BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Cloudy lock-in

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk

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Cloudy lock-in Posted: 23 Mar 2014 03:20 PM PDT Some scientific meetings, like the EGU or AGU, are attended by thousands and open to anyone prepared to pay the registration fee. Then there are the other sort of meeting; workshops. My fertile imagination likes to call them, “lock-ins”, as it sometimes seems like the plan is to get 30 or so scientists together, lock them in a castle, and only unlock the door when they have achieved something. In this case, my imagination is closer than usual to being literally true. Here’s the castle, My bedroom is on the 3rd floor of this tower! It is also snowing, which is quite fitting as it not only adds to the feeling of isolation (some attendees arrived un-Germanly late after braving the elements) but all this cloud fits in very well with the theme of the workshop – clouds, circulation and climate sensitivity.

[jules' pics] Scottish flowers

Unlike England, Scotland has flowers other than snowdrops!! And they are colourful!
camellia!!
gorse


Yes - that top one really is camellia!! Here is a close up to prove it. Two months too late, but still...


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 3/22/2014 02:58:00 PM

Sawyer's "remarkably accurate" forecast

Spotted this in the Guardian, not sure what provoked it, but never mind. The claim is that a paper published in 1972 made a remarkably accurate prediction of 0.6C, and this proves we've understood the climate system really well for a long time.

Well.

For starters, it should be pretty obvious that if people published enough random papers, some would (with hindsight) turn out to be close to correct. That in itself would hardly prove prescience, although it might be hard to refute a claim by the lucky one. See also investment analysts who claim to be able to "beat the market"...

But I'm not going to go looking for all the silly forecasts that were wide of the mark, which there surely were - people are still churning them out, remember Lovelock's few remaining breeding pairs of humans, or Bryden's AMOC shutdown, or Keenlyside's cooling? - but merely evaluate the Sawyer paper on its merits. Found courtesy of wmconnolley.org.uk the paper doesn't really seem to have much original research, but repackages other work in what looks more like a commentary. He uses Manabe and Wetherald's climate sensitivity estimate of 2.4C, and a predicted increase in CO2 of 25%, to get a warming of 0.25*2.4 = 0.6C by the end of the (20th) century.

While the final number ended up pretty close, there are a number of assumptions/approximations/errors (take your pick) in that calculation. Firstly, there are other forcings! The IPCC AR5 lists other factors which in total magnitude exceed the CO2 effect, though the positives and negatives broadly cancel. But Sawyer doesn't consider them at all. Secondly, the logarithmic effect of CO2 means that a 25% increase should equate to a 32% of the effect of a doubling, which would work out at 0.8C...not a huge difference in forecast, but a big difference in level of understanding! Lastly (perhaps) there is also the small issue of equilibrium versus transient response - the thermal inertia of the ocean means there's a chunk more warming in the pipeline, probably about a third as much again. All these values have substantial uncertainty even now, of course - and although I'd say the the 2.4C sensitivity value still looks pretty good, others disagree and at best it was a lucky guess to get it right back then.

So all in all, it looks like he made a number of significant errors which end up cancelling out, thus resulting in a forecast that hit the bullseye much more closely than can have been reasonably expected.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Internet

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk

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Internet Posted: 21 Mar 2014 08:49 AM PDT After 2 months in the internet wilderness, we are finally online properly. The constraint to this particular problem was that, while we look for somewhere else to live, we are staying with my Dad who has dial-up, and doesn’t want to change. We started sharing one laptop (and some iPads) that we brought with us in December. We bought a monthly contract internet dongle on the Three network, which seems to be the network with the best coverage here, although it isn’t brilliant. Then James thought he wanted a phone so we moved to a cheap smart phone with wifi hotspot capabilities. We discovered that it is easy to buy things through Three, but not so easy to downgrade. They let you do it but only after subjecting you to about 20 minutes of sales banter, which is apparently obligatory for the telephone monkeys to read out. Three could learn a lot from the case-by-case basis approach of most Japanese companies. Anyway, the mobile phone was OK while we had one laptop, but when the desktop arrived in the shipment from Japan, the phone couldn’t keep up with two people trying to connect at the same time. We quickly realised that we had to find some broadband, but we didn’t want to sign a long contract as we are not really planning on staying here very long. James found that Zen Internet offer 1 months contracts! We signed up. But it didn’t work! This didn’t really come as a surprise, as we are located at the end of a quarter of a mile of phone line that had never carried broadband. Zen Internet help desk were actually extremely good. They were, however, rather frightened of calling out the telephone engineer, as BT charge 180 UKP for an unnecessary callout, so they wanted us to test the modem they had sent. A week later we had successfully done this by plugging it in at the mother-in-law’s up on Scotland. Then the engineer visited, literally jiggled a cable at the exchange half a mile away in the village, and, suddenly, we have internets! It started at 4.5Mbps, and has now risen to 6.8Mbps. That’s several times faster than we had at home in Japan! Not bad when we only have sheep, grass, trees and bunnies for 500m or more in all directions. And Dad still has his dial-up. Through our collaboration with Bristol University (we are now official visiting researchers there) we have access to online journals through their very clever library proxy service. I am not sure how it works, but it does not seem to slow things down at all (except for when I switch it off and my iPad refuses to believe it is still online). Being a university they have access to a wider range of journals than we could access at JAMSTEC. So, just 2 or 3 months of papers to catch up on now! There are still plenty of distractions for those days when the sky approaches a blue colour, so it is perhaps fortunate that those blue-sky days are quite rare.

