Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

No, not the stuff in the stolen emails — although the University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have yet another statement out I’ll excerpt below.  It notes “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years.”

No, the vital climate data that the Hadley Center and CRU are withholding from the public is the warming taking place in the Arctic (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).  And that missing data is why NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies data are  almost certainly superior to CRU’s data “developed in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.”

Remember, “there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The UK’s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.” Thus it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

RealClimate has an excellent post on this very subject — “the ‘hole in the Arctic’ in the Hadley data, just where recent warming has been greatest” — with this great figure (and caption):

Figure. The animated graph shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data.

See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.”

Thus contrary to what the global warming disinformers say about the recent temperature record, it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

So that’s why the NASA temperature record should be seen as more accurate, which puts 2005 as the warmest year on record, with 2007 just edging out 1998 for second warmest.  This is “the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years,” as climatologist Ken Caldeira puts it.  NASA has reported June to October were the hottest on record.* And next year may well be the warmest on record.

So, no, there hasn’t been any recent “global cooling” even for the surface temperature record. And when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go — the oceans — you find steady warming over the past several years:

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We seem to have settled into a moderate to strong El Niño.  NOAA’s latest weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions“ shows that the key region of the Pacific Ocean has stayed quite warm for all of November (see here for figures and data).

The question is how long it will stay fairly strong.  Last week I noted that NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center had asserted:

Based on current observations and dynamical model forecasts, El Niño is expected to continue to strengthen and last through at least the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-10.”

This week they tweaked that to say:

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Oh, here it is.  Never mind….

Spencer Weart: My most interesting conversations were with historians who have been studying the history of the tobacco companies that did their best, and quite successfully for many years, to cover up the fact that smoking kills people by the million.  Some interesting parallels, but…

So begins a fascinating interview of Weart on the illegally hacked emails by Capital Weather Gang’s Andrew Freedman.  Dr. Weart is a physicist and science historian with the American Institute of Physics.

Weart’s website, “The Discovery of Global Warming,” is one of the places to start if you’re interested in getting the basics of climate science.  Based on the comments posted on CP, RealClimate, WUWT, DotEarth, etc., I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the self-proclaimed “skeptics” (aka those who’ve been duped by the professional disinformers) haven’t even bothered to look at the most basic scientific evidence on human-caused global warming.

And the majority of the professional disinformers simply have no regard whatsoever for basic science or an evidence-based search for the truth — which is why they keep pushing talking points that have long been debunked in the scientific literature (see, for instance, Scientists advising fossil fuel funded anti-climate group concluded in 1995: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of GHGs such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”).

But as science historian Weart tells Freedman — spreading disinformation about science is nothing new.  What is new is the slander of both individual scientists and the entire scientific community:

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Michael Mann, one of the country’s leading climatologists, has coauthored a major new review and analysis of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report.  Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, is much attacked by the anti-scientific disinformers because of his work on the paleoclimate “hockey stick” reconstructions of temperature over the past couple of millennia.  Contrary to what the disinformers continue to say, however, the hockey stick was essentially vindicated by the National Academy of Sciences (see NAS Report and RealClimate.org).

[Photo is ©  www.tomcogill.com.]

Since some of his email exchanges were made public by the recent illegal hack of documents from the University of East Anglia, he has also distributed a response to various members of the media and bloggers, which I reprint in full below.

Misrepresentation of these emails is so common that the Washington Post issued one of the fastest retractions/corrections in its history.  I had blogged on their November 25 op-ed “Climate of Denial” here — The newspaper that publishes George Will (and Sarah Palin) editorializes: “Many — including us — find global warming deniers’ claims irresponsible.” Well, one day later, they “clarified” one of their assertions about Mann (see here).  So this should be a cautionary tale to the media to go to the primary source before simply repeating what others have said.

Before reprinting Mann’s comments on the key emails, let me focus on what is far more important — the science.  As the UK’s Met Office, NERC and the Royal Society recently wrote, “even since the 2007 IPCC Assessment the evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened.” Now we have the detailed scientific basis for such statements.

Mann is a coauthor of “The Copenhagen Diagnosis,” in which the 26 leading climate researchers document “the key findings in climate change science since the publication of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.”  They “conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago”:

Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.

And that plausible worst case scenario would cause unimaginable harm — including to this country (see UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon”).  And yes, that scenario is quite different from the simple analysis of what happens if the nation and the world just keep on our current emissions path.  We’ve known that end-of-century catastrophe for a while (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).

None of this will be a surprise to those who follow the scientific literature or read CP.  Here are “the most significant recent climate change findings”:

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I have known Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for many years.  I have interviewed her a number of times and quoted her work on the hurricane-warming connection at length for my 2006 book, “Hell and High Water:  Global Warming — the Solution and the Politics.”  Later, I spent a day giving talks with her in various Florida cities.  She is a first rate scientist (CV here) and someone I have great respect for.  Her past public statements and articles on climate change can be found here.  As is the case with other guest bloggers on CP, I do not agree with everything she writes here.  But the hacked CRU emails raise important issues, I believe scientists should keep maintaining considerably higher standards than their critics, and I think her views deserve to be read and debated widely.  Comments are greatly desired, as always.

­An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate and the contents of the hacked CRU emails. After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I wrote an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research. The essay is posted over at climateaudit.org (you can read it at http://camirror.wordpress.com/ 2009/ 11/ 22/ curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/ ).

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values:  the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking.  Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.

My motivation for communicating on this issue in the blogosphere comes from emails that I received from Georgia Tech graduate students and alums. As a result of my post on climateaudit, I started receiving emails from graduate students from other universities. I post the content of one of the emails here, without reference to the student’s name or institution:

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