As the observed rate of rise in the global average temperature continues to be much less than climate models project, there are a growing number of knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of the damsel in distress (the damsel, of course, being the climate models). The rescue attempt generally employs two strategies, namely that 1) there is a bunch of stuff that has going on that the models couldn’t possibly have known about (so it is unfair to hold this against them), and 2) the climate models aren’t really doing that badly anyway.

The list of things proffered that the models couldn’t have known about that have led to slower-than-expected warming over the past 10-15 years includes declines in solar radiation, declines in stratospheric water vapor, increases in stratospheric aerosols, increases in tropospheric aerosols, the timing of El Nino/La Nina cycles, the timing of multi-decadal ocean circulation oscillations, and probably ultimately, the kitchen sink followed by the commode. What’s interesting is that the white knights never really mention these very same influences when they are acting in the opposite sense - that is, when they are acting to speed up the warming (which many were during the 1990s). But now that warming has considerably slowed, these mechanisms seem to have taken on cosmic significance.

What also seems to be conveniently overlooked in the list are changes that the models couldn’t have known about that are currently acting to enhance the observed warming in recent years - these include the recovery from the effects of Pinatubo and the reduction in summer Arctic sea ice (both of these mechanisms are explained in detail in our World Climate Report posts here and here).

But even while raising these excuses, the models’ champions are claiming success nonetheless. Nowhere better is this epitomized than in a forthcoming paper by Ben Santer and a long list of colleagues. Santer et al. have used a familiar procedure (familiar to us at least since we have oft-presented similar work, see here and here for example) to try to demonstrate that the observed trends over different timescales fall comfortably within the range of model expectations. Setting aside some methodological differences of opinion that we have with the analysis, there are still some interesting results to be found.

For instance, Figure 1 taken from the new Santer et al. paper, shows the average of the observed trend set against the distribution of model trends (by the way, this is not really an apples-to-apples comparison; more on this at a later date) for periods of time from 10 to 32 years. The model average projected trend for the lower atmosphere is about 0.25C/decade over all time scales (from 1979 through 2010) (green line in Figure 1). The 5%-95% spread of model projections is in yellow. The various averages of the observed trends over the different time scale (from several different observational datasets) are in red and blue and range from about 0.14 to 0.21C/decade. It is obvious that for the longest trends - which is what people should really care about - that observed temperatures are perilously close to falling beneath the 95% confidence limits of the models (right side of the illustration).

Figure 1. A comparison between modeled and observed trends in the average temperature of the lower atmosphere, for periods ranging from 10 to 32 years (during the period 1979 through 2010). The yellow is the 5-95 percentile range of individual model projections, the green is the model average, the red and blue are the average of the observations, as compiled by RSS and UAH respectively (adapted from Santer et al., 2011).

Santer et al. take comfort in this Figure that the average of the observed trends falls within the spread of individual model projected trends of similar length - and are further comforted when considering the myriad influences listed above.

We, however, interpret it to show that over all time-scales from 10 to 32 years, the observed trends in the lower atmosphere consistently fall beneath the model projected trends. And that as the length of the observed trend increases, the consistency with the climate model projections decreases.

Just how much more evidence do you need that climate models are projecting too much warming? Give us all the excuses that you want, but if the excuses are real, then they are important drivers of the climate and need to be considered when offering up future climate projections (and quite possibly have an important impact in climate sensitivity determinations).

The fact of the matter is, that the climate projections offered up thus far, have been, and continue to be, sizeable overestimates of reality.

Consequently, we see no compelling reason why we should bank on scenarios for the future that have been produced from the same set of climate models.

At some point, chivalry becomes chicanery.

Reference:

Santer, B.D., et al., 2011. Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale. Journal of Geophysical Research, in press.

Dr. Michael Mann seeks the help of other Climategate players to prevent access to his University of Virginia emails.

Dr. Michael Mann, who under a lesser title at University of Virginia created the famed “hockey stick” chart of 20th-century temperature escalations while leveling the Medieval Warm Period, has enlisted a Climategate Cavalcade of Stars to help him enter as an interested party in a lawsuit in which my organization, American Tradition Institute, seeks to get his old UVA emails and data.

Early this month Mann, who is now at Pennsylvania State University, had his lawyers ask for permission to intervene in ATI’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against UVA. Our request seeks correspondence between Mann and 30-plus other global warming activist scientists who form much of the cabal that created the various predictive reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The university, buttressed by the urgings of groups including ACLU, People for the American Way, Union of Concerned Scientists, and American Association of University Professors, is withholding the meaningful documents ATI seeks. Mann himself said the few thousand documents UVA turned over so far were, more or less, meaningless “boilerplate.” ATI lawyers David Schnare and Chris Horner (also an AmSpec contributor), under a court-order, will be allowed to identify some of the remaining emails the university believes should be kept from public view so as to reduce the number the judge will have to examine, and then ATI and UVA will argue which ones should be disclosed in a court hearing this fall. Dr. Schnare and Mr. Horner are under clear orders that whatever they see they must forever keep confidential unless the court later orders those emails released.

