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Curve-fitting and natural cycles: The best part

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It is not every day that I come across a scientific publication that so totally goes against my perception of what science is all about. Humlum et al., 2011 present a study in the journal Global and Planetary Change, claiming that most of the temperature changes that we have seen so far are due to natural cycles.

They claim to present a new technique to identify the character of natural climate variations, and from this, to produce a testable forecast of future climate. They project that

the observed late 20th century warming in Svalbard is not going to continue for the next 20–25 years. Instead the period of warming may be followed by variable, but generally not higher temperatures for at least the next 20–25 years.

However, their claims of novelty are overblown, and their projection is demonstrably unsound.

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References

  1. O. Humlum, J. Solheim, and K. Stordahl, "Identifying natural contributions to late Holocene climate change", Global and Planetary Change, vol. 79, pp. 145-156, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2011.09.005

AGU 2011: Day 1

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A number of us are at the big AGU meeting in San Francisco this week (among 20,000 other geophysicists). We will try to provide a daily summary of interesting talks and posters we come across, but obviously this won’t be complete or comprehensive.

Other bloggers are covering the event (twitter #AGU11). A small number of the posters are viewable on their website as well.

Monday

Two good general talks this morning – Harry Elderfield gave the Emiliani lecture and started off with a fascinating discussion of the early discussions of Harold Urey and Cesare Emiliani on isotope thermometry – and showed that even Nobel Prize winners (Urey – for the discovery of deuterium) are sometimes quite wrong – in this case for insisting that the overall isotope ratio in the ocean could not ever change. (This talk should become available online here).

The second general talk was by author Simon Winchester who excellently demonstrated how to communicate about geology by using human stories. He gave a number of vignettes from his latest book about the Atlantic ocean – including stories of the shipwreck of the Dunedin Star on the ‘Skeleton coast’ of Southern Africa, time on St Helena, and the fate of his book on the Pacific that apparently only sold 12 copies… He finished with a mea culpa and gracious apology to the assorted geophysicists for his rather hurried comments on the Tohoku earthquake disaster that caused some consternation earlier this year. In his defense, he only had 90 minutes to write what he was unaware would be the Newsweek cover story that week.

In the science sessions in the afternoon, there was some good talks related to attributing extreme events including Marty Hoerling discussing the Moscow heat wave and a very different perspective from the cpdn group in Oxford. It would have been good to have had some actual discussion between the different people, but AGU is not conducive to much back and forth because of the very tight scheduling. The oxford group estimated (based on volunteer computing) that the likelihood of the Russian heat wave was something like 3 times more likely with 2000’s background climate vs the 1980’s. Some good points were made about the non-Gaussian nature of observed distributions the semantic challenges in explain attribution when there are both proximate and ultimate causes. Kerry Emanuel gave an update of his views on hurricane climate connections.

In the next door session, there was interesting discussion on the philosophy of climate modelling (from actual philosophers!) and the strategies that need to be adopted in dealing with the multi-model ensembles of CMIP3 and CMIP5.

(Day 2)(Days 3&4)(Day 5 and wrap up)

Two-year old turkey

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The blogosphere is abuzz with the appearance of a second tranche of the emails stolen from CRU just before thanksgiving in 2009. Our original commentary is still available of course (CRU Hack, CRU Hack: Context, etc.), and very little appears to be new in this batch. Indeed, even the out-of-context quotes aren’t that exciting, and are even less so in-context.

A couple of differences in this go around are worth noting: the hacker was much more careful to cover their tracks in the zip file they produced – all the file dates are artificially set to Jan 1 2011 for instance, and they didn’t bother to hack into the RealClimate server this time either. Hopefully they have left some trails that the police can trace a little more successfully than they’ve been able to thus far from the previous release.

But the timing of this release is strange. Presumably it is related to the upcoming Durban talks, but it really doesn’t look like there is anything worth derailing there at all. Indeed, this might even increase interest! A second release would have been far more effective a few weeks after the first – before the inquiries and while people still had genuine questions. Now, it just seems a little forced, and perhaps a symptom of the hacker’s frustration that nothing much has come of it all and that the media and conversation has moved on.

