From: "Curt Covey"
To: "Christopher Monckton"
Subject: Sea level rise, hi-res paleodata, etc.
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:05:51 -0800 (PST)
Dear Dr. Monckton,
Thanks for copying me on your correspondence with Fred and prompting me to look again at IPCC sea level rise estimates for 2100. I agree you are comparing like-for-like. The 2001 report has an upper limit of 0.7 meters for the A1B scenario. If the 2007 report lowers this to 0.43 meters (or if the number gets raised again before the report is made final) it will certainly be appropriate to ask why. After reading Hansen's recent papers, I don't see how to justify such small upper limits. It also seems obvious to me (and apparently to you but not to Fred) that the A2 scenario would entail more sea level rise than A1B. Regarding the relative likelihoods of scenarios, I don't agree with you that it's "almost certain" that world population will "plummet" in the second half of this century.
Regarding the issue of recent vs. earlier global warming, when I look at the totality of data compiled by North et al. this year for their NAS / NRC report (see attached graphic), it seems clear that most of the warming since about 1850 (or 1900) occurred in recent decades. Going farther back in time, the data are of course more uncertain and estimates vary, but it appears that the warming rate for the 20th century was unusually high compared with the past 2000 years. This conclusion follows whether or not one includes Mike Mann's data. For the record, I must add that I do not share your characterization of Mann's work as "rubbish" or "useless." Nor do I see a situation of "flagrant dishonesty in which the UN and the scientific journals persist long after the falsity of their absurd and extreme claims has been properly demonstrated."
Sincerely,
Curt Covey
Christopher Monckton wrote:
Dear Fred, - Many thanks for sending me this exchange. Some comments:
Temperature: This question, like so many others to do with supposed "climate change", is bedevilled by the recency of reliable, instrument-based observations. Nevertheless, some conclusions can be attempted. The Dalton Minimum is generally considered to have come to an end in 1910. The five-year mean global land and sea surface air temperature anomaly for 1908-1912, calculated from NCDC annual figures, was --0.3579K. By 1940 there had been a rapid increase of 0.4700K to +1121K. By 2004 (again taking the five-year average, including 2006) there had been a further increase of +0.4413K to +0.5534. The mean annual increase in the 30 years 1010-1940 was thus 0.0157K more than two and a quarter times greater than the 0.0069K mean annual increase in the 64 years to 2004. Mean global temperature has hardly risen at all in the five years since the IPCC's last report. And the fact of the 20th-century temperature increase tells us nothing of the cause. It is interesting, for instance, that the polar icecaps on Mars are receding, inferentially in response to increased solar activity. At any rate, it is certain that anthropogenic planetary warming is not responsible. It is possible, therefore, that most of the warming both before and after 1940 was heliogenic.
Sea level: Your correspondent does not disagree with my statement that the IPCC has revised its upper-bound estimate of sea level rise to 17 inches (0.43m). He says, however, that this upper bound is based on the A1 scenario, by which world population will peak in mid-century at ~9bn and fall thereafter. So was the 2001 report's upper bound of 0.88m. I was correctly comparing like for like. The Sunday Telegraph, which reported these figures, has been told that the revisions arise from "better data" now available to the IPCC, supporting skeptics' conclusions that the IPCC's figures are little better than exaggerated guesses. Morner (2004) concludes firmly that there is little evidence for sea level rising any faster now than it has in geologically-recent times. Your correspondent says that the A2 scenario is "business-as-usual": in fact, it is an extreme scenario regarded by very nearly all serious demographers as absurdly unrealistic, in that it posits an increase in world population to 15bn by 2100, when it is now almost certain that rising prosperity and the consequent decrease in birth rates will cause population to peak somewhere between 9bn and 10bn in mid-century, and plummet thereafter.
