Now Debuting: Climate Depot Arctic Fact Sheet – Get the latest peer-reviewed studies and analysis
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Climate Depot Arctic Fact Sheet (for additional updates on the Arctic see new articles tagged Arctic)
Arctic Ice Changes in past 3 years due to ‘shifting winds’ – The Star Canada – July 28, 2009 – Excerpt: Oceanographer and Arctic researcher Jane Eert said “dramatic [Arctic ice] changes in the past three years are the result of shifting winds.” “Enormous amounts of ice have ‘been exported from the Arctic,’ driven by winds that are shifting,” according to Eert. Eert noted that climate models have many woes. “The guys who are running the long-term climate models have a tough problem,” Eert says. “They’re looking at really long time scales, and as result they can’t look at a lot of details for each year. In order to get the results before you die, you have to fudge some things. And what they fudge is the small-scale stuff. But it turns out that probably the small-scale stuff is important and fudging it gives you wrong answers.” […] Jane Eert is science coordinator of the Three Oceans Project, a federal study of Canada’s Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. […] A physical oceanographer, Eert leads the scientific team aboard The Louis. It’s her 10th voyage on the ship since 1999. Between 10 and 15 per cent of the Arctic Ocean is what Eert calls a data hole. It will take years’ more research to fill it in with solid information, she adds. After years of reports that vast areas of Arctic ice are melting as the seawater below, and air above, warm up, scientists have discovered that dramatic changes in the past three years are the result of shifting winds, perhaps caused by climate change. Enormous amounts of ice have “been exported from the Arctic,” driven by winds that are shifting as the climate changes, which pushed the ice into ocean currents that delivered it …
U.S. Government Scientist’s Shock Admission: ‘Climate Model Software Doesn’t Meet the Best Standards Available’
Two prominent U.S. Government scientists made two separate admissions questioning the reliability of climate models used to predict warming decades and hundreds of years into the future.
Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn’t meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit.
“As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn’t meet the best standards available. We’ve made quite a lot of progress, but we’ve still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.com.
Strand’s candid admission promoted WattsUpWithThat’s skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question:
“Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on ‘software [that] doesn’t meet the best standards available?’”
Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written on some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse. Yet our government has legislation under consideration significantly based on model output that Jim Hansen started. His 1988 speech to Congress was entirely based on model scenarios.”
Another Government Scientist Admits Climate Model Shortcomings
Another government scientist — NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt — admitted last week that the “chaotic component of climate system…is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically.”
Schmidt made his admission during a June 29, 2009 interview about the shortcomings of climate models. Schmidt noted that some climate models “suggest very strongly” that the American Southwest will dry in a warming world. But Schmidt also noted that “other models suggest the exact opposite.”
“With these two models, you have two estimates — one says it’s going to get wetter and one says it’s going to get drier. What do you do? Is there anything that you can say at all? That is a really difficult question,” Schmidt conceded.
“The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don’t anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can’t predict — the chaotic component of the climate system — which is not predictable beyond two …
‘Report is worse than fiction, it is a lie!’ — Climate expert rejects claim of 300,000 climate deaths as ‘methodological embarrassment’ – ‘Absurd’
Roger Pielke Jr. May 29, 2009 Excerpt: The new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which makes the absurd claim that 315,000 deaths a year can be attributed to the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. […]
It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed. […]
The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie. These are strong words I know. […] Let me first start by noting that the same group that did the analysis for the UN, the Geo-Risks group in Munich Re, earlier this year published a peer-reviewed paper arguing that the signal of human-caused climate change could not presently be seen in the loss data on disasters.
For Pielke Jr.’s complete analysis see here:
More Reaction to 300,000 climate death claim:
‘Simplistic disaster storyline will prevail for some time’
‘Dishonesty’: ‘Just transfers deaths by storms to the ‘global warming’ category’
Update: Kofi Annan defends: 300,000 climate death claim ‘could never be as rigorous as a scientific study’ – Excerpt: ‘We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today’
NY Times: ‘There are significant questions about robustness of numbers at heart of ‘ claim of 300,000 climate deaths – Excerpt: ‘Nearly impossible to isolate contribution from human-induced climate change to mortality from disasters’
‘There are simply no words to describe the lunacy’
Not The First False Claim About 300,000 Deaths
300,000 death claim is ‘poster child for how to lie with statistics’
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