If anyone has any questions about anything they see that seems interesting, let us know in the comments and we’ll see if we can provide some context. We anticipate normal service will be resumed shortly.

The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events

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The IPCC recently released the policy-maker’s summary (SREX-SPM) on extreme weather and climate events. The background for this report is a larger report that is due to be published in the near future, and one gets a taste of this in the ‘wordle‘ figure below. By the way, the phrase ‘ET’ in this context does not refer ‘extra-terrestrial’, and ‘AL’ is not a person, but these refer to the way of citing many scholars: ‘et al.‘

Fig. 1. The text analysis according to http://www.wordle.net/

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Times Atlas map of Greenland to be corrected

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We were pleased to hear from the University of Arizona’s Jeff Kargel that the Times Atlas folks are now updating their atlas of Greenland. As we reported earlier, the first edition was completely in error, and led to some rather bizarre claims about the amount of ice loss in Greenland. Kargel reports that HarperCollins (publisher of the Times Atlas) has now fully retracted their error and has produced a new map of Greenland that will be made available as a large-format, 2-side map insert for the Atlas and will also be available free online. Meanwhile, Kargel and colleagues have produced their own updated small-scale map and have written a paper that includes both their new map and a description of the incident that led up to it. Kargel was instrumental in pushing the cryosphere community to send a strong message to the publishers that they needed to correct their mistake. (A pre-print of the paper, currently under review and under public discussion on Cryolist, is available here.)

Figure 1 in Kargel et al. (2011) generated by a collaboration of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) with the Polar Geospatial Center Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota. Contact: Michele Citterio (GEUS) for questions about the glacier outlines or Paul Morin (UMinn.) for questions about the MODIS base image mosaic.

HarperCollins is to be commended for listening to the scientific community and producing a corrected map. Unfortunately, and despite recent events demonstrating that popular allegations against climate scientists are all wrong, HarperCollins still says on their web site that it’s all the scientists’ fault for not being clear (“The one thing that is very apparent is that there is no clarity in the scientific and cartographic community on this issue”,they write). Hmm. Our own view is that anyone flying over Greenland en route to Europe from North America would instantly have recognized a problem with the Times Atlas (assuming they knew their location of course). As Kargel and colleagues write in their paper:

“Distinguishing manifest, ignorable nonsense from falsehoods that might take root in the public mind is difficult, but the magnitude of and apparent authority behind this particular mistake seemed to warrant a rapid and firm response. The eventually constructive reaction of HarperCollins, which not only withdrew its mistaken claim but also produced a new map to be included in the Times Atlas as an insert, shows the value of such a response. No less than grotesque trivialization, grotesque exaggeration of the pace or consequences of climate change needs to be countered energetically.”

Nevertheless, they caution that “scientists cannot possibly challenge all of the innumerable misunderstandings and misrepresentations of their work in public discourse.”

Well said. Of course, many scientists can do more, and we encourage all of our colleagues to speak publically about their research and, as the international glaciological research community did in this case, to try to correct misconceptions. At the same time, hopefully, HarperCollins will catch on and recognize that being scientifically literate is not just scientists’ responsibility, but is everyone’s responsibility.

Conference conversations

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Rasmus & Gavin

The reason why scientists like going to conferences (despite them often being held in stuffy hotel basements) is because of the conversations. People can be found who know what they are talking about, and discussions can be focused clearly on what is important, rather than what is trivial. The atmosphere at these conferences is a mix of excitement and expectations as well as pleasure at seeing old friends and colleagues.

The two of us just got back from the excellent ‘Open Science Conference‘ organised by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) in Denver Colorado. More than 1900 scientists participated from 86 different countries, and the speakers included the biggest names in climate research and many past and present IPCC authors.

Open Science Conference

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MJO Conversations

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There is a (relatively) new blog from scientists involved in a big research program (DYNAMO) looking into the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). Called Madden-Julian Conversations, it is run by Adam Sobel and Daehyun Kim (Columbia), Zhiming Kuang (Harvard) and Eric Maloney (Colorado State).



