in global surface temperature of around 0.2oC (Figure 1), equivalent in magnitude to the average decadal warming trend in recent decades. It is only really since 2000 that the rise in global surface temperatures has paused.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/the-global-temperature-standstill-simply-explained/
So whether you start from 1998 or 2001, the pause is very real.
Frankly Lewandowsky and Oreskes are like Pharisees obsessed with making certain the dogma and law, every jot and tittle, is properly venerated by the members of their tribe. Of course they are determining (making it up as they go) what is the proper veneration.
Ponder this:
By defining the terms of how climate scientists must think about the climate science, we see a historian and psychologist telling the hard scientists how they must do their work. Like two priests telling doctors how they must practice medicine based on their religious dogma.
Hunter,
Lewandowsky and Oreskes are not a bit like the Pharisees, in fact they are in some ways the opposite. They have dogmatic beliefs that they put up barriers to prevent the real world impeding - barriers that are full of invective, but without any substance. For instance, they emphasize the scientific consensus on a couple of banal propositions instead of proclaiming the empirically demonstrated understanding that scientists have achieved.
The New Testament account of the Pharisees was that they were so hung up on rigorously observing the complex religious laws - and showing off that they were observing those laws - that they forgot about belief.
New paper by Oreskes and Lewandowsky "Lenin will rise again"
Following recent advances (cash mainly) in paleopsychology and paranormalhistory, they will show that whilst it is thought that Lenin died in 1924, and has been embalmed and entombed ever since, with no sign of a beat from his heart, this faux death, is simply a pause, and normal, and revigorated damage to humanity will start very soon.
Shub,
I do not know or need to know your qualifications and experience, but your comments on this thread are so close to my thoughts that you have saved me the repetition of similar sentiments. Thank you.
Might I add that this wing of climate 'science' contains little conventional hard science or its need for quality and replication by independent others. As an analogy, try to imagine an astronomer trying to discover and describe a new heavenly object, say a planet that resembles ours. One cannot increase discovery odds by making excuses for past inconvenient data or by cherry picking 'better' data to help the cause. It is there, or it is not.
Climate research seems to have this model that prominent events like a hiatus are malleable. They are not, any more than one can wish upon a new star.
The reluctance of some establishment scientists to face reality has been with us for decades. For example, here are extracts from an email exchange from 2009 or so, when a very senior BoM scientist found it inconvenient to admit to a temperature hiatus of several decades near or on Antarctica.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/thumb_nail_dipped_in_carbon.doc
All of the comments above are true, but as an Australian taxpayer what stick in my craw is that "Steve", now plying his trade in the UK, is still using a web site paid for by my tax dollars to do so.
'One of the most important and mysterious events in recent climate history is the climate shift in the mid-1970s [Graham, 1994]. In the northern hemisphere 500-hPa atmospheric flow the shift manifested itself as a collapse of a persistent wave-3 anomaly pattern and the emergence of a strong wave-2 pattern. The shift was accompanied by sea-surface temperature (SST) cooling in the central Pacific and warming off the coast of western North America [Miller et al., 1994]. The shift brought sweeping long-range changes in the climate of northern hemisphere. Incidentally, after “the dust settled,” a new long era of frequent El Niños superimposed on a sharp global temperature increase begun. While several possible triggers for the shift have been suggested and investigated [Graham, 1994; Miller et al., 1994; Graham et al., 1994], the actual physical mechanism that led to this shift is not known. Understanding the dynamics of such phenomena is essential for our ability to make useful prediction of climate change. A major obstacle to this understanding is the extreme complexity of the climate system, which makes it difficult to disentangle causal connections leading to the observed climate behavior. Here we present a novel approach, which reveals an important new mechanism in climate dynamics and explains several aspects of the observed climate variability in the late 20th century.' http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1029/2007GL030288/full
Climate shifts around 1910, the early 1940s, the late 1970s and 1998/2001. Shifts at 20 to 30 yer intervals but - as Michael Ghil says - 'the global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’
Mode 3 - dynamical complexity is the mechanism for 'unforced variability'. It has taken them so long to get to mode 2 - and many in the insular chambers of such as realclimate, andthenthere'sphysics and hotwhopper still haven't quite made it - that progress to mode 3 seems quite unlikely anytime soon. 'Seepage' of reality into the climate wars may still be some way off.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ghil-sensitivity.png
Complexity theory suggests that the system is pushed by greenhouse gas changes and warming – as well as solar intensity and Earth orbital eccentricities – past a threshold at which stage the components start to interact chaotically in multiple and changing negative and positive feedbacks – as tremendous energies cascade through powerful subsystems. Some of these changes have a regularity within broad limits and the planet responds with a broad regularity in changes of ice, cloud, Atlantic thermohaline circulation and ocean and atmospheric circulation.
In the way of true science – it suggests at least decadal predictability. The current cool Pacific Ocean state seems more likely than not to persist for 20 to 30 years from 2002. The flip side is that – beyond the next few decades – the evolution of the global mean surface temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum (Swanson and Tsonis, 2009).
Thanks Geoff. My experience and training does not match yours, or many others' on this forum. I try to say things that are not stupid.
I’m with you, there, Shub. The only difference is that you do manage to not look stupid.
Apropos nothing in particular, it is interesting to note that my comment is still in place. It would be rather hopeful (or perhaps naïve) to suggest that this is because the Big L[i]ew is man enough to accept such criticism, and let it be viewed by others; I suspect that he merely writes his blog, and doesn’t bother going back to read any replies.
What do other Climate Scientist's think of Lewandowsky and Oreskes Output ?
So far that is the only comment she has made on the Richard Betts / Lewandowsky debateI first checked the most mainstream of the skeptical climate scientist's Judith Curry
..I would class her opinion in the typical skeptics response of "yes Lew and Oreskes maybe thought of as proper scientists, but previously they have shown they are so far out of the real world and off in Climate Activist Lalaland that any new points that they bring are not worth wasting time thinking about UNLESS a really credible third party has thoroughly reviewed them and vouches for them aswell"
stewgreen, Oreskes and Lewandowsky are complaining that scientists are listening to science, not propaganda.
A first year psychology student could probably diagnose them both. If not, Lewandowsky could be the first person diagnosed with Lewandowsky syndrome, and achieve the recognition he craves.