Missing News: Lindzen on sensitivity

Roger Peilke Snr covers the publication of a new paper by atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen:
New Paper “Climate Physics, Feedbacks, And Reductionism (And When Does Reductionism go Too Far?)” By Dick Lindzen

Don't expect to see it on our ABC.

The concluding remarks read

This paper considers approaches to estimating climate sensitivity involving the basic physics of the feedback processes rather than attempting to estimate climate sensitivity from time series of temperature. The latter have to assume a perfect knowledge of all sources of climate variability —something generally absent. The results of a variety of independent approaches all point to relatively low sensitivities. We also note that when climate change is due to regional and seasonal forcing, the concept of one dimensional climate sensitivity may, in fact, be inappropriate. Finally, it should be noted that I have not followed the common practice of considering the feedback factor to be the sum of separate feedback factors from water vapor, clouds, etc. The reason for this is that these feedback factors are not really independent. For example, in fig. 2, we refer to a characteristic emission level that is one optical depth into the atmosphere. For regions with upper level cirrus, this level is strongly related to the cloud optical depth (in the infrared), while for cloud-free regions the level is determined by water vapor. However, as shown by Rondanelli and Lindzen [30], and Horvath and Soden [31], the area covered by upper level cirrus is both highly variable and temperature dependent. The water vapor feedback is dependent not only on changes in water vapor but also on the area of cloud-free regions. It, therefore, cannot readily be disentangled from the cloud feedback.

Missing Voices: Roger Pielke Snr

Roger Pielke Snr's work on climate change science has not been reported by the ABC. We have requested The Science Show interview Roger for some time to no avail. He continues to be among the missing voices Australians would benefit listening to.

Excerpts from his biography:
Professor Roger Pielke Snr:  
Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado in Boulder; Professor Emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist in CIRES and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (November 2005 -present). He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and has a five-year appointment (April 2007 - March 2012) on the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Dr. Pielke has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 50 chapters in books, co-edited 9 books, and made over 700 presentations during his career to date. A listing of papers can be viewed at the project website: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/pubs/. He also launched a science weblog in 2005 to discuss weather and climate issues. This weblog was named one of the 50 most popular Science blogs by Nature Magazine on July 5, 2006 and is located athttp://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/.

His most recent post at his blog is as follows:
The Misuse Of The Scientific Method – A Nature Geoscienes Article “Changes In Hail And Flood Risk In High-Resolution Simulations Over Colorado’s Mountains” By Mahoney Et Al 2012

Recently, there were two articles in Nature Geosciences which concluded, based on multi-decadal climate model predictions, that there would not be hail in Colorado by the end of the current century. This study illustrates the misuse of the scientific method where a top-down multi-decadal climate prediction, which has shown no skill at predicting changes in hail statistics in hindcasts, is used to make forecasts decades from now.

Yet Nature Climate Change elected to publish such an untested paper. This research is another example of the epidemic of papers that purport to to be science but are actually just exercises with the models. Nature Climate Change, instead of presenting sound scientific research, apparently publishes anything that promotes their particular agenda in climate science.

The authors (and Nature Climate Change] ignore the fundamental limitations on this top-down, regional downscaled approach that we summarize in our article

Pielke Sr., R.A., and R.L. Wilby, 2011: Regional climate downscaling – what’s the point? EOS. January 31 2012 pages 52-53

The Mahoney et al Nature – Cliamte Change study is yet another example of the waste of money that I have discussed, for example, in my post

Read the rest at Roger's blog, and if you'd like to hear him on the ABC, send in a suggestion via the ABC website.