Comments on: Geoffrey Boulton and IPCC Secrecy

By: Punksta

Punksta — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:24:20 +0000

“One could make a full time job of publishing criticisms of poor or incorrect papers. ”

Is this not a common practice? And if not, why not?

By: David Silva

David Silva — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:48:21 +0000

I don’t know if anything has changed since Feb 2nd but if you go to Meeting Documentation on the menu on the left and then select IPCC & WGs Sessions underneath, they have the Session 34 documentation at the top.

Can I assume this was not there a week ago? Certainly bad form not to have it on the Calendar, especially since they actually have a section for these links.

By: Michael Wallace

Michael Wallace — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:16:22 +0000

fair enough! Thanks

By: Richard Betts

Richard Betts — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:36:39 +0000

Thanks Michael. Indeed – we are very careful to attach clear health warnings to such work, since different models (or even different variants of the same model) can give a wide range of different projections, and moreover, as you say, they simply cannot be directly validated for the timescales and forcing scenarios for which the projections are made. The models can be evaluated in other ways, but in essence the future projections remain simply a best estimate based on current understanding as expressed in the form of a model. Some people still find this useful, but admittedly some do not!

By: Jos de Laat

Jos de Laat — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:09:47 +0000

Not sure, but possible. Europe has warmed faster since the late 1970′s than the global mean. Europe has also seen a drastic decrease in particulate matter since the late 1970′s.

The same appears to apply for the period after the second world war. Europe has seen a drastic increase in particulate matter, temperatures have dropped faster than the global mean.

Since aerosols are important for explaining the lack of warming after WW2 and before the late 1970′s, these temperature trend observations actually fit in nicely with the mainstream paradigm.

I guess that if I would have written that down and used the proper buzzwords the papers would have been heralded rather than disgruntled.

BUT, I am not convinced about this story, and I have a paper in the making that offers yet another perspective.

Cheers, Jos.

By: Michael G Wallace

Michael G Wallace — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:16:35 +0000

Richard thanks for your communications and patience. I find that your engagement with skeptics and other parties here is most refreshing compared with my experiences attempting to communicate with local climate-change authorities.

But regarding your providing multi-decadal scenario planning and risk assessment to mining customers, I’m curious how that translates into a novel service that adds value.

Hydrologists already condense historical climate variability data into technical products that are multi-decadal and are of great use to mining customers and many others. For example, the often – used “50 year flood”, or the PMF (probable maximum flood) are two well-documented prognostics that come to mind (and more than fit within the lifetime of a typical mine).

They incorporate not only climate variability but typically other phenomena and features, such as groundwater variation, topography (of course!), vegetative patterns, upstream water resource management issue, etc. They also typically are understood to be ‘works in progress’ and are subjected to calibration exercises and empirical closure towards the goal of minimizing uncertainties.

My guess is that an organization that promotes some sort of added certainty in climate change (at current state of the art)would be tempted to apply deterministic ghg-forcing GCMs and the like, to predict future conditions of drought and flooding likelihood. My problem with that is that the state of the art in that modeling field has failed to validate in any meaningful way to the types of tests that would be most relevant. I feel that aside from divergence of current temp records from C02 increases, there is also the prime problem of simulating even a single 100K yr glacial cycle. It’s never been done.

By: JamesG

JamesG — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:32:21 +0000

That commonly used dismissive “basic physics” phrase begins to irk when IPCC authors just ignore the basics when it suits them; eg that a warming ocean is somehow a net CO2 sink, that the deep ocean is somehow hiding the “missing heat” without first heating up the ocean surface, or that cold weather events are somehow triggered by global warming.

Of course that double standard doesn’t irk quite as much as bold statements from IPCC authors with no theory behind them whatsoever; like the whopper that a 4% increase in water vapour causes droughts in Russia or Texas, floods in Pakistan and every other event previously known as natural, random or jetstream related.

By: Michael Wallace

Michael Wallace — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:17:48 +0000

I’ve read that paper a while back, Roe, G., 2006, “In Defense of Milankovitch”, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L24703., and have cited it in a poster I recently presented at last December’s AGU. It’s certainly no defense of Milankovitch.
In spite of the title, it’s actually quite useful in REBUTTING Milankovitch.
That’s the problem with citations to blogs about citations, you don’t get to the heart unless you go to the actual source.
Roe himself seems an interesting and otherwise most objective character. I attended a lecture at that same AGU meeting that he presented titled “What can glaciers tell us about climate variability and climate change?” At this talk I learned quite a bit about stochastic glaciology. Enough to feel confident that there is nothing about kilometer scale changes in glacial length over the past century or so, that can be disambiguated from natural variability.

By: AJ

AJ — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:08:10 +0000

Hi Jos… Does your submitted paper have anything to do with trends in particulate emissions at the local/regional level? Steve had an interesting post a month ago about the past use coal in Toronto:

http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/05/toronto-1912/

IIRC, the principal driver in Ross’s findings was coal. Then again, I could be wrong.

By: AJ

AJ — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:15:18 +0000

There ya go Steve! Now you can mix business with pleasure. Just find a hydrologist, mix in a model, and produce assessments that have the highest likelihood for generating future cash flows!