cc: Jerry Meehl <meehl@ucar.edu>, Jonathan Overpeck <jto@u.arizona.edu>, Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:51:05 -0700
from: Caspar Ammann <ammann@ucar.edu>
subject: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Recommended reading?]]
to: Tom Wigley <wigley@cgd.ucar.edu>, Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@ucar.edu>

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Tom and Kevin,
below the summary I just sent to a few realclimate folks for further 
comment. I will keep you posted on any additional information that is 
coming.
Caspar



Well, if I recall right the most recent 'venting' on climateaudit did go 
towards the hurricanes and sea level. Currently their site is not 
responding, and it might just be strategic... I would assume that 
they are going to launch a multi-pronged approach trying to undermine a 
string of arguments that are currently either in the chain to link to 
GHG forcing and/or that have one of the biggest impacts in the popular 
perception. Its going to be in their usual fashion: Stir up a lot of dust
and move to the next thing before anybody can answer. In the end there is
little left...


Trying to interpret a priority list from my personal feeling of this 
guy. I do this based on a google-cash because his site is down or 
something. So here is my hunch/speculation. I'll see if I can get the 
document somewhere but I'm not very optimistic about this. By the way, 
I'm also going to forward this to Susan an few others that might have 
heard the rumor. Before I do send it to Susan, you might chip in on 
this list for "internal and IPCC use":


- keeps bugging away about the HadCRUT3 data, looking at some individual 
grid cells.

- stationarity in the climate system (see below; but my hunch is that 
they go for much larger real world variability than in most models, and 
thus there is a chance that its all noise; so their argument. Of course 
the space-time-geophysical process framework is much stronger, but at 
least this is a direction they might go; key is that models are only one 
way to do detection-attribution).

- declining temperatures in Antarctica: inconsistent with polar 
amplification ... not sure if he knows that central Antarctica has no 
sea ice feedback, but more importantly what circulation changes can do 
(difference vortex inside and outside)

- "Statistics of Rekordbreaking Temperatures": human landuse/heat island 
effect; also check this paper that McIntyre has been looking at (single 
point: Philadelphia and record breaking temperatures): 
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0509/0509088.pdf

- hurricanes are a poisson process not driven by a systematic underlying 
forcing increase.

- Arctic ice shelves: break off individual parts not unusual. Arguments 
might come that initial breakup started 1930s not now and "everybody" 
knows that it has been warm then when CO2 was low... etc.

- Satellite record (Mears-Wentz and also Christy): Not uniform warming 
at all... he points out that S-Hem is flat.

- solar: well one could only hope that he follows the 
so-idiotic-that-its-already-funny versions that Haemeranta is sending 
around. Sun is as active as never before, and then the predictions are 
for cooling... I think MM will try to simply say that solar 
contributions have been not well included and are actually much more 
important. By the way: Ammann et al. has now been accepted by PNAS, 
should have a say in the solar influence...

- climate reconstructions 1 (the obvious and usual): key issues are 
bring proxies up to date, contamination of all reconstruction with bad 
data that is shared and thus all are wrong, secrecy in proxy data

- climate reconstructions 2: Maybe the "bomb" is their claim of 
non-stationarity. Maybe they want to show that calibration on present 
day is tainted with problems, jumping on the bandwagon of VS that 
degrees of freedom are limiting stats. My answer of course is think 
physically and use time history...  (some paper by Sonechkin, which 
really doesn't understand how field reconstructions work, but the 
stationarity issue is more difficult to blow off the table with 
arguments... maybe we should be prepared for that one).

- climate reconstructions 3: Tree line and glaciers as indicators: It 
was "warmer" before so why bother now. My answer generally is that we 
have a GW signal of 30 years. If in medieval times there would have been 
current temperatures for the durations as it had in these times 
(different actual timing in different locations) then the so called 
signal of Medieval Warm Period would be much stronger. Currently almost 
nothing is in equilibrium. Glaciers are collapsing (mass!) not simply 
melting and the trees take many decades to change the tree line.

- sneaking in papers into AR4 that were past deadline


-- 
Caspar M. Ammann
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Climate and Global Dynamics Division - Paleoclimatology
1850 Table Mesa Drive
Boulder, CO 80307-3000
email: ammann@ucar.edu    tel: 303-497-1705     fax: 303-497-1348




-- 
Caspar M. Ammann
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Climate and Global Dynamics Division - Paleoclimatology
1850 Table Mesa Drive
Boulder, CO 80307-3000
email: ammann@ucar.edu    tel: 303-497-1705     fax: 303-497-1348

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