Mar 172008

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS

At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.

This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:

Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.

Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.

Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

 

10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”

  1. For the past several decades, I have been responsible for analyzing long-term climate and flow records for design of water supply reservoirs, flood control works and irrigation schemes. It is my business to be concerned with the hydrological impacts of climate change. However, there is very little evidence of significant long-term trends in floods and droughts though there are clearly cycles related to phenomena such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
    We use real data to design projects rather than the anecdotal evidence so beloved by Guardian jounalists. In cases where we have tried to use anecdotal information it has generally conflicted with hard information so we never rely on anecdotal data without confirmation.

    Engineering hydrologists design for extreme events and there has been nothing particularly unusual in the past few decades. Nevertheless, as records get longer we would expect maximum recorded events at specific locations to be exceeded every now and then.

    Some of our clients have requested us to investigate climate change impacts on water supply projects. We have taken the output from global climate models at face value and simulated the changes to the hydrology. In all cases any predicted flow changes can be handled by relatively minor modifications to infrastructure. In simple terms this is because the climate models generally project increases in precipitation – a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. As engineers are cautious, we have advised our clients to build-in flexibility to projects rather than assume that additional expenditures are warranted right now. Essentially a wait-and-see approach which is feasible because any future changes in the flow regime would be very gradual.

    You may be interested to learn, Tony, that my views are quite common amongst practicing water resources engineers and hydrologists.

    Thank you for an informative web site.

  2. Potentilla

    I’ll join Robin in thanking you for your practical, hands-on thoughts on the real, observed impact of “climate change” (i.e. global warming) on floods and droughts, from your standpoint as a hydrologist and water resources engineer.

    Your advice to your clients to “wait-and-see” by building in flexibility, rather than embarking on costly additional “just-in-case” expenditures, makes perfect sense to me (also an engineer, albeit a chemical engineer, rather than a hydrologist).

    Those of us who have been active on TonyN’s site here for several months tend to get sort of repetitive and stuck in our own paradigms, and it is great to see new, knowledgeable contributors such as yourself on this site.

    Thanks again.

    Max

  3. Climategate, the book!
    Have you guys caught up with this?
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/18/climategate-the-crutape-letters-now-online-at-amazon-com/

    The first book is now available; lead author Steve Mosher.
    That is really really quick, and I wonder if Lucia’s recent question of Mosh’ “were you the hacker?”, (given his credible skills etc,), but denied by him, might have some substance!
    I’ve ordered my copy!
    The “Mosher Timeline” article at CA is also a good read:
    http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/12/the-mosher-timeline/

  4. Max:

    Re your 9077, it wasn’t me but TonyN who thanked potentilla for his interesting and authoritative comment. I do, however, share his sentiments. It’s a subject I (and most people) know little about so it’s helpful to be better informed. I have found, in the “greenie” gatherings I sometimes attend, that the perceived human disasters that will follow the expected melting of Himalayan glaciers commonly used as an easily understood and practical example of the consequences of AGW. It’s remarkable that views that, as potentilla say, “are quite common amongst practicing water resources engineers and hydrologists” have failed to make the slightest impact on these earnest and largely intelligent true believers.

  5. Sorry ’bout that Robin and TonyN.

    But I agree that it is refreshing to get new insights from someone who has hands-on knowledge of a particular aspect of our planet’s ecology as it relates to our climate.

    Max

  6. Potentilla
    Welcome aboard, and that’s great stuff from you!

    Are you familiar with the recent story of gloom and doom in Australia about the Murray-Darling river system, and how in particular the lower lakes and the famous Kooyong are dying because of prolonged drought, and irrigation demands upstream? (although it’s just had/having a bit of a flush from floods up north)
    But Oz has a long history of droughts and floods.
    For instance here is a photo at Mildura back in 1914

    http://www.picturevictoria.vic.gov.au/site/mildura/images/14530.jpg (click if no image)

