The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Anthony Watts opens mouth, places foot firmly - in the weakening Walker Circulation

As if one foot in mouth wasn't enough for the day, Anthony Watts does it again (archived here, cached here). Maybe he wanted to give both his clodhoppers a turn. Whatever - he posted one of his "claim" articles, which was about a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. The paper, by Katinka Bellomo and Amy C. Clement from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, was describing evidence of the expected slowdown in the Walker Circulation. Beneath his "claim" headline Anthony wrote:

From the UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE and the “correlation is not causation department” comes this paper that suggests GHG’s decrease the Walker Circulation. Only one problem. They don’t give a clear cut mechanism, only tenuous linkage. I suspect Willis will have a thing or two to say about this paper.

Only one problem, the scientists did give a clear cut mechanism. (Actually, they referred to more than one mechanism, although they emphasised the one proposed by Isaac Held and Brian Soden.) As the authors explained right at the very beginning of their paper:

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.

Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held

First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.

The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick

Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

Anthony Watts arrives late at the APS climate party ... and gets it wrong

I see that Anthony Watts has only just discovered that the American Physical Society is reviewing its climate policy statement.  He wrote excitedly (archived here):

That noise you can hear in the distance is the sound of John Cook’s, Dana Nuccitelli’s, and Joe Romm’s heads exploding

Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel

He earlier wrote, quoting Simon of Australian Climate Madness, that:

The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to the panel of six. 

...before slightly amending it to insert the word "[address]" after "climate realists".


Anyway, Lindzen, Christy and Curry did attend a workshop of the APS sub-committee back in early January.  As well as the contrarians, the sub-committee invited three more highly regarded and serious climate scientists (Ben Santer, Isaac Held and William Collins).  Goodness knows why they had Richard, John and Judith along.

Lindzen, Christy and Curry aren't on the sub-committee and I don't hold great hopes that the sub-committee will end up with a sensible climate policy. If you read the transcript of the January workshop it's clear that the Sub-Committee members themselves know zilch about climate science.  You'd think that out of all the members of the APS they could find some climate experts to prepare a draft statement.

By the way, this is another example of Anthony either forgetting or not reading stuff he's already posted on his blog before, too. And he doesn't read Judith Curry's blog or Rabett Run either, both of whom wrote about this a month ago.

Eli's post is a must read.  He starts off scathingly:

The American Physical Society had done it again.  In a surprisingly repetitive fit of Dunning Kruger they have assembled a subcommittee to guide the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) in a review of the APS statement on Climate Change which is composed of nuclear physicists and others who know nothing about climate relevant physics.

From the WUWT comments

Even though the sub-committee has a lot of learning ahead of it when it comes to climate science, I wonder if WUWT is going to be a repeat of Richard Muller's temperature reconstruction - where they all cried "hurrah" anticipating a finding that earth had cooled or something - only to turn on him when his analysis was completed.  I mean how likely is it that the APS would reverse its current policy position?

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Terry Comeau says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:53 am
What I would give to sit in on the meetings of the panel. The alarmists on that panel must be panic stricken. Three people with such impressive scientific credentials to actually put real questions of science and integrity to their blatant and exceedingly flimsy eco-activistic pseudo-scientific constructs. How on earth can they try to maintain their house of cards under those circumstances? The gig is up and they must see it coming like a light in a train tunnel, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do to avoid it. Wow. Break out the popcorn.

Ken Hall says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:01 am
AT LAST!!! An authorititive and august scientific institution actually using a scientific approach to investigating the merits, or lack thereof, of the CAGW hypothesis. fully balanced and fully in public, without hiding anything. About effin time!

To overtly mangle metaphors, once this domino falls it should creat a crack in the dam of CAGW alarmism which should spread through all the other authorititive and august scientific institutions, including the Royal Society. Once this happens, real science may prevail and we may see a return to sanity in science and politics. It is early days yet, but fingers crossed.