In his attempt to intervene, Mann has called upon friends in academe to bolster his claim that, despite using a taxpayer-funded email system at UVA, that he has the right to prevent the public from seeing what he says are “private” emails. The concept that government-owned, or “public,” does not mean “private” is inconceivable to him (see Exhibit 2, here).

His appeal to the Prince William County court where ATI’s case is being heard included supportive letters (Exhibit 6, here) to UVA president Teresa Sullivan from four of his cohorts in Climategate or hockey stick creation fame. Each pleader registers objection to UVA providing “personal” or “private” emails to ATI under its existing court-authorized agreement. And amusingly enough, each of his four backers has his or her own credibility problems.

The first complainant is Rosanne D’Arrigo, a tree-ring reconstructor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who told Sullivan in her letter that “these are personal emails not relevant to valid scientific concerns.” Plucky, D’Arrigo is famous for explaining to the National Academy of Sciences that “cherry picking” is necessary if you want to make cherry pie. And as for what she thought of that “divergence problem” with tree-ring proxies: Pshaw! (see pages 11 & 12).

Next standing behind Mann is Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who when last we checked was still on the outside looking in at the National Academy of Sciences “Fight Club,” despite his Climategate-revealed plans to “beat the crap out of” somewhat skeptical fellow climatologist Pat Michaels. Those sentiments ran afoul of LLNL’s “missions and values” which required their publicly funded employees to show “respect for individuals” and “treat each other with dignity.” He also had erased statements that stated global warming was not attributable to human activities from the eighth chapter of the 1995 UN IPCC report, which also set off the integrity alarms.

Santer also fails to give up the idea that his government-funded email communications belong to taxpayers, not himself. His letter to UVA’s Sullivan (of course) does not note his IPCC deletions as he explains the integrity of his and Mann’s “science,” but it does characterize their emails as “personal.” “Professor Mann’s only ‘transgression’ is that he has performed cutting-edge research in the public and national interest (emphasis mine),” Santer wrote to Sullivan. Yep, that’s “personal” all right!

The third prestigious scientist (just ask him) supporting Mann is Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His Climategate fame is derived from his concern about a “travesty” that “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment,” in addition to his other failed predictions such as future hurricane horrors while administering discipline as one of the scientific journal brown shirts. In writing to Sullivan, Trenberth makes sure she knows how “distinguished” and “prominent” he is while he urges her to hide Mann’s emails from public scrutiny, citing “academic freedom.” We ask, can there be “taxpayer freedom” to opt out of the financing of secretive scientists’ research?

The final alarmist to push for Sullivan to keep Mann’s work under wraps is University of Massachusetts scientist Raymond Bradley, who co-authored the “hockey stick”, which should suffice in explanation of his support for Mann. But just for amusement it’s also noteworthy that Bradley’s letter to Sullivan refers her to his new book “Global Warming and Political Intimidation,” in which he cites Ben Santer as a victim!

But that’s not all. Bradley, so outraged by intrusion on to principles of academic secrecy when exercised by ATI, was unhindered by such sentiments in his own inquiry (with USA Today reporter Dan Vergano) of Professor Edward Wegman at George Mason University, another Virginia state educational institution. Bradley had accused Wegman of plagiarizing his work (more meaningless “boilerplate,” according to Climate Audit, irrelevant to Wegman’s findings) in his 2006 report that exposed statistical problems with Mann’s work. While George Mason investigated his allegation, Bradley violated a confidentiality requirement about forwarding Wegman’s work to third parties. And as Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre has shown, Bradley is selective in who he gets mad at for plagiarism (friends are okay), and of course, self-examination of his own reproduction of others’ work is non-existent.

In his attempt to intervene in the ATI/UVA case, Mann also makes his own plea to Sullivan and the university lawyers. “Allowing the indiscriminate release of these materials will cause damage to reputations and harm principles of academic freedom,” he wrote.

Fortunately neither side—ATI nor UVA—believes in an “indiscriminate” release. But in that one statement Mann provides reason enough for the records about his work and the company he keeps to be made public.

Science: Al Gore’s Current TV will use 24 straight hours of airtime this week to try to convert global warming skeptics. Will he mention a recent report that shows the climate change scare is grossly overblown?

