The gathering storm (2)

I see that Piers Corbyn has started to make a bit of a habit of predicting the future, ie actually issuing forecasts prior to their validation time. While this is potentially a much more impressive feat than his previous habit of painting Texas bullseyes round the handful of events that happened to coincide with statements, selected a posteriori, that he claimed to have made some time somewhere in private, it is also riskier when repeated hysterical claims of devastation fail to be borne out. On with the game...

On the 2nd Dec he said:

Two more serious storm periods are forecast by WeatherAction for December:- Around
5th-9th and around 23rd to 26th. The 23rd-26th is likley to include storms as severe or
more severe than this one.

"this one" referred to an existing storm that he described as having "damaging winds and exceptionally heavy seas"

On the 25th Dec he said:

Update of Forecast of Storm activity during the period Dec 23^rd/24^th to 25^th/26^{th .}

^{The current situation is interesting and present forecast maps (noon 24 Dec) are not yet showing developments which are likely to occur.}

[...]

the Christmas storm is likely to be more severe and potentially more damaging –particularly to Western parts of Britain (and Europe) - than anything experienced this November / December so far or since the storms of 1987 or 1990. The Christmas storm also coincides with full moon high tides on 24^th December hence sea defences will be threatened.

Storm activity in the Atlantic and the Western British Isles is expected build up from the West from 19^th December and become significantly more ferocious and then pass through Britain during the period 23^rd/24^th to 25^th/26^th . Tornado activity is likely – probably in the South, and storm tide surges likely eg on the South coast and Bristol Channel and/or France – threatening sea defences. Top winds on land or coast in the 65mph- 95mph are likely, with higher winds associated with Storm 11 or Hurricane force 12 at sea.

Winds will be damaging, travel will be disrupted and power lines are likely to be bought down in places so it may be advisable for some in exposed parts to cook early for Christmas.

The Christmas storm will be followed after a lull by another stormy system attacking from the West just before the New Year.

Snow at Xmas?

The Great Christmas storm is likely to bring colder air from the North later so Piers Corbyn and associates with WeatherAction have staked £500 with William Hill for snow on Christmas day in parts of Scotland.

Oh dear.

I see that he is now talking about -17C temperatures in January, perhaps in the hope that this will distract people from remembering what he was saying just a few days ago.

The average temperature for January as a whole will be close to
freezing - 0.8C (33.4F) at best.

I look forward to seeing how that one pans out.

Update 8 Jan

Well Piers has sent out a rambling grumble that the press have over-hyped his prediction for January. Apparently he didn't say it was going to be one of the coldest Januaries in the past 100 years, he merely said it was going to be one of the coldest 6 Januaries in the past 100 years. Of course he has my full sympathies over this dreadful misrepresentation. It must be awful to have the press turn your words round to mean something so completely different... Their report of his actual temperature prediction above stands unchallenged.

Interestingly, the BBC monthly weather review is up for December, and inexplicably there is no mention of this dreadful Christmas storm that Piers "correctly" predicted. Perhaps everyone was cowering indoors and unable to take the measurements :-)

And finally, Piers has helpfully told us that January will probably have a spell of bitingly cold Easterly winds. I'll top that with my own personal prediction that January 2018 will also have such a spell...anyone want to bet?

Ratty New Year

As I've mentioned before, the Japanese New Year is centred on mochi roulette with a spot of kamikaze mountaineering.

This year was no exception, sadly.

Actually, most people laze around for a week eating and drinking too much, but that is too mundane to blog about.

Much of the motivation for the winter mountaineering seems to be the desire to see the first sunrise of the year from a summit (and best of all, from the top of Fuji) but we don't have the necessary genetic inheritance for that particular foible and settled on visiting a mountain called Hinode (sunrise). It's the thought that counts, after all. We didn't even go on the first, but waited until yesterday. We did get up before sunrise if that helps.


Behind jules, the neighbouring mountain of Mitake-san has a little village on top. It has a shrine, hotels, shops and restaurants, some roads and even a fire station. Curious thing is...the road does not connect down to the bottom of the valley, so presumably all the vehicles are carried up and down on the cable car! Needless to say, we walked, and earned our reward of a soak in the onsen near the train station at the end.

Curiously, just like two years ago when we met a dog right at the start of the year of the dog, we saw some rats at the start of the year of the rat. I'd better leave before the year of the dragon!

When is a democracy not a democracy (2)?

"Well, they probably don't have that many Oxford graduates to choose from" says jules.

