Where’s Winter? from my friend and hero John Coleman.

By Jessie Jafet

Editor’s Note: Jim Witt is being featured today (Feb. 2) as The Huffington Post’s Greatest Person of the Day. The series features stories of people across the nation who are making a difference in their community. Congratulations Jim!

Predicting the weather is just one way Jim Witt has helped his community for the last fifty years.

Since 1986, this innovative meteorologist has been producing a long-range weather forecast calendar that has raised over two million dollars for charity.

Sold in over fifty stores, the calendar features local photographer Joe Deutsch’s beautiful landscape pictures of the Hudson Valley, along with Witt’s expert weather projections for the months ahead.

Witt, a resident of Cold Spring and a former Lakeland Central School District science teacher, remembers how he became fascinated with meteorology back in 1944.

“I have been excited about weather since I was a seven-year-old kid watching a barometer go down as a hurricane came up the East coast,” he said. Witt eventually came to the district in 1962 and became the coordinator for the district’s science departments.

Tapping into his students’ excitement for forecasting weather, he founded the high school’s “Weather Club,” an admired program that has been nationally recognized.

“We would meet to plot and analyze weather maps and come up with forecasts for the days ahead,” Witt said of the club. Their three-day forecasts were then broadcasted on local radio station WLNA and appeared in the Peekskill Evening Star.

After retiring in 1977, Witt founded a forecasting company that aided highway departments, shipping companies, crane operators and others in obtaining accurate weather information. He has utilized his broad expertise to teach meteorology, consult for government organizations and as a radio personality on stations like WHUD and WLNA in the Hudson Valley and at WKIT, a station in Bangor, Maine that is owned by the author Stephen King.

It was with colleagues at WHUD that the idea for the calendar was born.

“We knew that people love the weather and with Joe’s gorgeous photos of the Hudson Valley - why not make a calendar that would raise money for kids?” Witt said.

All of the proceeds have gone to 50 different organizations involved with the Hope for Youth Foundation charity, with beneficiaries that include the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Ronald McDonald House and Friends of Karen, among others. He added that the Peekskill Rotary club has now become an invaluable partner in the production and distribution of the calendar.

Witt proudly asserts that his greatest achievement has been the success of his former Lakeland district students in their pursuit of science.

“It is really incredible and I am so proud of what these kids have achieved,” he said. “One of my former students is the Director of Research at the National Hurricane Center, another is Executive Vice President at AccuWeather, a third is a lead forecaster at NASA and amazingly, a student of mine is responsible for a breakthrough in forecasting technology that has improved the accuracy of the seven-day forecast.”

His legacy was recognized last year with a prestigious award from the American Meteorological Society for “innovative leadership in teaching high school meteorology, mentoring, and inspiring his students to accomplishments in the meteorological community and in life.”

And what about Jim Witt’s forecast for the rest of winter 2012?

He predicts a “major event” during the week of March 18-March 24, with very strong, cold winds and possibly a large snowstorm. Careful out there.

Look for Witt’s calendars in these fifty stores around northern Westchester.

See Jim’s website and educational pages:

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)

SS “Skeptical Science”[sic] author John Cook gets schooled by Lord Christopher Monckton (ad-hom magnet).

Mr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled “Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.

Chaotic climate

Cook: “Monckton launched his Gish Gallop by arguing that climate cannot be predicted in the long-term because it’s too chaotic because, [Monckton says],’the climate is chaotic...it is not predictable in the long-term...they [the IPCC] say that the climate is a coupled, non-linear, chaotic object, and that therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’… It’s really quite self-evident that Monckton’s statement here is incorrect.”

Reply: Paragraph 5 section 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 TAR report says: ‘In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” My quotation from the IPCC, given from memory, was in substance accurate. Here and throughout, I shall ignore Mr. Cook’s numerous, disfiguring, ad-hominem comments.

Consensus

Cook: “Monckton proceeds to demonstrate his confusion about the causal relationship between science and consensus: [he says: ‘the idea that you decide any scientific question by mere consensus [is incorrect].’… He suggests that somehow climate science is done by first creating a consensus when in reality the consensus exists because the scientific evidence supporting the anthropogenic global warming theory is so strong.”