    Nowadays, this area is alive with large luxury houseboats and various water-sports. I even read somewhere that boating deaths exceed road deaths in the region. Of course, the water-flow can nowadays be regulated from upstream reservoirs, but there is also a HUGE increase in demand for irrigation.
    Also, see this concerning; the great droughts of: The Federation Drought 1895 – 1903 and The
    Great Eastern Drought 1914 – 1915. There is a nice photo of buggies and sulkies in the dry Murray river bed. Elsewhere I remember there is a rather similar photo taken at Easter 1917. (not to hand at the moment)
    http://historyteacher.org.au/nhc/2005_07/07_YoungHistorian.pdf

  7. Potentilla (9076)

    as records get longer we would expect maximum recorded events at specific locations to be exceeded every now and then

    Obvious really, but sadly not something that alarmists seem to consider before they start waving their arms about!

    Enjoying your contributions.

  8. Potentilla,

    I certainly wouldn’t argue that the problems in the Murray-Darling basin are entirely due to climate change and I doubt if anyone else would either. The water diverted for use in the cotton industry is usually measured in units defined by amount of water in Sydney Harbour. I’m sure you’ll be able to tell us exactly how many Sydney harbours are used annually. Whatever, its a huge amount of water that has been effectively stolen from downstream irrigators who have have much more modest requirements for food crop production.

    You write:

    “I can accept that man is having some influence on global average temperatures”.

    Would you care to quantify “some”? The IPCC are saying exactly the same thing so maybe there is no argument there.

    Your argument is “I do not believe that increase in average temperatures will lead to global climate catastrophe”. Again, you need to quantify that statement. If you are talking another 1 degC you could be right. But what about the IPCC’s figure of 3 degC over the course of this century?

  9. potentilla

    … my views are quite common amongst practicing water resources engineers and hydrologists.

    I wonder if this applies equally between the private and public sector?

    Where consultants and their clients interact against a background of objective assessment of risks, and equally objective cost benefit analysis, one would certainly expect this to be so. However I do wonder how comfortable a hydrologist would be expressing such views within an organisation such as the Environment Agency where political pressures are likely to play a part.

  10. TonyN,

    There is nothing that Potentilla has said so far that would put him outside the mainstream. His views as expressed so far shouldn’t cause him any professional problems at all. Its a bit of a puzzle to me why you are claiming him as one of your own.

    I particularly would agree with Potentilla that engineers should be cautious. We’d all like to know that the bridge we might cross every day has been designed with a good margin of safety, and that the chances of it collapsing in the next 100 years are very much less than 0.1%.

    I doubt if we’ll be able to build anything like that measure of safety into our treatment of our environment. But why should we have one rule for bridge safety and another for CO2 safety?

  11. Further to my 9073, it seems the Tory leadership is trying head off any problems: it is reported by the FT that “Ten Conservative election candidates were sent on a green “re-education” day”. It was conducted by a think-tank called “Green Alliance” (website here). I wonder how they got on.

  12. What’s happening at the usually ultra green Independent? Here’s the final paragraph of an article today about the embattled Met Office:

    Some climatologists hint that the Office’s problem is political – its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren’t borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather’s always warmer than it really is, because it’s expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I’m afraid it deserves to be shown the door.

  13. I have no idea of the significance of this but I see, from a post on WUWT, a claim that “Arctic temperature is heading for absolute zero”. Here’s the reference.

  14. “re-education day”

    That sounds suitably Orwellian.

  15. Peter M

    You ask:

    should we have one rule for bridge safety and another for CO2 safety?

    Of course we should, Peter.

    Unsafe bridges collapse, killing people. There is plenty of empirical data based on actual physical observations supporting this fact. It is indisputable.

    There is no empirical data based on actual physical observations supporting the premise that AGW, caused principally by human CO2 emissions, is a serious threat. This has has been underscored by your inability to provide such data, despite repeated requests from posters on this site. In fact, recent observations (Spencer et al., Lindzen and Choi, etc.) provide empirical data based on physical observations, which point to the conclusion that AGW is not a serious threat.