(That's with reference to Benazir Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal was catapulted into the maelstrom of Pakistani politics yesterday, appointed leader of her party just three days after the assassination that plunged the country into chaos, of course)

Chylek on sensitivity

Another one of this strange collection of papers has an odd attempt to estimate climate sensitivity by Chylek et al, which has recently been published.

They start from the familiar zero-dimensional energy balance

(1) dH/dt = F - l.T

where H is the total heat anomaly (dominated by ocean heat uptake), F is the forcing anomaly and T the surface temperature anomaly (note that my notation is slightly different from theirs). Here l = 1/S is the radiative feedback parameter, the inverse of climate sensitivity S. At equilibrium, the LHS of equation (1) is zero and so the formula T = F/l gives the equilibrium temperature change for a given forcing.

Chylek cites Raper et al (2002) to justify the substitution

(2) dH/dt = k.T

where k is a constant. This is slightly different from the "effective heat capacity" approach of Schwartz: in this expression, the rate of heat uptake is assumed proportional to the surface temperature anomaly, whereas for Schwartz, the heat content is assumed proportional to surface temp anomaly - with heat content being the integral of heat uptake over time. This expression that Chylek uses may be a reasonable approximation during an experiment in which the forcing is increasing steadily (as Raper et al state), but is clearly not valid in general, as we shall see shortly. (For reference, Raper et al apply their analysis to the standard test case in which the CO2 level increases at 1% per year and all other forcing are held fixed.)

Substituting (2) in (1), we get

(3) k.T = F - l.T

which can be differentiated (or finite-differenced) with respect to time to get

(4) k.DT = DF - l.DT

where the D indicates the decadal trend (it's a greek Delta in Chylek et al).

This can be rearranged to give

(5) S = 1/l = DT/(DF - k.DT)

which is the expression that Chylek use to diagnose S using data from the past decade.

But it is immediately obvious that this expression will have some problems when used to diagnose S over an arbitrary interval. For example, if we take a decade over which the net forcing does not change, then DF = 0 and from equation (5) we get

(6) S = DT/(0 - k.DT) = -1/k

unless DT is also zero (in which case the expression is undefined) which is implausible to say the least. So something odd is going on here. Let's look a little closer...

Stepping back to equation (3), we can rearrange it to give:

(7) T = F/(l+k)

which implies that (in order for the equation to be valid) the surface temperature must always be directly proportional to the forcing - with constant of proportionality 1/(l+k) - and thus is instantaneously in equilibrium with the forcing, with no lag.

However, we started off with the zero-dimensional energy balance (1) which as I already pointed out has the equilibrium solution

(8) T = F/l

These latter two expressions (7) and (8) are only compatible if k=0 (which it certainly isn't, and Chylek never claim it is).

So we have a contradiction here. The fundamental problem is that the expression dH/dt = k.T is only a plausible approximation under certain circumstances. Chylek's formula (5) cannot be used as a general expression to diagnose the sensitivity of the climate system, as it gives nonsensical answers when forcing does not follow a steadily-increasing profile such as that of the CMIP (1% pa) experiments. There is no justification in their paper as to why their expression should be accurate when applied over the last decade, and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it fails to usefully diagnose sensitivity when applied to GCM output such as that in the AR4 database (I've not bothered to do this).

So in the absence of any evidence that their method actually works, it's hard to take their results seriously. I haven't even started to talk about how sensitive their calculation is to natural variability noise, which they have not accounted for either.

When is a democracy not a democracy?

When half the ruling party (and 8 out of 10 recent prime ministers) have inherited their seats:

After the last election, 185 of 480 Diet members (39 percent) were second- or third- (or more) generation politicians ('seshuu seijika'). Of 244 members of the LDP (the ruling party for practically the entire postwar period), 126 (52 percent) are seshuu seijika. Likewise eight of the last 10 prime ministers, and around half the Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda Cabinets. When the average turnover of lawmakers per election is only around 3 percent, you have what can only be termed a political class.

Debito is a bit in-your-face but rarely significantly wrong in his facts, so I see no reason to doubt these figures. I'd be interested to hear of equivalent stats for other countries. I know that in the UK "Fatty" Soames is related to Churchill, for example. And of course the USA has its dynasties of Bushes, Kennedys and Clintons (although perhaps the last ones were both destined for politics before they got together). There's a Mussolini in Italy, but I can't help but think that the fame of these few cases may be a sign of their relative rarity.

Egypt 'to copyright antiquities'

Correspondents say the law will deal a blow to themed resorts across the world where large-scale copies of Egyptian artefacts are a crowd-puller.