[jules' pics] Scottish sea

Ailsa Craig (it's geology)

Beach

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 3/21/2014 02:58:00 PM

[jules' pics] Amadeus the Amaryllis

Sorry for the lack of pickturs. As James suggests, a slow intertube is a big disincentive, but also, most of the photos I have been taking recently are quick snaps of the inside and outside of other peoples' houses, which one can hardly then go and put on flickr. We realise now that we have always previously cheated the housing problem by having the constraint of living within a 35-45 minute tandem bicycle ride of work. Now the home is the workplace, the problem is unconstrained! However, James has decided that we should settle close to Settle. Hopefully this is a sufficient constraint to make the housing problem tractable.

Meanwhile, Amadeus, the Amaryllis which the Mother In Law gave me for Christmas, has flowered. Dad is mightily impressed and says he has never seen anything like it. Neither have I, except, of course, at the mansion of the green fingered Mother In Law.

Budding
Flowering
The powdery bits


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 3/08/2014 06:17:00 PM

"Pause" blah

I've got lots of bits and pieces to write about, so this will probably turn out to be a fairly incoherent blog post as I don't have time to write a concise and structured one. We are still struggling to obtain a proper broadband connection, though the end (one way or the other) might be in sight with a BT engineer visit planned for next week.

We had a brief visit to Bristol last week - sorry to those we had promised to contact, but it was a chance to see two different people on the same rather busy day, so we jumped at it. We are now both officially "visiting collaborators" of some sort there which is nice, the main practical benefit is library access (inc remotely), and perhaps also the right to a cup of coffee in the staff common room? So hopefully we'll be back on an occasional basis in the future. This is all as a follow-up to Paul Valdes' sabbatical visit to Japan last year, from which joint work is still ongoing.

The "pause" discussion continues (see RC for a summary of recent coverage), which seems a bit silly to me, because it isn't really a "pause" at all, just a continued anthropogenically-forced warming with some other (anthropogenic and natural) forcings and internal variability added on, such that the trend is a little lower than most expected.  Of course idiots will continue to play the "down the up escalator" game indefinitely, but I don't feel the need to play with them. I'm usually happy to let the "communicators" duke it out on the most politically correct way to present the science, but perhaps they could start by not using a term that's factually wrong.

There are many possible causes for the model-data discrepancy: the forcings might have been more negative than anticipated, or perhaps natural variability has a bit more negative recently, and just possibly the forced response is a little lower than (most) models predicted. I'm a little surprised to see people like Gavin apparently nailing his colours to the mast of the models being right, for one thing, his calculations (which may be mildly optimistic) only explain "most" of the model-data discrepancy, and it is worth noting that since the natural forcings and internal variability are relatively transient and short-term in nature, this view implies a substantial future near-term acceleration in order for the world to catch up with where the models say we should be. All model simulations show only a very gradual rise in underlying trend, and it is worth mentioning (to those who think that climate scientists have been slow to discuss this) that back in about 2006 I was pointing out to the authors of the IPCC AR4 drafts that the model trends were already starting to look a little high relative to recent observations. This acceleration has been promised "just around the corner" for a long time now, I'm happy to give people like Hansen a bit of a pass on his 1984 work because it was so groundbreaking (and substantially correct), but it's now starting to feel like people are scrabbling around trying to find excuses. I even think I saw some wag in a recent paper (sorry I forgot where) arguing that there were so many excuses for a lack of warming, that the logical conclusion from the model-data discrepancy was that sensitivity was actually higher than the models say!

By the way, one point that is sometimes ignored in these recent energy balance type of calculations, is that some of the analyses (ie, those based on D&A techniques) aim to specifically separate out the different forcings though the different warming patterns they generate. So it is not enough to claim that there are additional negative forcings, but these forcings actually have to generate a spatial warming pattern that negates the well-known pattern of GHG response. Or else, the model patterns of response to the different forcings have to be wrong in a way that leads to a large systematic underestimation of the GHG impact. It's not impossible, but at some point Occam's razor has to kick in.

Oh yes, the GWPF thing has also been published. Disclaimer: those who actually read the thing (which seems to be a small minority, judging from my in-box) will see that I'm acknowledged, which is due to having acted as a reviewer. I haven't carefully checked the final version, but on the whole I saw it as a slightly optimistic but basically defensible interpretation of the evidence. There have certainly been worse papers published on climate sensitivity! I haven't seen any very convincing rebuttals, but am of course open to further dicussion on that score. I'm sort of assuming it's been on the blogosphere but haven't had much time (or internet) to look. Some have found it notable that the GWPF is explicitly acknowledging a significant future warming (albeit at the low end of IPCC projections) thanks to ongoing emissions. I'm not sure how much of a narrowing of disagreement that represents, especially when others are doubling down on a high sensitivity.

