Red/Blue and Peer Review

Here is a further article on the proposed red team review of climate science, which gives a nice history of peer review but, unlike the previous article, doesn't describe the possible benefits of an honest red team effort.

Healthy skepticism has long formed the foundation of the scientific peer review process. Will anything substantively new be gleaned from a red team/blue team exercise?

[UK only] This Friday's Curzon Cinemas Q&A event is a live introduction over a satellite link by Al Gore to the new film "An Inconvenient Sequel" - 11 August 2017.

The list of participating cinemas here doesn't seem to be quite accurate, as I'm going to the Wimbledon event, which isn't listed. So, get a glass of wine, sit in a comfy chair and see what the big man's been up to - he's certainly stuck at it and surely deserves some credit for that.

Hurricane Harvey's aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits

"Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events.

This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.

Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change......

Now, a group of scientists at Oxford University in England say they plan to measure how much of Hurricane Harvey's intensity bears the fingerprints of climate change. Their climate modeling project, climateprediction.net, is a partner of the WWA program."

"Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events."

If Irma takes out Mar-a-Lago, that could settle some people's minds on the subject.

Article in The Guardian co-authored by Miles Allen (father of CPDN project):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/07/big-oil-must-pay-for-climate-change-here-is-how-to-calculate-how-much

It is possible for scientific evidence to help apportion responsibility for climate damages among fossil fuel producers. Our paper shows how

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

We were wrong - worst effects of climate change can be avoided, say scientists
The Times. September 18 2017, 5:00pm. Ben Webster, Environment Editor.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/we-were-wrong-worst-effects-of-climate-change-can-be-avoided-say-scientists-k9p5hg5l0

Catastrophic impacts of climate change can still be avoided, according to scientists who have admitted they were too pessimistic about the chances of limiting global warming.

The world has warmed more slowly than had been predicted by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions on average temperature, research has found.

New forecasts suggest that the world has a better chance than claimed of meeting the goal set by the Paris Agreement on climate change of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The study, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, makes clear that rapid reductions in emissions will still be required but suggests that the world has more time to make the necessary changes.

Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.

He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”

Speaking to The Times, he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.

“It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”

Professor Grubb said that the new assessment was good news for small island states in the Pacific, such as the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which could be inundated by rising seas if the average temperature rose by more than 1.5C.

“Pacific islands are less doomed than we thought,” he said.

Professor Grubb added that other factors also pointed to more optimism on climate change, including China reducing its growth in emissions much faster than predicted and the cost of offshore wind farms falling steeply in the UK.

He said: “We’re in the midst of an energy revolution and it’s happening faster than we thought, which makes it much more credible for governments to tighten the offer they put on the table at Paris.”

The study found that a group of computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had predicted a more rapid temperature increase than had actually occurred.

The global average temperature has risen by about 0.9C since pre-industrial times but there was a slowdown in the rate of warming for 15 years before 2014.

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.

He said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.

According to the models, keeping the average temperature increase below 1.5C would mean the world could afford to emit only about 70 billion tonnes of carbon after 2015. At the current rate of emissions, this so-called “carbon budget” would be used up in three to five years’ time.

Under the new assessment , the world can emit another 240 billion tonnes and still have a reasonable chance of keeping the temperature increase below 1.5C.

“That’s about 20 years of emissions before temperatures are likely to cross 1.5C,” Professor Allen said.

He added: “It’s the difference between being not doable and being just doable.”

The Met Office acknowledged today that there had been a 15-year slowdown in the rise in average temperature but said that this pause had ended in 2014, the first of three record warm years.

The Met Office said the slowdown had been caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of warm and cool phases in Pacific sea-surface temperature.

Adam Scaife, a professor at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, said: “The end of the recent slowdown in global warming is due to a flip in Pacific sea-surface temperatures. This was due to a change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which entered its positive phase, warming the tropics, the west coast of North America and the globe overall.”

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FYI: From 24 reader posts below the article, the majority disbelieve the science or blame the scientists.

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And ...
ANALYSIS September 18 2017, 5:00pm, The Times. ben webster, environment editor

Global warming predictions may have been too gloomy

When 194 nations met in Paris in 2015 and agreed to try to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5C, many scientists dismissed the goal as unattainable.

They said it would be politically and economically impossible to cut emissions fast enough and that the world would have to prepare for the effects of an increase of more than 1.5C, including worse droughts and heatwaves and islands disappearing beneath rising seas.

Now it turns out the scientists were being too pessimistic and had been led astray by computer models which overstated the rate of warming.

Other factors have also contributed to the new, more optimistic assessment, including the cost of renewable energy and China’s emissions growth both falling faster than almost anyone had predicted.

Many climate sceptics had, however, repeatedly criticised climate scientists’ computer models for being “on the hot side” and diverging from the slower warming trend shown in actual records.

Computer models remain the best way of working out how quickly we need to cut emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, but climate scientists could be nimbler at revising them when actual temperature readings diverge from predictions.

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FYI, the links are probably behind a paywall for Times subscribers. The last paragraph is perhaps the most pertinent for cpdn contributors.

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There's a CarbonBrief take on the recent Millar et al. Nature Geoscience paper, "Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C".

It's at "Factcheck: Climate models have not ‘exaggerated’ global warming" - as usual they sort the wheat from the chaff.

[Edit: More at the Guardian from Richard Millar and Myles: When media sceptics misrepresent our climate research we must speak out.]

There is a new analysis of this summer's "Lucifer" heat wave as part of the World Weather Attribution project.

Euro-Mediterranean Heat — Summer 2017

PS ... including weather@home models.

Worrying.

Northern Hemisphere La Niña

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml

That article does not predict a "northern hemisphere southern oscillation", whatever that would be. It predicts "the formation of La Niña as soon as the Northern Hemisphere fall 2017" - i.e. the phrase "Northern Hemisphere" is used to indicate the timing not the location, as anyone who had read the article would instantly realise.

Interesting discussion of the counter-intuitive complexities of ice melt:

Melting Ice Raised Sea Levels More Than Previously Thought

Hello.

I really wonder if unpredictable events such as a Krakato type eruption or a series of volcanic eruptions happening in a short period may be taken in account in a century time climate modelization.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41778089

Record surge in atmospheric CO2 seen in 2016

No doubt this will be portrayed as "fake news".

There are two new stories on the project front page:

Dr Fredi Otto to take part in ‘Climate Science and the Law’ seminar

Does rapid attribution stand test of time?