Reliability of the IPCC's reports: I understand that the IPCC's 2007 draft does not contain an apology for the defective "hockey-stick" graph, which the US National Academy of Sciences has described as having "a validation skill not significantly different from zero". In plain English, this means the graph was rubbish. It is difficult to have confidence in a body which, after its principal conclusion is demonstrated in the peer-reviewed, scientific literature and in numerous independent reports as having been useless, fails to make the appropriate withdrawal and apology. Worse, the UN continues to use the defective graph. This failure of basic academic honesty on the IPCC's part was the main reason why I began my investigation of the supposed climate-change "consensus". The supposed scientific "consensus": Your correspondent seems unaware of the letter written by 61 Canadian and other scientists in climate and related fields to the Canadian Prime Minister. At the end of the attached commentary on Al Gore's recent attempt to rebut my articles on climate change in the Sunday Telegraph, beneath the references, I have appended the full text of the letter and the names, qualifications and then-current affiliations of all 61 scientists. Al gore and others tend to lean rather more heavily than is wise upon a single, rather bad one-page essay in Science for their contention that there is a scientific consensus to the effect that most of the warming in the past half-century was anthropogenic. The essay was by Oreskes (2004), who said that she had analyzed 928 abstracts mentioning "climate change" published in peer-reviewed journals on the Thomson ISI database between 1993 and 2003, and that none of the 928 had expressed dissent from the "consensus". Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University subsequently made a more careful enquiry. Science had been compelled to publish an erratum to the effect that the search term used by Oreskes had not been the neutral "climate change" - which returned some 12,000 articles, but the more loaded "global climate change", which returned 1,117 articles. Of these, Dr. Peiser found that only 1% had explicitly endorsed the "consensus" as defined by Oreskes"; that almost three times as many had explicitly expressed doubt or outright disagreement; and that less than one-third had expressed explicit or implicit agreement with the "consensus". He wrote a paper for Science pointing out these serious defects, which pointed to a conclusion diametrically opposite to that of Oreskes. Science at first asked him to shorten his paper, and then said that, because conclusions like his had been widely reported on the internet, his paper would not be published. As far as I can discover, Science has not published any corrigendum to this day, providing further confirmation of what I have long suspected: that the leading peer-reviewed journals, having unwisely taken strongly-political editorial positions on the question of climate change, are no longer objective. The need for honest science: It was only after years of increasingly-public pressure that Nature was induced to oblige Mann et al., the authors of the useless "hockey-stick" graph that starred in the IPCC's 2001 report, to publish a mealy-mouthed, partial and unsatisfactory corrigendum. In such an environment of flagrant dishonesty in which the UN and the scientific journals persist long after the falsity of their absurd and extreme claims has been properly demonstrated, it is in my view unreasonable to expect China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other fast-polluting countries to deny to themselves the fossil-fuelled economic growth which we in the West have been fortunate enough to enjoy. Until there is honest science, no one will believe either the UN or the journals to the extent of adopting the expensive and (on my calculations) probably futile remedial measures which they and their supporters so stridently advocate. - Christopher
And here is the awesome followup email:
Curt, I can't believe the nonsense you are spouting, and I furthermore cannot imagine why you would be so presumptuous as to entrain me into an exchange with these charlatans. What ib earth are you thinking? You're not even remotely correct in your reading of the report, first of all. The AR4 came to stronger conclusions that IPCC(2001) on the paleoclimate conclusions, finding that the recent warmth is likely anomalous in the last 1300 years, not just the last 1000 years. The AR4 SPM very much backed up the key findings of the TAR The Jones et al reconstruction which you refer to actually looks very much like ours, and the statement about more variability referred to the 3 reconstructions (Jones et al, Mann et al, Briffa et a) shown in the TAR, not just Mann et al. The statement also does not commit to whether or not those that show more variability are correct or not. Some of those that do (for example, Moberg et al and Esper et al) show no similarity to each other. I find it terribly irresponsible for you to be sending messages like this to Singer and Monckton. You are speaking from ignorance here, and you must further know how your statements are going to be used. You could have sought some feedback from others who would have told you that you are speaking out of your depth on this. By instead simply blurting all of this nonsense out in an email to these sorts charlatans you've done some irreversible damage. shame on you for such irresponsible behavior!
Mike Mann -- Michael E. Mann Associate Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology
Help me out,,...which side is Mann on?
******************************EXCERPT*****************************
As the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) apparently hacked files have spread throughout the blogosphere, I downloaded all 160-some MB of the e-mails and documents, and started to clicking away randomly. I stumbled across this e-mail from Kevin Trenberth who was an IPCC lead author. The subject of the day seems to be how to explain the lack of warming for the past decade or so. Trenberth wrote his e-mail just last month from an unseasonably cold Boulder, Colorado, and the e-mail was sent to one or more of the following: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Stephen Schneider, and James Hansen, among others.
This is from the e-mail file #1255553034:
From: Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu>
To: Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:43:54 -0600
Cc: Michael Mann <mann@meteo.psu.edu>, Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@ucar.edu>, Stephen H Schneider <shs@stanford.edu>, Myles Allen <allen@atm.ox.ac.uk>, peter stott <peter.stott@metoffice.gov.uk>, “Philip D. Jones” <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, Benjamin Santer <santer1@llnl.gov>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@noaa.gov>, Jim Hansen <jhansen@giss.nasa.gov>, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@Princeton.EDU>
<x-flowed>
Gavin,
I just think that you need to be up front with uncertainties
and the possibility of compensating errors.
Tom.
Mike Mann -- Michael E. Mann Associate Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology
Methinks the professor doth protest too much. You think?
Which email is this?