BTW, for those who accuse me of being in the pay of the fossil fuel industry - yes, the trip to Bristol was funded by a major oil company :-)

Having strayed into tl;dr territory (some time ago!) I'd better stop here.

Turkey trots and windy trots

Some recent knockabout on twitter reminded me that I hadn't mentioned running in a little while. Well, I haven't blogged at all for some time, due partly to a lack of material and perhaps more to a lack of computers and internet. Our second computer arrived safely in one of the boxes a couple of weeks ago (we had a mild panic when we realised that it was not listed on the manifest, but it turned out to be disguised as a bit of padding in the bottom of the box with the monitor) and the internet problem has been addressed (I hesitate to say solved) for now by a mobile phone on the 3 network. This can just about pick up a signal at home in the deepest Lune Valley and broadcasts wifi throughout the house, though it grinds to a halt with tedious regularity whenever jules and I are both surfing working at the same time.

I thought I should take advantage of my marathon training by entering some other events while I was still reasonably fit. In particular, I'd had my eye on completing a 10k in less than 40 mins for some time, but had not really had a good racing opportunity. Given that we were going to be staying about 15 mins walk away, the Ayrodynamic Boxing Day Turkey Trot up and down the seafront seemed like an obvious choice. All the packing and moving meant that we weren't really well prepared, and the horrible weather had further limited our running, but amazingly it cleared up for the morning of the race and both jules and I ducked under our optimistic targets of 40 and 50 mins respectively. Oh, I just see on re-reading this post that this was my New Year resolution for 2013, achieved in the nick of time!

Encouraged by that performance, and still without our full complement of tandems, jules set her eyes on improving on her previous half marathon performance, which had been a soaking wet experience in Tokyo. Blackpool also has a flat promenade, and a half marathon event in February seemed to fit the bill. We gradually built up running distances on the local lanes and looked nervously at the weather forecast, which alternated between predictions of moderate rain and heavy rain, with occasional spells of really heavy rain. On the day, the rain actually held off for the duration of the event, but we had a "strong breeze" (which seems rather an understatement) to contend with instead. Like Ayr, the course was up and down the promenade, so there was absolutely no shelter from the strong southerly. This made it a much more tactical event than we are used to, as the only (sensible) way of running into the wind was to attach to a peloton of people going at about the right speed. On the second lap, I actually waited for some people who were a little way behind me, and hopped on the "bus" as it went past. It turned out to be the right choice as we ended up catching up one or two people on that upwind leg. I finished with 1:28:42 (Garmin here) which is a couple of minutes off my best but I thought a decent outcome in the conditions. I barely had time to pull on some warm clothes and have some food before jules appeared, rather sooner than I'd expected and several minutes faster than her previous best in 1:54. Here's her Garmin track. She's now got her sights on catching a Stoat :-)

The UK events have been an interesting contrast from the Japanese ones we have participated in. There's been rather less in the way of organisation and marshalling here - the first sign we saw yesterday was after we had already arrived at the race HQ, and even once inside the building it took several attempts to find the seemingly mythical changing area, due to the combination of plainly incorrect directions which we were repeatedly given, and a complete absence of any signage. Hardly anyone else found it either, it wasn't just our incompetence. The start time was also rather approximate, with the starter choosing to give a eulogy to some local footballer for reasons unknown, while we were shivering at the start line. But the races themselves went smoothly enough, and the courses have both seemed to be a touch on the short side (according to our Garmins) in contrast to the Japanese ones which were invariably long.

No pics, I'm sorry to say, as we were both running and there was also nowhere secure to leave stuff.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk

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Visualising Vegetation Posted: 21 Feb 2014 10:30 AM PST I usually get lost in the wiggles and weird nomenclature of paleoclimate data papers and presentations. Most seem to require some magic eye or inner sight, that I am sadly not gifted with, to see the climate signal. All I usually see is “noise”. This figure, however, is beautifully informative to this non-expert of paleo-data. Perhaps such figures are old hat. I probably need to get less tl;dr. Even for this one, you have to get through 7 pages of weird wiggles before it appears, on page 8 of the 12 page paper. TANŢĂU, I., FEURDEAN, A., DE BEAULIEU, J.-L., REILLE, M. and FĂRCAŞ, S.: Vegetation sensitivity to climate changes and human impact in the Harghita Mountains (Eastern Romanian Carpathians) over the past 15 000 years, J. Quaternary Sci., n/a–n/a, doi:10.1002/jqs.2688, 2014. jules

[jules' pics] hills

Whernside and Ingleborough, are two of the "three peaks" of North Yorkshire. They aren't really peaks at all, but that makes the area all the better for mountain biking. Today we finally got our act together sufficiently to view the third peak, Pen-y-ghent.
This view was thanks to The Return Of El Conquistador, the mountain tandem.
James now thinks he wants to live in Settleswick (Settle or Giggleswick), which is a place that is close to a lot of this mountain biking. Apart from the colour of the sky, the surrounding landscape is surprisingly Wyoming like, with tufty grass, cliffy hills, and pronghorn antelope sheep everywhere.


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 2/18/2014 08:50:00 PM