And we also doubt that anyone else connected with the sympathetic media will. The CERN report, which we covered on this page two weeks ago, has been largely ignored by the mainstream press.

Had the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) report bolstered the conjecture that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, the story would have gone above the fold in newspapers and led the network TV news. The tone of the stories would have been dire.

Instead, a report that casts more doubt on the accuracy of the models that the activists and the media use to incite global warming hysteria gets as much attention as a postman’s dog bite.

The CERN report is not a trivial matter. It indicates that the sun’s magnetic field has some impact on creating cloud cover, which has its own effect on temperatures. Cloud cover is a phenomena the computer models that have been predicting global warming have not adequately accounted for.

While the CERN study doesn’t disprove the speculation that fuels the climate change religion, it does show that science still has a long way to go on climate science. It clearly demonstrates that claims saying the science is settled and the debate is over are both exaggerated and premature.

For that sin, the report is relegated to media obscurity.

Meanwhile, Gore will, according to Reuters, “renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multimedia event.”

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast This don’t-miss hectoring will appear on Current TV - a cable network co-founded by Gore - beginning Wednesday. The Big Brother marathon ends Thursday at 7 p.m. ET with a live broadcast of Gore offering, we imagine, his usual litany of exaggerations.

Read much more here.

Instead of listening to another hour of mistruths as was established in his last production, see some alternatives below. Encourage their use in schools as an alternative to the Gorathon.

See the Heartlands collection of links to stories and videos that show how bankrupt Gore and the alarmists science is here.
Bob Carter 5 part series here.

Also Global warming Swindle 8 part series. Part 1 of 8. Others on the page.

Lord Monckton and Vaclac Klaus in Australia are linked to here followed by Marusek’s list of early extremes.

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“The Changing Climate of Global Warming” - FREE all day Wednesday

Reminder: “The Changing Climate of Global Warming” is screening FREE over the Internet on September 14th

Click on this link anytime on September 14th to watch the Documentary. See the Documentary Trailer. The documentary website. The Facebook Page for the documentary.

Also more dynamic Lord Monckton in Minnesota.

Coleman’s corner - easy to understand video for the non scientist.

Minnesotans for Global Warming classic song

Hansen Says Clouds Are A “Substantial Forcing”

Dessler should have read Hansen’s paper before rushing to press. So should JGR’s editor. He should do the honorable thing and resign like Wagner.

Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha

Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be -1.6 plus/minus 0.3 W/m^2, implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes.

http://www.columbia.edu/

Every time I read one of these papers, it strikes me as a bunch of clueless children playing half-assed mathematics games, and trying to make it sound like they know what they are talking about. Their time would be better spent playing WOW or Battlefield 3.

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And C3 makes a case for Trenberth to resign and retire here. And they defend the Spencer work and challenge the data Dessler used:

Spencer Cloud Research Uses IPCC Gold-Standard HadCRUT Data, But New Dessler Study Avoids Gold-Standard Benchmark

Read here. New research published today by Andy Dessler, an IPCC Climategate scientist, appears to have major shortcomings. His new study was greased, like goose leavings, through the peer reviewed process in just a few weeks, which may have contributed to the work’s shoddiness.

Supposedly, Dessler’s new research was to be a refutation of the Spencer and Braswell 2011 study that revealed clouds were likely to be a negative climate feedback. Instead of doing an apple-to-apple comparison though, Dessler chose a different temperature dataset (a non-consensus dataset avoided by the IPCC) than the Spencer research.

Unfortunately, the choice of non-HadCRUT, non-IPCC dataset, reflects the unbridled cherry-picking temptation that the Dessler research fell victim to. If the HadCRUT dataset is the IPCC benchmark that Spencer research followed, then Dessler should have met the scientific challenge by using the same best-of-breed data that the IPCC demands.

It now seems obvious that Dessler knew his research would falter if based on the gold-standard of the IPCC. If this wasn’t the case, why not use the gold-standard?

Even with his cherry-picking of the dataset, Dessler research does not hold up to the statistical scrutiny that Steve McIntyre brings to the table. It didn’t take long for Steve to ascertain that the positive cloud feedback that Dessler claims might not be so “positive.”

“Doing the same regression with 4-month lagged relationships (which both Dessler and SB agree to be more significant than the instantaneous relationship), the sign of the slope is reversed. Whereas Dessler 2010 had reported a slope of 0.54 +- 0.72 w/m2/K, the regression with lagged variables is -0.90 +- 0.95 w/m2/K and has better diagnostics...Given that the even the lagged relationship is weak, I’m reluctant to say that analysis using the methods of Dessler 2010 established a negative feedback, but it does seem to me that they cannot be said to have established the claimed positive feedback...Perhaps the editor of Science will send a written apology to Kevin Trenberth.”

