Thursday, May 16, 2013

Yet more sensitivity

This really does seem to be the story that runs and runs...here's another article in the NYT recently, this time by Justin Gillis, who summarises my views accurately (take note David Rose)

There is also this paragraph, which piqued my interest:
Several scientists say they see reasons to doubt that these lowball estimates will in fact stand up to critical scrutiny, and a wave of papers offering counterarguments is already in the works. “The story is not over,” said Chris E. Forest, a climate expert at Pennsylvania State University. 
I don't have any idea what the "wave of papers" is, although the recent splash about increased ocean heat uptake might have some impact. But several people - Forest prominent among them - have argued for some time that the models already take up too much heat, which suggests to me that while the new data on this might help to close the gap, it is unlikely to show models not mixing enough (which would be one route to arguing that sensitivity is actually high).

11 comments:

Hank Roberts said...

Here? (very slow loading, slides from NCAR presentation)
http://www.image.ucar.edu/Workshops/TOY2012/pdf/20120806-0930-CForest.pdf

Hank Roberts said...

(this correction is paywalled for us civilian readers): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50480/abstract

Correction to “Sensitivity of distributions of climate system properties to the surface temperature dataset”†

Alex G. Libardoni1,
Chris E. Forest2,*

DOI: 10.1002/grl.50480

Carl C said...

Are you a "mainstream climate scientist" as well as "climatology’s most renowned warmist scientists"? And do the skeptics really get so giddy that you take an IPCC avg of 3C and say it's 2.5C (well within any error bars)?

Carrick said...

Carl C: And do the skeptics really get so giddy that you take an IPCC avg of 3C and say it's 2.5

I was wondering that too.

I'm also not sure about the "mainstream" designation... seems like a rather muddy designation to me.

By the way, Libardoni & Forest's 2012 AGU presentation is located here.

(Libardoni's thesis is also online.)

James Annan said...

Carl,

Well, if it's written in the NYT, it must be true!

Don't worry, I don't really take any of this slapstick seriously (as I hope the quotations make obvious). The sceptics want to make out that I'm "prominent" specifically because I dared to disagree (slightly) with the IPCC, of course.

James Annan said...

Hank, the Libardoni and Forest work doesn't seem to use recent data at all. The correction doesn't seem to have much impact on the results.

EliRabett said...

Some indication that the editors Broderized the article

Magnus said...

what about this? http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50390/abstract

Carrick said...

From Olson 2013: "Our emulator relies on model output at the 250 parameter settings of the ensemble and interpolates the model response to any desired parameter setting."

250 parameters... really?

James Annan said...

Carrick, that will be 250 different (sets of) values, not 250 parameters.

Magnus, saw that, thanks, but it only quantifies the limitation to the precision that can be attained with a specific approach. And no-one has claimed a more precise result, as far as I know. So I don't think it has any practical impact.

Carrick said...

Thanks James. I guess that should read "250 sets of parameters from the ensemble of runs" rather than "250 parameter settings". Not the best word choice on their part. ;-)