This correspondent says the law is a joke or political stunt that will have no effect outside Egypt's borders. Obviously.

Hmm...on the other hand, maybe the Scottish parliament should charge worldwide royalties for users of pneumatic tyres, tarmac roads, televisions, bicycles, penicillin, and deep-fried Mars Bars...they'd probably have to go halves with Italy on deep-fried pizza though.

A Christmas Poem

Just thought I'd like to share this, from a collection of Christmas poems:

`Peace upon earth' was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass,
We've got as far as poison gas.

That was "Christmas: 1924" by Thomas Hardy. Happy turkey-stuffing to you all.

AGU: the science

OK, enough joking around. I was actually there for work, having received a generous invitation to present at the session on "Climate Sensitivity From Modeling, Current Observations, and Paleoclimate Data."

We've often thought about going to the AGU Fall Meeting, since while we are in Japan it's actually more convenient than the EGU, but never previously got round to it. The organisation is rather different to the EGU, and took a bit of getting used to. For some reason, the poster sessions are not clearly linked to their corresponding oral sessions (the code numbers indicate the section and the time, but eg there is no obvious link between U43A and U51B, despite them being posters and oral session on the same topic). They don't even arrange things in alphabetical order in the book. There is also no Climate section and very little Nonlinear Geophysics (the two most interesting sections in the EGU), but a whole lot of Paleoclimate.

Here are some highlights from my notes. Errors and omissions all mine, of course.

After a couple of paleoclimate talks first thing on Monday morning I ducked into a rather bizarre session entitled "Navigating a Career in the Geosciences: Strategies for Success." It started off with some important successful guy telling us how the rewards would come if we just put in enough hard work and perseverance and were prepared to take our chances. He told us his own life story of how there were not enough jobs in his PhD speciality, so he changed topics. Then he found funding hard to come by in his next field...so he changed again, becoming Director of NCAR. Why didn't we all think of that? The next presentation was a similar pep-talk from another senior professor about how great life was if only one persevered, but the last talk actually did have some useful content based on real research about what distinguishes the more successful from the less. But I'm hardly going to give away the secrets to you lot :-) One of the most important factors seemed to be the Y chromosome, which reliably distinguishes the "outstanding" from the merely "hard working" (Trix and Psenka, 2003). Later on that day, a session on extremes had Tom Knutson sounding rather sceptical about whether or not hurricanes were likely to increase much (and he thought it would take some time to see a signal in the data).

Tuesday morning started with a session on aerosols, not really my thing but I'd spotted both Schwartz and Chylek were presenting, so I turned up to listen. Steve Schwartz presented his sensitivity analysis, but admitted it had received a lot of criticism and he would not "bet the ranch" on it, which probably defused some potential criticisms (in the questions after someone did say that they thought his detrending was a dodgy step). Later on in the week I spoke to him in person, he said he'd just got our comment and hadn't yet planned his reply. Petr Chylek presented a somewhat similar paper from in the same special issue of JGR (guest editor: P Chylek) which I'll probably blog about in more detail later. I got the impression of a bit of a clique separate from mainstream climate science here. Someone in the audience actually asked where they might get the opposing point of view. It wasn't 100% clear what they meant by "opposing", but one good answer might be chapters 9 and 10 of the IPCC AR4 WG1, or indeed the whole book. There was also a session concerning use of the multimodel ensemble (ie the AR4 runs), which I am getting interested in. In fact there were a few sessions with this sort of flavour that during the week.

After 2 consecutive 10h days and fairly late nights, Wednesday morning had nothing much of interest so we had a lie-in (and tested the crappy hotel gym). The afternoon had some stuff on ocean tracers, including some adjustments to the ocean heat content data, and also estimates of ocean mixing based on various other tracers (tritium from bombs, helium from the mantle). This is something I've tried to point out to some climate sensitivity estimation people who claim that we can't say much about the ocean mixing rate (and thus heat uptake, which affects climate sensitivity estimates) because the temperature data are so uncertain. Even if the direct measurements of temperature are uncertain, we have other evidence about the mixing rate, which they studiously choose to ignore!

Thursday morning had some fun stuff on carbon sequestration, including various air capture schemes. I'm not really convinced that these make sense, but I've nothing against their consideration. Rather than harvesting and burying biomass, it might be simpler to just use it for energy in place of the fossil fuels. In the afternoon we had the exciting session on "Tipping points", which started off with a well-attended talk by Jim Hansen. He didn't actually talk about tipping points in much detail but argued for a rapid halt to coal use (unless sequestration-enabled).

