Obviously my main scientific interest in the SPM is their handling of proxies. Here there was one rather big surprise and it wasn’t what you might think. (I’m not saying that this is necessarily a very important section of the report; it just happens to be an area that I know well, am interested in and can appraise.)
Continue reading →
The Summary for Policymakers for the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Review has been released today. Here is the presentation. As discussed before, the actual WG1 Report was not released today. It will only be released in May 2007, the delay occurring to permit the IPCC to ensure that there is “consistency” between the Summary and the underlying report. An unofficial version of the Second Order Draft (April 2006) has been posted online here.
Here is the website for IPCC WG1 http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/
What will I be looking for in the SPM4? There’s not much fun in trying to predict their temperature estimate when they’ve already leaked that it’s 2-4.5 deg C by 2100. So here are some things that I’m going to be looking for. Continue reading →
climateaudit was not really hijacked. The domain registration was scheduled to expire on Jan 31, 2007. An invoice for this was sent in December 2006. My credit card had rolled over since the previous payment. So when the server attempted to process the domain registration, the payment was refused. They notified me and I sent new credit card particulars and settled the invoice on Jan 7, 2007, but the process got interrupted, and on Feb 1, the site got lost in cyber-space. I heard about problems last night but I got the site OK. It turns out that DNS changes, whatever they are, propagate through the internet at varying rates and so different people could see different things depending on locations. Nothing could be done until accounting people arrived at work in Vancouver at about 11 am Eastern time. They sorted it out quickly. For a whlie, it was working all right in Vancouver but not in Toronto, but it’s working here now. I presume that it will take a while to sort out around the world. Sorry about this.
When I look at posting information, not everyone seems to have been affected. During the past 2 days, about 170 comments have been posted and, at least one comment was posted per hour except for one crash for about 3 hours due to our more usual operating problem – traffic overload.
Andrew Weaver in an article here says of the SPM: “This isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles.” Wow. Even better than Space Invaders. There was a big front page preview of the SPM in the Toronto Globe and Mail today here all of which is worth reading, but for now I draw your attention to the 2nd paragraph of the article:
Humans have already caused so much damage to the atmosphere that the effects of global warming will last for more than 1,000 years, according to a summary of a climate-change report being prepared by the world’s leading scientists.
The draft, seen by The Globe and Mail yesterday, also says evidence the world is heating up is now so strong it is “unequivocal” and predicts more frequent heat waves, droughts and rain storms, as well as more violent typhoons and hurricanes. It concludes the higher temperatures observed during the past 50 years are so dramatically different from anything in the climate record that the last half-century period was likely the hottest in at least the past 1,300 years.
I wasn’t sure that the Hockey Team would even make the SPM this time, but here there are in the 2nd paragraph. The Team stayed in the spotlight.
Not just in the spotlight – but maybe they’re what Weaver meant by a “battallion of intergalactic missiles”? “Look, up in the sky, It’s a bird, It’s a plane, It’s the Team.” Who would have guessed? Do they get spandex suits? It puts Mann’s instruction to Rutherford – “Beam me up, Scottie” – in an entirely new light. Continue reading →
We’ve all become rather used to graphs looking like the one that I’ve drawn below (other than the horizontal blue line that I will explain later). This, together with the corresponding graph of CO2 levels, is almost certainly same as Gore’s graphic on page 66 of Inconvenient Truth. I’ll bet dollars-to-doughnuts that some variation of this will be featured in the AR4 Summary for Policy-Makers. The Hockey Stick became important because it was promoted not simply in TAR, but in the SPM, which was the only document available for several months. So here are some thoughts on this. Continue reading →
Wegman observed last summer that climate scientists failed to involve statisticians to an appropriate degree in the work. Yesterday Simon Tett drew our attention to Brohan et al 2006 as an explanation of uncertainties in HadCRU3. Brohan et al, of which Tett is a coauthor, used the prominent statistician, Donald Rumsfeld, as an authority for their uncertainty model. Brohan et al:
A definitive assessment of uncertainties is impossible, because it is always possible that some unknown error has contaminated the data, and no quantitative allowance can be made for such unknowns. There are, however, several known limitations in the data, and estimates of the likely effects of these limitations can be made [Rumsfeld, 2004]. Continue reading →
Continuation of More Unthreaded.
A thoughtful article by Kerry Emanuel on overall AGW issues here.
IPCC AR4 is going to report that the difference between present temperature and late 19th temperatures is about 0.8 deg C, as opposed to the 0.6 deg C in TAR. This difference seemed a little higher to me than temperature changes from 2000 to 2005 (the last reported years in the respective reports) and I thought that I’d try to figure out why. Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
SPM released
The Summary for Policymakers for the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Review has been released today. Here is the presentation. As discussed before, the actual WG1 Report was not released today. It will only be released in May 2007, the delay occurring to permit the IPCC to ensure that there is “consistency” between the Summary and the underlying report. An unofficial version of the Second Order Draft (April 2006) has been posted online here.
Here is the website for IPCC WG1 http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/