GWPF | 25 Feb 2016
Global News Media Ignore Inconvenient Research Findings
A new paper put out by a group of scientists — including Michael Mann of “hockey stick” curve fame — has debunked a controversial National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report from last year claiming global warming has accelerated faster than surface temperature readings have shown. The debunking comes as congressional investigators demand government climate bureaucrats turn over emails and documents related to the “hiatus”-busting study. House science committee Republicans sent a letter to NOAA, slamming the agency for dragging its feet and trying to skirt transparency. –Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 25 February 2016
A new paper published yesterday in Nature Climate Change confirms that the so-called global warming hiatus between 1997 and 2014 was real and that claims that it has been overstated or never existed are untrue. “It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.” Most of the world’s major news outlets that reported last year that the warming hiatus never existed have so far ignored the new findings. It will be interesting to see how long they will keep mum. —Global Warming Policy Forum, 25 February 2016
1) NOAA In Trouble As Scientists Debunk Attempt To Eliminate The Hiatus
The Daily Caller, 25 February 2016
2) Hide The Hiatus: Global News Media Ignore Inconvenient Research Findings
Global Warming Policy Forum, 25 February 2016
3) Global Warming Hiatus Is Real
Reason Online, 24 February 2016
4) Lord Stern: Current Climate Models Are Grossly Misleading
Bishop Hill, 25 February 2016
5) Are Most Peer-Reviewed Social Psychology Findings False?
Heterodox Academy, 23 February 2016
Last June, Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann crowed: “Just out in Science is a new article by Tom Karl of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and colleagues driving another stake through the heart of the supposed “hiatus” or “pause,” i.e. what I like to call the “Faux Pause.” I expect this article will be attacked by climate change deniers who are unhappy to see the demise of a narrative they helped frame, a narrative that arguably took hold due in part to the “seepage” of contrarian framing into mainstream climate science discourse.” Mann is now a co-author on the new study that pulls that stake out. Has Mann become climate change “denier” now? Hardly. — Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 24 February 2016
You know all that money we have been spending on developing economic models of the effects of climate change? Well apparently it has mostly been wasted. At least that’s the case according to Lord Stern, whose article in the sociology journal Nature says that we should be moving onto something more reliable. It’s also interesting to see stochastic modelling being touted in a week when climatologists have been outraged by a suggestion that such an approach might be useful in their own field. — Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 25 February 2016
Over the last decade, Nick Stern has received tens of millions of pounds in research funding. Why did he not just build the models he wants? Where did all that money go? The leading researchers in the economics of climate change have turned their backs on model building. Research has decidedly moved to empirical analyses. –Richard Tol, Bishop Hill, 25 February 2016
Social psychology is in crisis because no one knows what to believe anymore. The journals are now filled with failed replication after failed replication. Published studies once believed to demonstrate all sorts of amazing world-changing pervasive effects have not been replicated by other researchers. Some of the most famous and most influential effects in social psychology have been called into question not only by failed replication after failed replication, but by revelations of questionable methodological, statistical, and interpretive practices. How will we figure out what, from the vast storehouse of nearly a century of social psychological research, is actually valid and believable? To me, there is a single, crucial ingredient for figuring this out: Diversity of viewpoints and deep skepticism of one another’s claims. Groupthink and deference to prestigious scientific “authorities” and to repeated “scientific” stories resting on empirical feet of unclear firmness is the enemy. –Lee Jussim, Heterodox Academy, 23 February 2016
1) NOAA In Trouble As Scientists Debunk Attempt To Eliminate The Hiatus
The Daily Caller, 25 February 2016
Michael Bastasch
So, there really hasn’t been much global warming lately. Scientists have debunked a controversial government climate report from last year claiming the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming never actually existed.
A new paper put out by a group of scientists — including Michael Mann of “hockey stick” curve fame — has debunked a controversial National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report from last year claiming global warming has accelerated faster than surface temperature readings have shown.
“Overall, there is compelling evidence that there has been a temporary slowdown in observed global surface warming,” Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading and co-author of the paper, wrote in a blog post on the new research.