Reply:

This seems a quibble. Dr. Denniss had said he was satisfied with the science because there was a consensus. He had appealed repeatedly to consensus. Yet in the Aristotelian canon the argumentum ad populum, or headcount fallacy, is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view - and whatever “science” the consensus opinion is founded upon - may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion. Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it. However, the real scientific debate is about how much warming extra CO2 in the air will cause. There is no “consensus” on that; and, even if there were, science is not done by consensus.

Mediaeval warm period

Cook: “Every single peer-reviewed millennial temperature reconstruction agrees that current temperatures are hotter than during the peak of the [Mediaeval Warm Period]....

Reply: At http://www.co2science.org, Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries providing evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was generally warmer than the present, sometimes by as much as 3-4 C. Many of these papers provide millennial reconstructions…

Climate sensitivity

Cook: “Where Monckton gets this claim that the Australian government’s central climate sensitivity estimate to doubled CO2 is 5.1 C is a complete mystery.

Reply: The “mystery” could and should have been cleared up by Mr. Cook simply asking me. The estimate is that of Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian Government’s economic adviser on climate questions. It is on that figure that his economic analysis - accepted by the Australian Government - centres.

Cook: “Monckton also repeats a myth… that most climate sensitivity estimates are based on models, and those few which are based on observations arrive at lower estimates. The only study which matches Monckton’s description is the immensely-flawed Lindzen and Choi (2009)."Reply: I am not sure what qualifications Mr. Cook has to find Professor Lindzen’s work “immensely flawed”. However, among the numerous papers that find climate sensitivity low are Douglass et al. (2004, 2007) and Coleman & Thorne (2005), who reported the absence of the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming in the tropical mid-troposphere; Douglass & Christy (2009), who found the overall feedback gain in the climate system to be somewhat net-negative; Wentz et al. (2007), who found that the rate of evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming rose thrice as fast as the models predicted, implying climate-sensitivity is overstated threefold in the models; Shaviv (2005, 2011), who found that if the cosmic-ray influence on climate were factored into palaeoclimate reconstructions the climate sensitivities cohered at 1-1.7 C per CO2 doubling, one-half to one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate; Paltridge et al. (2009), who found that additional water vapor at altitude (caused by warming) tends to subside to lower altitudes, allowing radiation to escape to space much as before and greatly reducing the water vapor feedback implicit in a naive application of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), who found the cloud feedback as strongly negative as the IPCC finds it positive, explicitly confirming Lindzen & Choi’s estimated climate sensitivity; Loehle & Scafetta (2011), who followed Tsonis et al. (2006) in finding that much of the warming of the period 1976-2001 was caused not by us but by the natural cycles in the climate system, notably the great ocean oscillations; etc., etc.

Climate sensitivity

Cook: “Monckton at various times has claimed that climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is anywhere between 0.2 and 1.6 C.”

Reply: I have indeed done climate sensitivity estimates by a variety of methods, and those methods tend to cohere at a low sensitivity. The IPCC at various times has claimed that a central estimate of climate sensitivity is 3.8 C (1995); 3.5 C (2001); and 3.26 C (2007); and its range of estimates of 21st-century warming in the 2007 report is 1.1-6.4 C. Ranges of estimates are usual where it is not possible to derive an exact value.

Carbon pricing economics

Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”

Reply: On the contrary: my analysis, presented in detail at the Los Alamos Santa Fe climate conference in 2011, explicitly calculates the costs of taxing, trading, regulating, reducing, or replacing CO2 and sets against the costs the cost of not preventing the quantum of “global warming” that will be reduced this century as a result of the “investment”.

Reply

Yet again, if Mr. Cook had bothered to check I could have sent him my slides and the underlying paper.

Benefits of CO2 control

Cook: “Economic studies consistently predict that the benefits [of carbon dioxide control] will outweigh the costs several times over.”

Reply: No, they don’t. True, the Stern and Garnaut reports - neither of them peer-reviewed - came to this conclusion by questionable methods, including the use of an absurdly low inter-temporal discount rate. However, if one were permitted to use the word “consensus”, one would have to point out that the overwhelming majority of economic studies on the subject (which are summarized in my paper) find the cost of climate action greatly exceeds the cost of inaction. Indeed, two review papers - Lomborg (2007) and Tol (2009) - found near-unanimity on this point in the peer-reviewed literature. Cook is here forced back on to the argument from consensus, citing only an opinion survey of “economists with climate expertise”. However, he does not say how many were interviewed, how they were selected, what weightings and other methods were used: and, in any event, the study was not peer-reviewed. Science is not, repeat not, repeat not done by opinion surveys or any form of head-count. Has Earth warmed as expected?

