[Meeting the Convening Lead Author, Southwestern States Chapter, National Climate Assessment at NMSU’s Climate Change lecture.]
This post is in four sections: before Convening Lead Author Dr Gregg Garfin arrived at NMSU, the lecture itself, the question I asked during the “Q and A” session and concluding thoughts. There is also an addendum.
[Dr Gutzler conducted the 1 March 2018 “Lush and Lean” water conservation workshop in Las Cruces in the Roadrunner Room of the Branigan Library from 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM: About an hour-long lecture of 21 Slides, followed by questions and answers. The nominal topic was, “Learn about projecting future water supplies in a rapidly changing climate.” I prepared this memo the next day, 2 March 2018 and have edited it a bit in the time since. I provide it in this post as a small part of the overall climate debate.]
Overall Gutzler did only a fair job explaining the development of the present La Nina and the present and impending drought conditions; I rate it as ‘only fair’ because he did not mention either the 2016 El Nino or features of El Nino-Southern Oscillation, he mentioned the Pacific Decadal Oscillation but did not explain it, or it’s 60-year periodicity.
Dr. Gutzler devoted perhaps only 5 minutes to the “increasing greenhouse gasses are causing anthropogenic climate change,” but this point was the last one in the three points he emphasized in his concluding slide.
[This is a reprint of a blog from the Friends of Science web site by Grégoire Canlorbe. This post originally appeared on Friends of Science and also on Grégoire Canlorbe’s site. We are reprinting it with the permission of Dr. Willie Soon and the author, Grégoire Canlorbe. ed]
Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.
Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?
A significant weather system which affects the globe was not even discovered until the 1970s, perhaps because it is stronger in the Southern Hemisphere than the Northern. This system, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, is an area of enhanced rainfall with these characteristics:
The enhanced precipitation anomaly starts in the Indian Ocean; it always moves eastward, and usually moves from Indian Ocean into mid-Pacific at speeds of 9-19 Miles/Hour. In addition to the enhanced precipitation area itself, there is an associated area of suppressed precipitation, an out-of-phase area ahead of it, usually way out ahead of it. The disturbed weather areas usually last 30 to sometimes 90 days.
[Ed. Dr. Roy Spencer wrote a post (22 March 2018) disagreeing with Lord Monckton’s theory that climate scientists have over-estimated feedback by a factor of 2, because they have been using the feedback equations incorrectly. Dr. Spencer agrees with the factor of 2 error, but he disagrees with the reason given by Lord Monckton. In response, Lord Monckton has countered Dr. Spencer’s argument with a post of his own on Spencer’s blog. The original Spencer post can be found here with Lord Monckton’s counter argument here.]
A recent article by Lord Christopher Monckton over at WUWT argues that there has been an “elementary error of physics” that has led to climate sensitivity being overestimated by about a factor of 2.
I agree with the conclusion but not the reason why. It is already known from the work of Otto et al. (2013), Lewis & Curry (2015) and others that the climate system (including the deep oceans) has warmed by an amount that suggests a climate sensitivity only about half of what the models produce (AR5 models warm by an average of 3.4 deg. C in response to a doubling of CO2).
But the potential reasons why are many, and as far as I can tell not dependent upon Christopher’s arguments. For those who don’t know, Lord Monckton is a pretty talented mathematician. However, like others I have encountered over the years, I believe he errs in his assumptions about how the climate research community uses — and does or does not depend upon — the concept of feedback in climate modeling. Continue reading “Climate F-Words”