Hawkins noted that “the most recent observed 15-year trends are all positive, but lower than most previous similar trends in the past few decades” which is a “clear demonstration that the rate of change has slowed since its peak.”
The debunking comes as congressional investigators demand government climate bureaucrats turn over emails and documents related to the “hiatus”-busting study. House science committee Republicans sent a letter to NOAA, slamming the agency for dragging its feet and trying to skirt transparency.
“While I appreciate that NOAA has started to comply in part with the Committee’s lawful subpoena, I am disappointed with the slow pace and limited scope of the Agency’s production,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith ×
wrote in a letter to NOAA Monday obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Smith, who chairs the House science committee, has for months been seeking documents related to NOAA’s 2015 study claiming to have eliminated the global warming “hiatus” from the temperature record. The study was highly controversial and immediately criticized for making drastic adjustments to surface temperature data.
But NOAA has not been forthcoming with all the information Smith’s office has requested from the agency regarding the study. At first, NOAA claimed it would not release any emails from scientists, trying to create a narrative that Smith’s aim was to basically harass government researchers.
Smith fired back and continued to press the agency for documents, eventually getting them to agree to have political staff and scientists be interviewed by congressional investigators. Then things heated up when a whistleblower told Smith the study in question was “rushed” and was published “before all appropriate reviews of the underlying science.”
In light of this, NOAA agreed to hand over emails from non-scientists to the committee. But even now, Smith is worried NOAA’s allowing of employees to search their own emails for records under narrow guidelines is hampering his investigation.
“On numerous occasions, NOAA has miscommunicated delivery dates of document productions and has seemingly stalled its efforts to comply with the Committee’s subpoena,” Smith wrote.
The NOAA study published last year by climate scientist Tom Karl, argued “[n]ewly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus.’”
Now, scientists have published work calling into question Karl’s research.
“We’re presenting results to support previous findings of reduced rates of surface warming,” John Fyfe, a climate scientist with the Canadian government who worked on the paper, told Climate Central. “That essentially refutes the Karl et al. paper.”
2) Hide The Hiatus: Global News Media Ignore Inconvenient Research Findings
Global Warming Policy Forum, 25 February 2016
A new paper published yesterday in Nature Climate Change confirms that the so-called global warming hiatus between 1997 and 2014 was real and that claims that it has been overstated or never existed are untrue:
“It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.”
Annual mean and global mean surface temperature anomalies; source Nature Climate Change 24 Feb 2016
Most of the world’s major news outlets that reported last year that the warming hiatus never existed have so far ignored the new findings. It will be interesting to see how long they will keep mum.
3) Global Warming Hiatus Is Real
Reason Online, 24 February 2016
Ronald Bailey
Lots of climate researchers and climate change activists have been discombobulated by the fact that global average temperature increases have been considerably slower during the first years of this century than most climate models projected. There have been scores of studies that have tried to explain away this inconvenient fact. One of the more heralded studies was published by researchers associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in June, 2015. That study eliminated the hiatus by controversially adjusting ocean temperature data derived from robot buoys to match earlier data temperature data taken by ocean-going ships.
Now a group of climate researchers in Nature Climate Change have published an article, “Making sense of the early-2000s warming,” that argues the hiatus is real and not well understood. Interestingly, it includes as co-authors some of the more prominent climate researchers who have challenged the notion of the “pause.” For example, last June, Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann crowed:
Just out in Science is a new article by Tom Karl of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and colleagues driving another stake through the heart of the supposed “hiatus” or “pause,” i.e. what I like to call the “Faux Pause.”
I expect this article will be attacked by climate change deniers who are unhappy to see the demise of a narrative they helped frame, a narrative that arguably took hold due in part to the “seepage” of contrarian framing into mainstream climate science discourse.
Mann is now a co-author on the new study that pulls that stake out:
It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.
Has Mann become climate change “denier” now? Hardly.
About the new study, Nature News reports:
The latest salvo in an ongoing row over global-warming trends claims that warming has indeed slowed down this century.