    Get the difference?

    It is basic.

    Potentilla advises clients

    to build-in flexibility to projects rather than assume that additional expenditures are warranted right now

    This would make much more sense for any eventuality regarding our climate, be it a prolonged period of cooling (as some scientists predict) or a resurgence of the 20th century warming (as other scientists predict), rather than embarking hell-bent on costly mitigation expenditures (or even sillier, totally ineffective carbon taxes) for only one eventuality, which may never come to pass.

    Max

  16. Max,

    You have, perhaps unwittingly, put your finger on one of the difficulties facing us all on the climate issue. People by and large tend to react to clearly observable events and actions are then taken to prevent a reoccurance. The Titanic hits an iceberg and sinks. Its obvious after the event that the design of the bulkheads was faulty and there was no need for the ship to have sunk. Of course the problem was rectified on its sister ships but it could have been foreseen. If any engineer had pointed this out he too would have been told in no uncertain terms that “there is no empirical data based on actual physical observations supporting the premise that (the ship sinking), caused principally by (iceberg collisons), is a serious threat…”

    There is only one ship this time. We don’t get a second chance.

  17. Peter M #9085,

    I doubt if we’ll be able to build anything like that measure of safety into our treatment of our environment. But why should we have one rule for bridge safety and another for CO2 safety?

    One of the engineers who contribute here will probably be delighted to explain. It just might have something to do with the climate being a vast chaotic system that is part of the natural world, and a bridge being a fairly elementary artefact.

  18. Peter M

    Do you really not appreciate the difference between the hypothesis of AGW and the laws of maths and physics that apply to ships?

  19. Robin, Reur 9088;
    Concerning the exchange at WUWT pasted below;
    I think you can relax, because the red line average temperature has only dropped from -21C to -34C in 44 years, and has another 239 degrees to go before reaching zero K. (= -273C)

    NZ Willy (00:33:44) :
    Has anyone noticed, Arctic temperature is heading for absolute zero (see http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php )! Once it reaches about 10K, superconductivity comes into play! Grotesque ice monsters exhaling dry ice (carbon dioxide) mist will form and devastate civilization! Giant icy feet will be our end! Oh, the humanity, the CRU-Mann-ity!

    Alexej Buergin (02:32:59) :
    ” NZ Willy (00:33:44) :
    Has anyone noticed, Arctic temperature is heading for absolute zero (see http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php )!”
    True. And the colder it gets, the slower the ice grows (JAXA, Nansen).

  20. I don’t think that Arctic temperature is doing anything remarkable….yet. During the winter the temperature of the Arctic seems to swing all over the place and as the green line is an average it is misleading. The only time Arctic temperatures are stable is during the short summer. Just look at any other year.

  21. JamesP,

    Yes, the laws of maths and physics do apply to ships. They apply to bridges and everything else too. Even the atmosphere!

    TonyN,

    You write “One of the engineers who contribute here will probably be delighted to explain….. a bridge being a fairly elementary artefact.”

    Just for the record, and I may have mentioned it before but I might just say I’m an engineer too. Speciality is electromagnetic theory which is handy in the design of antennas etc. Its not directly relevant to climate theory, so I’m not claiming any special professional expertise.

    I’m not sure if engineers like Brunel would have considered bridges to be “fairly elementary”. He was a pioneer, there was no theory laid out, and he faced great uncertainties. The more uncertain he was the more cautious he was in his approach. His structures were somewhat over-engineered – but they have stood the test of time. You guys seem to be just the opposite. “Sure we don’t know what happens in the atmosphere but just pump as much CO2 as you like. She’ll be right!”

  22. Tony: Many interesting issues have been raised by your readers and I will try and address them in a series of posts.

    Would you care to quantify “some”? The IPCC are saying exactly the same thing so maybe there is no argument there.

