Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By ScienceBlogs (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

American Drinker Climate Forecaster of The Year 2010 [Stoat]

Monday, December 3, 2012 0:10

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Oh go on guess, who do you think it was. Well, you’re wrong: it was Piers Corbyn. To be fair to Piers, he doesn’t appear to use the “honour” himself, its been used for him on his signature to the recent OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists. Those 125 are the usual pile of NN, non-scientists, and a very small sprinkling of people with reputations. Thought this time no-one with anything close to first-rank in met/climate: even Lindzen and Christie have deserted. I think this in aid of opposing Doha. It seems rather sweet and naive of them; I can’t see the point.

As far as I can see, the only interesting bit of the “open letter” is

The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction.

But it isn’t true (as you’d expect). The bit they are misreading appears to be:

ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervalsof 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.

So this is the familiar situation: the denialists are cherry-picking their starting year of 1998. If you don’t do that, or if you take out ENSO (as the 2008 report explicitly did; or as Foster and Rahmstorf did), then you see the warming you expect.

Refs

* The Winner of This Year’s ‘Best Climate Predictor’ Award (Clue: It Wasn’t Al Gore!) (the article is such drivel I don’t think its even worth shredding).