Objectively, if the Dessler rushed peer reviewed research is the best that mainstream climate scientists can deliver against the Spencer and Braswell study, then it’s a case closed. Clouds do appear to be a negative feedback mechanism within the climate system as the Spencer 2011 work suggests.

It’s hard to believe the Blue Jersey people are this dumb. Alas, they are!

How many people in New Jersey will die of lung disease because of Chris Christie’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative consortium?

Does this deep thinker honestly believe that carbon dioxide harms the lungs? Somebody’s got to inform him (or her; I can’t tell from the name) that he’s expelling CO-2 with every breath (40,000 ppm versus 390 ppm in the air) - and therefore poisoning himself.

The great mass of true believers in the carbon cult seem to be under the impression that greenhouse gases are pollutants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Carbon dioxide is essential to life.

All I can say in this guy’s defense is that the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is just as clueless on scientific matters. In this piece on Rick Perry’s assertions on global warming, Cohen makes the same mistake, conflating actual pollutants which harm lungs with a substance that is emitted by lungs.

“He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that “a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data” to make it appear that mankind — our cars, trains, automobiles, not to mention China’s belching steel mills - is the culprit."”

I don’t know if China’s steel mills do indeed “belch,” but if they do what they belch would be conventional pollutants. They would also emit some CO-2, but that CO-2 is no different in its effect on the atmosphere than the CO-2 emitted by dolphins, polar bears, or any of the other creatures the tree-huggers wish to hug.

In accusing Perry of ignorance on the issue, Cohen goes on to show he make the same mistake as that Blue Jersey blogger:

Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like an innocuous tick, a conviction without consequence...

“Polluting our precious atmosphere” with greenhouse gases? Not quite.

Let’s consider the emissions of his despised “cars, trains, automobiles.” (By the way, Dickie boy, that’s redundant: Cars are automobiles.) They do indeed emit some true pollutants that contribute to bad air quality. But those pollutants are not connected to global warming in the minds of even the most fevered Al Gore fans.

Again, it’s the CO-2 that is alleged to cause all that environmental damage. And humans emit CO-2 whether they walk, jog, ride bikes or travel in cars. Are bicycles polluting? Evidently so, if you follow Cohen’s logic.

There are indeed some interesting issues in the debate over anthropogenic global warming. but that debate is going on far over the heads of people like the Blue Jersey crowd and Cohen.

If you’re interested in the actual debate, check this study about the effect of CO-2 on the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.  The entire premise of the alarmist crowd is that the relatively tiny effect of CO-2 on temperatures will be magnified through what is known as “forcing” of water vapor into the atmosphere.

The problem with this theory is that could formation is an extremely complex topic that cannot be easily studied. Until you examine this issue, you should not form an opinion on global warming.

And then there’s this:

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

And that in turn means the entire anthropogenic theory of global warming is in doubt.

Do personal and financial ties corrupt views on global warming? The warmists thinks so, but only when skeptical scientists are involved.

Skeptic climate scientist Dr. S Fred Singer, a contributor to American Thinker, relayed the following in his weekly Science & Environmental Policy Project email (reproduced here):

IPCC Censorship: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a Vice-Chair (Vice President) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, objected to Fred Singer participating in a seminar on global warming / climate change that was to be held at SEII Foundation Universitaire in Brussels. A google translation of part of the letter van Ypersele sent follows:

You should know that Mr. Fred Singer is a person whose scientific integrity leaves much to be desired. Its (sic) activities are financed disinformation by the lobbies of fossil fuels..... , and it is scandalous that such a person may be associated, directly or indirectly, to SEII and the University Foundation.

Claes Johnson, another skeptic who had been expected to participate in the seminar, has the original untranslated letter at his blog site, along with more about van Ypersele’s suggestion for censoring skeptic speakers.

Having never heard of IPCC Vice-Chair van Ypersele before, but having written several online articles here and elsewhere on the apparently unsupported accusations that skeptic scientists are corrupted by fossil fuel industry funding, I decided to see what other connections were to be found between Mr. van Ypersele and the people surrounding what I call the ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists.  It seems every time I look into this, I find anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan and his associates at the enviro-advocacy group Ozone Action, which later merged into Greenpeace USA in 2000.

My first guess is that Mr. van Ypersele might be a recent addition to the IPCC, so I simply plugged his name into an internet search along with one of the two names from my June A.T. article, which was about people associated with the long-term smear accusation who also turned out to be recent IPCC report reviewers. Sure enough, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is on the same list of 2007 Reviewers of the IPCC WGIII Fourth Assessment Report as the two in my article. That probably doesn’t mean much, it is a rather huge list.