A schematic of the MJO from cmmap.org

The MJO can be seen in eastward propagating systems of rainfall and deep convection near the equator and influencing the Indian monsoon and El Niño dynamics. Each MJO cycle takes around 30-60 days, so these events can be seen in high frequency diagnostics of cloud cover, LW radiation, rainfall etc. The blog goes into a little more detail of what the MJO is (part i, and parts ii, iii, iv and v), (note that is sometimes referred to as the Intra-seasonal Oscillation or ISO), as well as descriptions of the DYNAMO program and what atmospheric scientists working in the field actually get up to.



(but note that apparently a helmet is not actually required for modelers to launch radiosondes).

This is exactly the kind of thing that should become more common – scientists actually showing the world directly what their research involves and the process that we follow to find stuff out. This will make a great backdrop to the rather dryer contributions to the technical literature that will come from this.

A Well Deserved Honor

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The rest of us here would like to congratulate Gavin on a well-deserved honor. He is the recipient of the inaugural AGU Climate Communication Prize. Since co-founding RealClimate back in 2004, Gavin has emerged as the de facto leader of RealClimate, having written the majority of our posts–and many of our best ones. One of his very first contributions “Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion” remains one of our most highly cited posts. One of his most recent, about what the recent CERN experiments do (and don’t) tell us about cloud processes, is a good example of his characteristic knack for explaining complex scientific issues with clarity and wit. Gavin also takes the lead role in dealing with the comments on RC posts. His almost non-stop, patient, response to the flood of comments that ensued in the week following the CRU email server hack in late 2009 impressed us all.

Gavin’s communication efforts, of course, go well beyond RealClimate. He is frequently quoted in mainstream news venues and often appears on radio and television news programs, to help communicate key aspects of climate science to the public. Here he is in an interview articulating both the science and the history of the science, and putting the recent politicizing of climate science into context. (It’s worth watching this interview to the end, by the way, for some thoughts on what you can do to improve communication of climate science.) He’s also produced a very accessible and beautiful book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science (with photographer Josh Wolfe).

Gavin’s efforts go well beyond the classic ‘public understanding of science’, since what he so successfully promotes is the ‘public understanding of research’. He makes it understandable and tangible how scientists work and think, not just what their results are. Gavin is a champion of easy access to data: see our Realclimate section on data sources. And, of course, a champion of making good use of the available data: see his many articles where he explains how particular questions (such as whether climate models agree with data) should not be speculated about but can be answered by anyone with basic skills simply by using publicly available data archives. Gavin’s work is often about empowering people to draw their own conclusions.

All of this is based on a solid foundation of his own scientific research: Gavin is a top-notch climatologist with an excellent publication record (h-index: 33), and we and our colleagues refer frequently to Gavin’s numerous papers in our own research and teaching. We only sometimes wonder whether his days have 30 hours, or how he finds the time to achieve all this.

Of course we’re a bit biased here at RealClimate, but it is truly hard to imagine a more deserving recipient for this award than Gavin.

Congratulations, once again, to our colleague and friend.

Mike Mann, Eric Steig, Stefan Rahmstorf, Jim Bouldin, Ray Pierrehumbert, David Archer, and the rest of RealClimate

Hooked on ‘theWeather’

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During the annual European Meteorological Society’s (EMS) annual meeting in Berlin, I was pleasantly surprised by a magazine called ‘theWeather’, issued by the theWeather Club, an outreach activity associated with the Royal Meteorological Society. TheWeather Club was awarded the EMS outreach & Communication award 2011 for this magazine.

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Resignations, retractions and the process of science

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Much is being written about the very public resignation of Wolfgang Wagner from the editorship of Remote Sensing over the publication of Spencer and Braswell (2011) – and rightly so. It is a very rare situation that an editor resigns over the failure of peer review, and to my knowledge it has only happened once before in anything related to climate science – the mass resignation of 6 editors at Climate Research in 2003 in the wake of the Soon and Baliunas debacle. Some of the commentary this weekend has been reasonable, but many people are obviously puzzled by this turn of events and unsupported rumours are flying around.

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