Heliogenic Climate Change: From Hansen's shop

How did this get past the clergy?:

"By examining the spatial pattern of both types of climate variation, the scientists found that the anthropogenic global warming signal was relatively spatially uniform over the tropical oceans and thus would not have a large effect on the atmospheric circulation, whereas the PDO shift in the 1990s consisted of warming in the tropical west Pacific and cooling in the subtropical and east tropical Pacific, which would enhance the existing sea surface temperature difference and thus intensify the circulation. Thus, it can be concluded that the observed 15-year trend in radiative imbalance of the tropics is probably a signature of natural rather than anthropogenic climate variations.

Anthony Del Genio
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies" "Separating the Man-Made from the Natural"

Prometheus » Blog Archive » Sea Level Rise Slows by 20%

Efforts to sell climate policy based on ever more scary scenarios of apocalypse cannot be sustained and are likely to work in exactly the opposite manner than desired. A good example of why this is so can be found in a recent paper (hat tip Dad) that suggests that the rate of sea level rise from 2003-2008 (2.5 mm/year) is 20% lower than that presented by the IPCC for 1993-2003 (3.1 mm/year). Whether this is “consistent with” longer-term predictions is different that whether it is “consistent with” a political strategy based on scaring people. It seems pretty obvious that systems that exhibit a large amount of variability or are simply poorly understood on relatively short time scales are not very useful props in efforts to show the world moving inexorably towards doom.

Prometheus » Blog Archive » A Modeler’s Hippocratic Oath

• I will remember that I didn’t make the world and that it doesn’t satisfy my equations.

• Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.

• I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.

• I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.