Shapiro to Chair InterAcademy Council's IPCC Review Committee

05/03/10: Harold T. Shapiro (CV), an economist and president emeritus of Princeton University, has been selected by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organization of the world's science academies, to chair a 12-member committee to conduct an independent review of the procedures and processes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The review was requested last month by the United Nations.



The committee will review IPCC procedures for preparing its assessment reports. Among the issues to be reviewed are data quality assurance and control; the type of literature that may be cited in IPCC reports; expert and government review of IPCC materials; handling of the full range of scientific views; and the correction of errors that are identified after a report has been completed. The committee also will review overall IPCC processes, including management functions and communication strategies.



The IAC plans to deliver a peer-reviewed report with the committee's findings and recommendations to the U.N. by Aug. 30.





"We approach this review with an open mind," Shapiro said. "I'm confident we have the experts on this committee necessary to supply the U.N. with a stronger process for providing policymakers the best assessment of climate change possible."



The IAC committee, whose members were nominated by science and engineering academies around the world, includes experts representing several countries and disciplines. Shapiro has chaired many U.S. National Academy of Sciences committees and served in a variety of other roles in efforts focused on the relationship between science and society, including as vice chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.



Shapiro was the president of Princeton from 1988 to 2001 and the president of the University of Michigan from 1980 to 1987. He currently is a professor in Princeton's Department of Economics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.



More information about the committee, including the full list of members, is available on the IAC website. Founded in 2000, the IAC was created to mobilize top scientists and engineers around the world to provide evidence-based advice to international bodies such as the U.N. and World Bank.

Dr. Lindzen's New Paper: 0.7°C temperature change from doubled CO2

Drs. Lindzen's & Choi's new paper has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The paper updates and responds to criticisms of their 2009 paper, but arrives at essentially the same conclusions. They find on the basis of empirical satellite observations that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels is a mean of 0.7°C, implying CO2 has negative (not positive as assumed by IPCC models) feedbacks on water vapor, and that all of the IPCC models exaggerate climate sensitivity. This is in close agreement with other peer reviewed papers which have examined empirical satellite and balloon data.



24 Abstract



25 To estimate climate sensitivity from observations, Lindzen and Choi [2009] used the

26 deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent responses in

27 the top-of-atmosphere outgoing radiation from the ERBE satellite instrument. Distinct periods of

28 warming and cooling in the SST were used to evaluate feedbacks. This work was subject to

29 significant criticism by Trenberth et al. [2009], much of which was appropriate. The present

30 paper is an expansion of the earlier paper in which the various criticisms are addressed and

31 corrected. In this paper we supplement the ERBE data for 1985-1999 with data from CERES for

32 2000-2008. Our present analysis accounts for the 36 day precession period for the ERBE satellite

33 in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper which simply used what may have been

34 undue smoothing. The present analysis also distinguishes noise in the outgoing radiation as well

35 as radiation changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes that constitute

36 feedbacks to changes in SST. Finally, a more reasonable approach to the zero-feedback flux is

37 taken here. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics and extend the effect

38 of these feedbacks to the global climate. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from

39 SST fluctuations exceeds the zero-feedback fluxes thus implying negative feedback. In contrast

40 to this, the calculated outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric GCMs forced by the

41 observed SST are less than the zero-feedback fluxes consistent with the positive feedbacks that

42 characterize these models. The observational analysis implies that the models are exaggerating

43 climate sensitivity.

45 1. Introduction







46 It is usually claimed that the heart of the global warming issue is so-called greenhouse

47 warming. This simply refers to the fact that the earth balances the heat received from the sun

48 (mostly in the visible spectrum) by radiating in the infrared portion of the spectrum back to

49 space. Gases that are relatively transparent to visible light but strongly absorbent in the infrared

50 (greenhouse gases) will interfere with the cooling of the planet, thus forcing it to become warmer

51 in order to emit sufficient infrared radiation to balance the net incoming sunlight. By the net

52 incoming sunlight, we mean that portion of the sun’s radiation that is not reflected back to space

53 by clouds and the earth’s surface. The issue then focuses on a particular greenhouse gas, carbon

54 dioxide. Although carbon dioxide is a relatively minor greenhouse gas, it has increased

55 significantly since the beginning of the industrial age from about 280 ppmv to about 390 ppmv,

56 and it is widely accepted that this increase is primarily due to man’s emissions. However, it is

57 also widely accepted that the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide would only be about

58 1°C (based on simple Planck black body calculations; it is also the case that a doubling of any

59 concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of

60 carbon dioxide’s absorption on the amount of carbon dioxide).

61 This amount of warming is not considered catastrophic, and, more importantly, this is much

62 less than current climate models suggest the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide will be.

63 The usual claim from the models is that a doubling of carbon dioxide will lead to warming of

64 from 1.5°C to 5°C and even more. What then is really fundamental to ‘alarming’ predictions? It

65 is the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and

66 clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so

67 as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their net effect resulting from

68 both their infrared absorptivity and their visible reflectivity is to further reduce the net cooling of

69 the earth. These feedbacks are still acknowledged to be highly uncertain, but the fact that these

70 feedbacks are strongly positive in most models is considered to be a significant indication that

71 the result has to be basically correct. Methodologically, this is an unsatisfactory approach to

72 such an important issue. Ideally, one would seek an observational test of the issue. As it turns

73 out, it may be possible to test the issue with existing data from satellites and there has recently

74 been a paper [Lindzen and Choi, 2009] that has attempted this though, as we will show in this

75 paper, the details of that paper were, in important ways, incorrect. The present paper attempts to

76 correct the approach and arrives at similar conclusions.

Oh, Mann: Cuccinelli targets UVA papers in Climategate salvo

UPDATE: Read the Demand Letter from the Attorney General to UVA



by Courteney Stuart 4:32pm Thursday Apr 29, 2010

No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.





In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.



If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.



Mann is one of the lead authors of the controversial “hockey stick graph,” which contends that global temperatures have experienced a sudden and unprecedented upward spike (like the shape of a hockey stick).









Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.



The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.Last fall, the release of some emails by researchers caused turmoil in the climate science world and bolstered critics of the human-blaming scientific models. (Among Climategate’s embarrassing revelations was that one researcher professed an interest in punching Charlottesville-based doubting climate scientist Patrick Michaels in the nose.”)Neither UVA spokesperson Carol Wood nor Mann returned a reporter’s calls at posting time, but Mann— whose research remains under investigation at Penn State— recently defended his work in a front page story in USA Today saying while there could be “minor” errors in his work [just two weeks ago he claimed his work received a 'clean bill of health'] there’s nothing that would amount to fraud or change his ultimate conclusions that the earth is warming as a result of human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.