Perhaps not helping matters in Mr. van Ypersele’s favor is that the same two people are on the list of participants at the Bonn, Germany 1999 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP5). In the UNFCCC meeting the following year in The Hague, no less than eleven people from Ozone Action, including Ross Gelbspan, were participants.

Did they all talk among themselves, and with the multiple number of Greenpeace International attendees, about skeptic scientists?  That would be for professional reporters to find out.

The plot thickens considerably when we first read the line in the official IPCC bio for Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, which says he “...was a Lead Author for the WGII contribution to the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and was elected in 2002 Vice-Chair of its Working Group II.” You’d think he would want to minimize any ties with enviro-activist groups at that point, but then we read in this Greenpeace paper, “Report commissioned by Greenpeace and written by Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Philippe Marbaix, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. July 2004.

On the 2nd page - let me repeat the above points for emphasis - IPCC Lead Author Jean-Pascal van Ypersele’s Greenpeace-commissioned paper starts with a fictional account of an out-of-control global warming disaster 40 years into the future, and then states,

I have long dreamed of drafting an inventory on the potential impacts of climate change in Belgium, as has been done for Europe or for several of our neighbours. Greenpeace’s request has given me the chance to make a start on this....We assume full scientific responsibility for the result and would like to thank Greenpeace for not having interfered at all in the content of our paper....

I hope that this report will be food for thought. This is our only planet - we do not have a spare.

Could anyone dare imagine a more breathtaking example of hypocrisy? An IPCC Lead Author commissioned to write a paper for an enviro-activist group while claiming no influence from them is now a top ranking IPCC leader repeating an old unproven accusation insinuating that mere association with fossil fuel industry funding renders skeptic scientists completely untrustworthy, and he demands such skeptics should be silenced.

Add this to Al Gore latest efforts to try equating skeptics with Civil Rights-era racists, and the ever-growing appearance of an impending implosion for the entire global warming crisis is much harder to miss now. In the parlance of current internet talk, this is fast becoming an “Epic Fail.”

Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists,” and you can follow him on Twitter at QuestionAGW.

Washington, D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today blasted President Obama’s announcement of his choice of Alan Krueger as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Krueger served as chief economist at the Treasury Department during the first two years of the administration.

“The choice of Alan Krueger is yet another example of the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy, on American jobs and on our economy,” Senator Inhofe said. “During his time at the Department of Treasury under President Obama, Mr. Krueger made clear his opposition to the development of traditional domestic energy. He even went so far as to say, ‘The administration believes that it is no longer sufficient to address our nation’s energy needs by finding more fossil fuels...’ He further stated, ‘The administration’s goal is to have resources invested in ways which yield the highest social return.’ Yet as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports, America has the largest recoverable reserves of oil, gas and coal in the world. The Obama administration’s failure to appreciate this fact is one of the many reasons why they are failing to make progress on creating jobs and improving our economy. 

“The nominations of John Bryson to head Commerce, Rebecca Wodder at Interior and now Alan Krueger should make it crystal clear that President Obama continues to favor a radical environmental agenda ahead of turning around our economy and putting Americans back to work.”

A paper published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that changes in the character of El Ninos over the past 31 years are the opposite of the predictions of climate models from greenhouse gases. The paper concludes “A plausible interpretation of these results is that the character of El Nino over the past 31 years has varied naturally” rather than being forced by increased greenhouse gases. Another alarmist prediction by climate modelers crumbles in the face of real-world data.

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L15709, 4 PP., 2011

El Nino and its relationship to changing background conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean

Key Points:

The character of El Nino is changing in ways not expected from climate models

Changes in El Nino are projecting onto background conditions

The changes probably result from natural variations rather than GHG forcing

M. J. McPhaden et al

This paper addresses the question of whether the increased occurrence of central Pacific (CP) versus Eastern Pacific (EP) El Niños is consistent with greenhouse gas forced changes in the background state of the tropical Pacific as inferred from global climate change models. Our analysis uses high-quality satellite and in situ ocean data combined with wind data from atmospheric reanalyses for the past 31 years (1980–2010). We find changes in background conditions that are opposite to those expected from greenhouse gas forcing in climate models and opposite to what is expected if changes in the background state are mediating more frequent occurrences of CP El Ninos. A plausible interpretation of these results is that the character of El Niño over the past 31 years has varied naturally and that these variations projected onto changes in the background state because of the asymmetric spatial structures of CP and EP El Ninos.

Enlarged. H/T Marc Morano