Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on Warmist Heidi Cullen’s testimony: ‘She does include some dubious and misleading statements’

Curry on Roy Spencer

No surprises here.  This argument is particularly clever:

It should also be noted that the fact that I believe at least some of recent warming is human-caused places me in the 97% of researchers recently claimed to support the global warming consensus (actually, it’s 97% of the published papers, Cook et al., 2013). The 97% statement is therefore rather innocuous, since it probably includes all of the global warming “skeptics” I know of who are actively working in the field. Skeptics generally are skeptical of the view that recent warming is all human-caused, and/or that it is of a sufficient magnitude to warrant immediate action given the cost of energy policies to the poor. They do not claim humans have no impact on climate whatsoever.

His treatment of the ‘pause’ was well done:

The lack of statistically significant warming in the last 15 years  is sometimes glossed over with the claim that the global temperature record has a number of examples of no warming (or even cooling) over fifteen year periods. But this claim is disingenuous, because the IPCC presumed radiative forcing of the climate system from increasing CO2 has been at its supposed maximum value only in the last 15 years. In other words, when the climate “stove” has been turned up the most (the last 15 years) is also when you least expect a lack of warming.

It is time for scientists to entertain the possibility that there is something wrong with the assumptions built into their climate models. The fact that all of the models have been peer reviewed does not mean that any of them have been deemed to have any skill for predicting future temperatures. In the parlance of the Daubert standard for rules of scientific evidence, the models have not been successfully field tested for predicting climate change, and so far their error rate should preclude their use for predicting future climate change.

The claim has been made that the extra energy from global warming has mostly bypassed the atmosphere and has been sequestered in the deep ocean, and there is some observational evidence supporting this view. But when we examine the actual, rather weak level of warming (measured in hundredths of a degree C) at depths of many hundreds of meters, it implies relatively low climate sensitivity. Part of the evidence for this result is satellite radiative budget measurements

Read the full testimony of all the witness at Senate Climate Hearing

Panel 1

Dr. Heidi Cullen
Chief Climatologist
Climate Central
Mr. Frank Nutter
President
Reinsurance Association of America
Mr. KC Golden
Policy Director
Climate Solutions
Ms. Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Senior Fellow
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Dr. Robert P. Murphy
Senior Economist
Institute for Energy Research

Panel 2

Dr. Jennifer Francis
Research Professor
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University
Dr. Scott Doney
Director, Ocean and Climate Change Institute
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Dr. Margaret Leinin
Executive Director, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute
Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr.
Professor, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado
Dr. Roy Spencer
Principal Research Scientist IV
University of Alabama, Huntsville