Articles Tagged "Roger Pielke Sr."

Today, there were news articles concerning the state of the climate system; e.g. see the Associated Press news release in the Washington Post

Climate change study: More than 300 months since the planets temperature was below average

The news article refers to the 2010 climate summary that will be published in a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society article. The article will undoubtedly include informative information on the climate.

However, the news article itself erroneously reports on the actual state of the climate, as can easily be shown simply by extracting current analyses from the web. Two of the prominent individuals quoted in the news report are Tom Karl and Peter Thorne. They make the following claims

“The indicators show unequivocally that the world continues to warm,” Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in releasing the annual State of the Climate report for 2010.”

“There is a clear and unmistakable signal from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” added Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, North Carolina State University.”

“Carbon dioxide increased by 2.60 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2010, which is more than the average annual increase seen from 1980-2010, Karl added. Carbon dioxide is the major greenhouse gas accumulating in the air that atmospheric scientists blame for warming the climate.”

In his testimony Richard Muller (which I posted on Friday April 2 2011), indicated that he used 2% of the available surface stations that measure temperatures in the BEST assessment of long-term trends. It is important to realize that the sampling is still biased if a preponderance of his data sources comes from a subset of actual landscape types. The sampling will necessarily be skewed towards those sites.

If the BEST data came from a different distribution of locations than the GHCNv.2, however, then his results would add important new insight into the temperature trend analyses. If they have the same spatial distribution, however, they would not add anything beyond confirming that NCDC, GISS and CRU were properly using the collected raw data.

We discuss this bias in station locations in our paper

Climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr has noted that land surface temperature records (which comprise the vast majority of temperature records prior to the satellite era (1979-)) are unreliable due to land use changes and urban heat island effects, and that we should therefore look to ocean heat content changes as the most reliable metric for assessing global heating and cooling. The oceans cover 71% of the global surface area and hold at least 1000 times more heat than the atmosphere. Many have claimed that the 'missing heat' from 'anthropogenic global warming' has gone into the oceans, even though the heat seems to be 'missing' from the oceans as well. Recent data from the ARGO network of ~3200 floating robot sensors has shown that since full deployment of the system in ~2003, the ocean heat content has declined despite steadily rising 'greenhouse' CO2 levels:

From Loehle 2009: Cooling of the global ocean since 2003

How could this be? Here are the physical reasons why increasing concentrations of 'greenhouse gases' would not be expected to increase ocean heat content.

Click source to read FULL report from the HockeySchtick

Henk Tennekes is well known to the visitors of our website. A few days ago, he told me that he submitted a letter of resignation to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on Saturday, January 23. He wrote to me “I don’t want to remain a member of an organization that, like AMS and NAS, screws up science that badly.” The Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad apparently got hold of a copy of the resignation letter and ran a News Flash on Saturday, January 30. In the letter to the Academy, Henk complains that he submitted the manuscript of his essay on Hermetic Jargon (which I am happy to reproduce here below, with his permission) to the Academy President at that time, Frits van Oostrom. The President, however, did not bother to respond. The NRC news flash, translated by Henk himself at my request, reads:

Tennekes Quits

By Karel Knip

“I have had it. Farewell.” With these words Henk Tennekes concludes his final letter to the Executive Board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He wrote his letter of resignation on January 23. A unique occurrence in the history of the Academy, which obtains its membership by co-optation. Normally, a member of the Academy loses his membership only when he dies. Tennekes is still alive.

For many years, Tennekes was director of research at KNMI. He also was a professor at the Pennsylvania State University and at the Free University in Amsterdam. In 1982 he became a member of the Academy. And now he steps out. “There is light out there” is the closing sentence of the essay “Hermetic Jargon” that he now gives a broader distribution.

On July 22 2009 I posted on the new paper on solar forcing by Lean and Rind 2009 (see). In that post, I also referred to the Benestad and Schmidt 2009 paper on solar forcing which has a conclusion at variance to that in the Lean and Rind paper.

After the publication of my post, Nicole Scafetta asked if he could present a comment (as a guest weblog) on the Benestad and Schmidt paper on my website, since it will take several months for his comment to make it through the review process. In the interests of presenting the perspectives on the issue of solar climate forcing, Nicola’s post appears below. I also invite Benestad and Schmidt to write responses to the Scaftta contribution which I would be glad to post on my website.

The global warming promoting website RealClimate.org, is under fire yet again from a prominent scientist for presenting incorrect climate information. Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. publicly rebuked the website in a June 30, 2009 article for "erroneously communicating the reality of the how the climate system is actually behaving." Pielke, the former Colorado State Climatologist and currently a senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, countered Real Climate's claim that warming was "progressing faster than expected" with the latest data on sea level rise, ocean heat content and Arctic ice.

In his article titled "Real Climate's Misinformation", Pielke also chastised readers of Real Climate for blindly accepting the incorrect climate claims promoted on the site.

"Media and policymakers who blindly accept these claims are either naive or are deliberately slanting the science to promote their particular advocacy position," Pielke Sr. wrote.

The dismissive response on Real Climate and on Grist to this letter do not provide the objective scientific rebuttal to these science claims. This is unfortunate and is misleading policymakers, but, as we have learned and reported many times on at Climate Science and elsewhere (e.g. see and see), this is the way the IPCC and CCSP community deals with solid science that disagrees with their perspective.

Open letter by the cato institute on climate science

UPDATE: Also see what that nice man MONBLOT has to say about this from the Guardian

Please download PDF file to read FULL report

Further Reply By Gavin Schmidt to this Climate Science posting [his reply to my comment #150].

Roger, If you think that accusing people of being in a conspiracy to defend the IPCC and imply that disagreeing with you means that people are actively trying to “mislead” the public, is ‘constructive interaction’, you might want to buy a new dictionary. The NRC meeting I attended was a discussion of whether a new report on solar-climate interactions would be helpful for the NRC to do. Most presentations focussed very specifically on solar-climate links. It remains a puzzle to me why you thought the proposed report would be something related to the IPCC report at all. Thus your characterisation of that meeting was, frankly, extremely partial and unfair to the participants and agency reps who attended. Your accusation that I misrepresented that meeting in the comment above is ludicrous.

Bruce Hall has an excellent presentation of temperature records in the United States on his weblog.

Among his valuable comments, he writes

“The U.S. analysis showed that the late 1990s were indeed hot and had a greater than normal expected level of statewide monthly records. What it also showed, however, was that the 1930s had a much higher frequency of those records. Finally, it showed a sharp tailing off of such extremes beginning with the new century.

I have completed the review of the high temperature extremes through 2008 and there were no additional statewide month high temperature records. An analysis of the 2005 - 2008 data for minimum temperature records will be started shortly.”

There are no independent climate assessments of the IPCC report “Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change” that have been funded and sanctioned by the NSF, NASA or the NRC.

On Monday December 8, 2008 I attended a meeting to discuss whether the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council should convene a meeting titled “Detection and Attribution of Solar Forcing on Climate”. The strawman outline for this meeting was..