    Your argument is “I do not believe that increase in average temperatures will lead to global climate catastrophe”. Again, you need to quantify that statement. If you are talking another 1 degC you could be right. But what about the IPCC’s figure of 3 degC over the course of this century?

    Well I am not a climate scientist so quantifying the proportion of man’s influence on the global climate is not my expertise. But I am not convinced that it is expertise that anybody has. I do have expertise in hydrological modelling so I know how models in the earth sciences are set up and operated. A critical step is model calibration where the model parameters are adjusted to obtain a best fit to recorded data. The next step is model verification where the model is tested against a set of data that were not used for calibration.

    To my knowledge global climate models (GCMs) have not generally been subjected to this routine process though some limited calibration is attempted. Because of our engineering background, when we have conducted climate change studies for clients we have attempted to verify the results from GCMs at specific locations. We have found that GCMs are very poor at representing the current climate. I suspect that is why results from GCMs are always given as anomalies – differences from the standard 1961-1990 period. If they didn’t do this the projections from GCMs would vary even more than they do. They all have a different base case. The inadequacy of GCMs to represent the current climate has been addressed in peer-reviewed papers for example:

    http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/900/

    If GCMs cannot pass a simple verification test, then using them for climate change projections to the year 2100 is just playing computer games. I suspect, though, that it must be entertaining for those with research grants. But the observation that GCMs do not perform well shouldn’t really be too surprising as GCMs do not include all the physical processes that affect climate.

    Regarding speculation about global climate catastrophe it is just that, speculation. There is simply no evidence to support it; not in the GCM outputs, not in the recorded data and certainly not in peer-reviewed research. The only “evidence” is provided by the likes of Guardian journalists wandering through south Asia collecting anecdotal gems from people who supply what they want to hear. There is no supporting real data. The only reason I mention the Guardian by the way is that I am a regular reader but I am appalled by the nonsense peddled there on climate change issues.

  23. I have previously mentioned that I had identified several hundred places worldwide that appeared to be cooling for at least thirty years in direct contradiction to the IPCC reports.

    I have been collaborating with several people-Verity Jones and KevinS- and the data has now been put by them into a useable format (it still has gremlins)

    http://82.42.138.62/MapsGISS.asp

    http://82.42.138.62/MapsNOAA.asp

    The links will take you to global maps with coloured dots indicating the temperature trends. Clicking on a dot will reveal information for that station. The script might cause a message to appear asking if you want to abort-click no (you might need to do it several times)

    It is quite an eye opener to see that gobal warming is no such thing, which is why they changed the name to climate change.

    Tonyb

  24. I seem to have been credited with an opinion on the Murray-Darling Basin but I have not made an observation! So I might as well jump in:

    I know very little of the details of the Murray-Darling system but I do know that problems of this sort are always a result of excess water use. As hydrologists we design on the basis of a drought of a defined return period say 1 in 100 years. Droughts are complicated because they also have to be defined in terms of drought duration depending on the impacts. A fish would want the design drought duration to be 1 day; a farmer might want the duration to be one week or an irrigation season and a drought design period for a reservoir could be one or two years. The Murray Darling Basin has low rainfall and for these types of systems the standard deviation of droughts is very large. This means that the 1 in 100 year drought is much more severe than the 1 in 10 year drought.

    Complex systems such as the Murray-Darling Basin have often not been well-managed in the past. There is often pressure on authorities to grant water licences, particularly in the past when the hydrology of the basin was less understood and ecological values did not have the importance they have today.

    The end result is that when a drought occurs (as it always will) there is a tendency to point fingers and try and duck responsibility. Climate change might as well be the culprit. Nobody can disprove it either way so it is ideal.

    Of course a devastating drought in a well-managed system could simply have exceeeded the design drought, for example it could be a 1 in 150 year drought. Such occurrences are possible within a “normal” climate regime. “Climate change” does not have to be invoked.

  25. potentilla:

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen the GCMs filleted quite so economically, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

    Climate models obviously have great value as research tools; it’s reliance on their predictive skill in the policy making process that is so troubling.

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