Friday morning was our big thrill of the week, with presentations in the session on climate sensitivity. I was due to talk 2nd up, immediately after Jim Hansen, which (as is generally the case in these situations) I presumed would mean a mass exodus throughout my talk. I consoled myself with the thought that at least most would hear the start of it. Anyway, we arrived bright and early, checked that our presentations were set up and bagged good seats. At about 8:02 the convenor stood up, and said that she was very very sorry, but unfortunately Jim Hansen's presentation wasn't ready yet, so we would have to start with the 2nd presentation! Well at least that saved me another 15 minutes of nerves, and since Hansen's presentation was "in the pipeline" people didn't have time to run out for a coffee so I had a packed house. When initially invited, I'd really planned to steal jules' paleo work and talk about that, but then she also got a talking slot in the same session so I had to leave that in her hands and revamped the "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity" stuff instead. I had some fun reading a bit of Steven Goodman's Nature letter ("This technique would be a wonderful contribution to science were it not based on a patently fallacious argument, almost as old as probability itself") against a back-drop of quotes from the recent climate science literature all claiming that uniform priors represent a state of pure ignorance (this of course being the patently fallacious argument Goodman was ridiculing). Lest anyone think I was picking on anyone in particular, I quoted from 3 papers from largely different groups, plus an extract from the Nobel-winning consensus of 2500 climate scientists otherwise known as the IPCC AR4. However I had noticed that Myles Allen was supposed to be talking straight after me, and I was disappointed that he did not attend and defend his beliefs. I guess if I keep on turning up to the major conferences we can't continue to miss each other indefinitely. The rest of the session had a mix of old and new stuff, nothing too revolutionary. We wound down with a session on geoengineering which was fun.

Nameable names that I met for the first time (mostly very briefly) included, in no particular order: Steve Schwartz, Ray Pierrehumbert, Michael Tobis, Michael Mann and of course there were numerous others I've met before. The weather was great and SF is easily the nicest city I've visited in the USA (not that I'm very well travelled over there) so we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. On scientific grounds, I think I prefer the EGU, but maybe that is partly a matter of familiarity.

sci-wimmin

Apparently women scientists are all very very unhappy. James pointed me to the "I am woman I do science and I'm not telling you my name" blogs. I even subscribed to one. But I'm giving it up. I find it boring. I'm not sure if it's the anonymity or the boasting about how great their science is that bores me most. Or is it really that I just don't share any of their experiences?

As far as I can make out they all live in countries which actually have anti-discrimination laws, where many women can have careers, by which I mean not just a job with no prospects where they are treated basically as slave labour and blamed for everything which goes wrong. In fact it seems that in their countries any women with a degree can expect to have some sort of career! wow!

I was really starting to wonder how can they bear to almost everyday write another post about every perceived unfairness in their lives when I came across this post.

And it was at that point I realised that for the last 6 years I have been living their dream. I'm not very girly by nature. Once a year I go away to the "Women's Conference" at Amagi Sanso to see what women are like. I really enjoy that, especially since it is only 2 days long. Americans are so noisy! :-) My status here is foreigner first and woman, well - I don't really count as one of them at all. Luckily. Women in Japan get a really bad deal. Here I am treated equally with James. This was not how it was in the UK, but to be honest I think their problem was more that they liked to put all their workers into little boxes ... and the memory is fading.

Everyone here takes my scientific opinion as seriously as anyone else's - actually more seriously in some ways, because I'm a Westerner. And yes, all you girls, who so sadly have never experienced this, it's great. After a while you start to get less angry, less shrill, and to take people as you find them. You start to think before you speak because you realise that when you speak people will listen and act! That bit is a real shock the first few 100 times it happens. So, bloggy sci-wimmin with side degrees in wimmin's stuff, please come to Japan - Japan seriously needs feminism! Well I think it does - the Japanese female workforce is seriously under-employed, and by the same token the men are employed above their natural station. I tried pointing out to my female friends that Japan is 91st in the world in male-female equality but they didn't seem to react at all to the news... which was very puzzling. Bring in the pros!

jules

A puzzle

Here's something to keep you amused while I compose my summary of the AGU. It's from one of the presentations I attended.


The left hand side shows global mean surface temperature from an 800 year integration of a well-known climate model (click on the pic for a larger version). The puzzle is to identify what the colour changes represent, and what caused the climate change. The right hand pic (from the IPCC AR4) is simply to provide some context on the vertical scale, it has no direct relevance to the puzzle - note the horizontal scales aren't the same either.

Those who actually know the answer are invited to not answer too soon, so others can have the fun of trying to work it out.