Earth warming

Cook: “Monckton...repeats… that Earth hasn’t warmed as much as expected...[He says} ‘If we go back to 1750...using the Central England Temperature Record as a proxy for global temperatures...we’ve had 0.9 C of warming...’. It should go without saying that the temperature record for a single geographic location cannot be an accurate proxy for average global temperature.”

Reply: Central England is at a latitude suitable to take the long-run temperature record as a fair proxy for global temperatures. However, if Mr. Cook were unhappy with that, he could and should have contacted me to ask for an independent verification of the 0.9 C warming since 1750. Hansen (1984) found 0.5 C of warming had occurred until that year, and there has been 0.4 C of warming since, making 0.9 C. Indeed, in another article on Mr. Cook’s website he himself uses a value of 0.8 C in the context of a discussion of warming since 1970. The significance, of course, is that the radiative forcings we have caused since 1750 are equivalent to those from a doubling of CO2 concentration, suggesting that the transient sensitivity to CO2 doubling is around 1 C.

Aerosols

Cook: “...Human aerosol emissions, which have a cooling effect, have also increased over this period. And while 3 C is the IPCC’s best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity, the climate system is not yet in equilibrium. Neglecting these two factors (aerosols and thermal inertia of the global climate), as Monckton and Lindzen have done, will certainly give you an underestimate of equilibrium sensitivity, by a large margin. This is how Monckton supports his lowball climate sensitivity claim - by neglecting two important climate factors.”

Reply: Once again, Mr. Cook has failed to check his facts with me. Of course my calculations include the effect of aerosols (which, however, is by no means as certain in its magnitude as Mr. Cook seems to think). And of course I have not ignored temperature feedbacks (which Mr. Cook mistakenly confuses with “the thermal inertia of the global climate”: actually, it is I who have been arguing that there is considerable homoeostasis in global temperatures, and he who had earlier been arguing that global climate was not stable). If I am right about temperature feedbacks (see above), then the equilibrium sensitivity will be about the same as the transient sensitivity - around 1 C. And that, on most analyses, would actually be beneficial.

Always entertaining to see AGW cultists accuse others of ‘gish galloping’!

Guest post by Indur M. Goklany

Over at the Wall Street Journal a group of pedigreed individuals headed by Dr. Kevin Trenberth argue:

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

Wrong answer!!

If you need surgery you DON’T want “a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.” What you want is “a highly experienced expert in the field who has CONVINCING EVIDENCE THAT HIS OR HER OPERATIONS HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL”

And if before I go to a dentist, I would like evidence that the dentist does not pull the wrong teeth (even on occasion).

Unfortunately, there is no convincing evidence that climate models can successfully predict future climate - and I mean “climate” not just “temperature.” [The latter is just one aspect of the climate and for many impacts it may not even be the most relevant.]

Climate models, which are the source of the apocalyptic vision of global warming, have not been validated using data that were not used in their development. Even the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and the IPCC acknowledge as much. Specifically, the IPCC does not say that “all” features of current climate or past climate changes can be reproduced, as a reliable model of climate change ought to be able to do endogenously. In fact, it notes:

“… models still show significant errors. Although these are generally greater at smaller scales, important large scale problems also remain. For example, deficiencies remain in the simulation of tropical precipitation, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (an observed variation in tropical winds and rainfall with a time scale of 30 to 90 days).” (AR4WG1, p. 601).

And the CCSP has this to say in its 2008 publication, Climate Models: An Assessment of Strengths and Limitations. A Report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research:

“Climate model simulation of precipitation has improved over time but is still problematic. Correlation between models and observations is 50 to 60% for seasonal means on scales of a few hundred kilometers.” (CCSP 2008:3).

“In summary, modern AOGCMs generally simulate continental and larger-scale mean surface temperature and precipitation with considerable accuracy, but the models often are not reliable for smaller regions, particularly for precipitation.” (CCSP 2008: 52).

So before one pulls society’s economic teeth, validate the models or else you could end up pulling society’s economic teeth in error.

In the medical profession this would be known as “evidence-based medicine.” Exactly the same principle should apply to climate change remedies. We should insist on nothing less.