The scourging of the denialist

It is a remarkable phenomenon, that if you say you doubt that human beings have much of an influence on the climate, you are treated as a kind of pariah. In the US, for instance, a very nice, intelligent woman called Judith Curry has recently walked out of her academic post. She has merely expressed doubts, and has done so clearly and honestly for a number of years.  I have watched several hours of videos of her addressing professional societies and government bodies, and have been struck by her ability to communicate her doubts succinctly and openly. Yet she has been vilified by many of her colleagues, struggled to find funding for her research, and had her students unfairly criticized in turn.

There was the infamous case of two American physicists, Soon and Baliunas, who wrote a review paper, summarizing the literature on global temperatures around 1400CE. Review papers are generally uncontroversial; they merely pull together a range of findings by other people. Soon and Baliunas dug up some 200 peer-reviewed studies of medieval temperatures, the great majority of which found that it had been significantly warmer than it is today. Wine in Scotland, tropical fruits in Rome, worldwide such evidence of the Medieval Warm Period.

However, a group who depended on the human warming hypothesis had produced a graph which failed to show any such period. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had seized on their graph to show unprecedented warming in the 20th century. The graph even acquired a name - the Hockey Stick.  The inconvenient review had to be killed! And killed it was.  By the time the dust had settled, even the journal which had allowed the review to appear had disappeared.

Just to make matters worse, the Hockey Stick showing no Medieval Warming Period was found to be faked.  The underlying mathematics had been wrongly applied, and there had been reliance on the width of tree rings to estimate the historical temperatures - but the tree rings went the wrong way when measured against modern temperatures.  So the modern tree-ring data was deleted, and replaced with the temperature record.  As scientific chicanery went, it has few equals.

A few years ago, the SA National Energy Association [SANEA], local representative of the World Energy Council, did me the honour of awarding me their Energy Award. Shortly after that they had a presentation at one of the monthly meetings in Cape Town from a True Believer from Johannesburg. What he had to say was highly questionable, but in the few minutes after the meeting there was no time to ask the really searching questions. So I asked the SANEA Secretary if he could find me a slot to respond to the highly charged material the True Believer had presented. At all the meetings, there were requests for future topics and speakers, so I felt the request was perfectly reasonable.
  
Three years down the road, I am still waiting. 

There's none so deaf as will not hear.

Consensus? What consensus?

The American Physical Society has just held an extraordinary meeting. It has a Subcommittee looking at climate change. The Subcommittee found it necessary to understand the IPCC consensus on climate science through a workshop which dived deeply into some of the more uncertain aspects. In doing so, it hoped "to illuminate for itself, for the APS membership, and for the broader public both the certainties and the boundaries of current climate science understanding."

People taking part in the workshop included the great climate modeller, Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; the climatologist Judith Curry from Georgia Tech; the atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen of MIT; and climate scientist John Christy from the University of Alabama. Each of the specialists would be given a chance to address a set of issues drawn up by the APS panel; the panel would ask questions; there would be a general discussion; and they would move on to the next specialist.

I read the 500-odd pages of transcript.  I think there must be something masochistic in the desire to capture every word, even the announcement that cake was served.  But in amongst the reams of dross, there lay gems.  For instance, Santer produced a lovely graphic showing the problems with his own models:

 

The top half is what the models say should have happened in the upper atmosphere over the past 34 years; the bottom half is what has actually happened.  The "fingerprint"of the human-derived carbon dioxide is annoyingly absent - well, annoying to the modellers.  The tropical hotspot between about 500 and 700hPa pressure just isn't there.  Yet the physics underlying the carbon-dioxide-driven global warming hypothesis is clear - it should be! Sceptic and believer agree on that. Why is it missing?  And why, for that matter, has the Arctic air warmed ?

Christy confirmed the problem:

The dots give the data; the squares the average of the data; and the spaghetti lines show the attempts of 25 different models to show what might be happening.  Clearly, they fail - the pattern of the fingerprint is wrong. Christy spent some time castigating the IPCC for ignoring this gap between data and models.  The IPCC claimed that the data in the upper troposphere, as shown here, was somehow deficient yet, as you can see, the spread of four independent sets of measurements is quite small and the model average is a long way from the measurement average.

Christy also had some fascinating things to say about the "average global temperature". The estimation of this starts with measuring the temperature at a whole lot of points around the globe.  At each point, the daily maxima and minima are recorded, and the average temperature at that point for that day is the average of the maximum and minimum.  

The trouble comes when you consider what happens in nature, when very often inversions occur and cool air is trapped near the surface.  Then you put a few buildings around the place, and the turbulence they cause destroys the inversion layer and the night air is warmer than it would otherwise be - regardless of any heat coming from the building.  

The net result is that when you look at data from areas that have become increasingly urbanised, there is little change over time in the day-time maxima, but the nights steadily warm, and this then gets recorded as "global warming." Again, the IPCC claims to have looked at the "urban heat island" effect, and to have taken it into account, but Christy showed that a significant correction was needed - because of the basic atmospheric physics.

The APS Panel was concerned as to how is was possible that the IPCC could claim greater certainty in the latest Assessment Report AR5 than in the previous AR4.  In particular, the human impact had gone from 90 to 95% 'certain'. Lindzen was sniffy:

Do you still believe there is consensus?