An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.
Now a prominent group of researchers is countering that claim, arguing in Nature Climate Change that even after correcting these biases the slowdown was real. “There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”
Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory.
A graph comparing climate model projections, a.k.a., Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CIMP5) with satellite data from Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama in Huntsville is most illuminating. See below.
Overlapping trend in the temperature of the lower troposphere (TLT), spatially averaged over the near-global (82.5°N, 70°S) coverage of two satellite-based datasets; model results are from 41 simulations of historical climate change performed with 28 CMIP-5 models, with RCP8.5 extensions from 2005. Peaks in the running 15-year trends centred around 2000 reflect recovery from the Pinatubo eruption in 1991.
4) Lord Stern: Current Climate Models Are Grossly Misleading
Bishop Hill, 25 February 2016
Andrew Montford
You know all that money we have been spending on developing economic models of the effects of climate change? Well apparently it has mostly been wasted. A
t least that’s the case according to Lord Stern, whose article in the sociology journal Nature says that we should be moving onto something more reliable.
Because the IAMs omit so many of the big risks, SCC estimates are often way too low. As a first step, the consequences being assessed should include the damages to human well-being and loss of life beyond simply reduced economic output. And the very large uncertainty, usually involving downward bias, in SCC estimates should always be made explicit…
A comprehensive review of the problems of using IAMs in climate economics called for the research community to develop a “third wave” of models. The authors identify various types of model that might offer advances. Two are: dynamic stochastic computable general equilibrium (DSGE) models, and agent-based models (ABMs).
It’s also interesting to see stochastic modelling being touted in a week when climatologists have been outraged by a suggestion that such an approach might be useful in their own field.
5) And FinallyAre Most Peer-Reviewed Social Psychology Findings False?
Heterodox Academy, 23 February 2016
Lee Jussim
Social psychology is in crisis because no one knows what to believe anymore. The journals are now filled with failed replication after failed replication. Published studies once believed to demonstrate all sorts of amazing world-changing pervasive effects have not been replicated by other researchers. And the issues go well beyond failed replications. Or, put differently, some of the most famous and most influential effects in social psychology have been called into question not only by failed replication after failed replication, but by revelations of questionable methodological, statistical, and interpretive practices.
What does this have to with HeterodoxAcademy? Isn’t this just methodological arcania, the equivalent of “inside baseball” for social psychologists? Not at all. Heterodox is about political diversity, but it is not only about political diversity. It is also about intellectual diversity. Intellectual diversity is crucial for solving difficult problems because it deflates the intellectual arrogance of those who think they know the answers, despite a lack of evidence. As Abraham Loeb put it, in an article in Nature:Physics on astronomy (not politics or the social sciences), “Uniformity of opinion is sterile; the co-existence of multiple ideas cultivates competition and progress.”
Difficult to replicate studies similarly deflate arrogance, or at least they should, and, therefore, should ultimately lead to a stronger and more sound science. However, deflating arrogance is one thing, declaring it all or mostly bunk is quite another. The first step, then, is to figure out how bad it actually is in social psychology. […]
How will we figure out what, from the vast storehouse of nearly a century of social psychological research, is actually valid and believable? How can we distinguish dramatic, world-changing results that are just hype, terrific story-telling, researchers torturing the data till they confess, wishful thinking and, ultimately, snake oil, from dramatic world-changing results that we can really hang our hats on and go out and change the world with? No one really knows yet, and anyone who claims they do, without having subjected their claims to skeptical tests such as p curves, replication indices, and pre-registered replication attempts is just selling you repackaged snake oil.
To me, there is a single, crucial ingredient for figuring this out: Diversity of viewpoints and deep skepticism of one another’s claims. When answers are not settled science – and much of social psychology is currently unsettled – diversity and skepticism are essential tools for ferreting out truth from hype, signal from noise, real world-changing results from snake oil.
Groupthink and deference to prestigious scientific “authorities” and to repeated “scientific” stories resting on empirical feet of unclear firmness is the enemy