John Whitman says:

March 20, 2014 at 10:29 am
It does not get any better than this for it finally shows a reasonable good level of openness and transparency in climate science assessment. The review panel has high level personnel who are very critical of the processes that supported the controversial aspects of climate science used for the IPCC reports.

This APS process is a prototype that the The Royal Society, the IPCC, the NAS, AAAS, AGU and the US Congress should emulate.
John 

Let's wait to see how this plays out.  The American Physical Society has a reputation to uphold after all.  It could well be that WUWT will suffer a series of head explosions, not John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli or Joe Romm.

Bacci's "Delusional Dribble"

Talking "dribble" on climate models and tea leaves

This is (probably not) for people who listen to fake skeptics science mockers like bacci, who writes:

Source: HotCopper.com

Bacci starts off talking about modelling complex systems. He says the idea that 'we' can model the climate in 100 years is 'delusional'.  (I'd have to agree that any attempt by Bacci and mates to model complex systems would indicate delusion on their part, going by his posts.  Using his own imagery, bacci tends to dribble his drivel like a drip.)

He then shifts to weather forecasting, saying that in order to 'prove' a model of centennial trends in climate, one needs to model monthly weather.

Predicting monthly trends in weather

Actually, most people (Bacci excepted) don't need a model to broadly predict weather on the monthly scale.  Next month is the start of autumn down here and we know from experience that autumn brings milder temperatures (but it can still get a bit hot).  We can even predict with reasonable accuracy that in five months time (July) the average monthly temperature in southern Australia will be cooler than the average for this month (February) and there will likely be snow on the ranges, while in the northern hemisphere the ice in the Arctic will be melting.

Feel free to check back in July and tell me how wrong my prediction is!

One source for an indication of likely rainfall patterns in eastern and south-eastern Australia on a short term scale (weeks to months) is the Bureau of Meteorology's seasonal outlooks and also their ENSO wrap up.

Fake skeptic predictions

Fake skeptics have not done very well in their predictions. Some have even been so far off target with short term predictions that the 'delusional' descriptor may be appropriate.

John McLean's Delusional Drop

For example, bacci could have been talking about computer technician John McLean.  Back in March 2011, he 'predicted' that "2011 would be the coolest year since 1956, or even earlier".  He was forecasting a drop of 0.8 degrees Celsius in the average global surface temperature in a single year, from the record high of 2010. (The global average surface temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees Celsius in the past century.  In 2010 it was 0.62 degrees above the twentieth century average.)

As it turned out, 2011 was the 11th warmest year on record and the warmest La Nina year on record.  So much for that fake skeptic's delusion.  2011 was 0.51 degrees Celsius above the twentieth century average, whereas the average temperature in 1956 was about 0.18 below the twentieth century average.  He was out by a whopping 0.69 degrees Celsius!

Click here to go to the NOAA source.

Other fake skeptics' tea leaves

Bacci says he might as well read tea leaves.  Maybe that's what fake skeptics do.  SkepticalScience.com has an animated gif comparing the predictions of 'skeptics' with IPCC temperature projections and actual observations.  Fake skeptics 'tea leaf' predictions don't stack up at all well, while the different years' IPCC projections have so far all been much closer to what was actually recorded.

The skepticalscience.com article goes into more detail and is worth a read.   It discusses some of the weaknesses of IPCC projections, such as the fact that sea levels may be rising faster and the fact that Arctic ice is definitely disappearing much faster than expected.

Realclimate.org does an annual comparison of models too, looking at global surface temperature, ocean heat content and summer Arctic sea ice cover as well as early projections from James Hansen.

To sum up, complex models based on physics and constructed by experts in climate science have been very good predictors of global trends and even of regional trends.  They are not perfect but as computing power increases along with knowledge of climate the models also improve.

Important factors that climate scientists have more difficulty in predicting in the medium to longer term are the amount of greenhouse gases and aerosols we choose to pour into the atmosphere.  (Also significant volcanic eruptions that might occur in the future.) That's why they use scenarios to model climate under different permutations of future pollution.

Isaac Held's blog is a really good place to peep under the hood of climate modelling.