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Scientists

American and New Zealand climate scientist Kevin Trenberth has published widely on climate change science and fought back against climate change misinformation for decades.[241] He describes in his memoirs his "close encounters with deniers and skeptics"—with fellow meteorologists or climate change scientists. These included Richard Lindzen ("he is quite beguiling but is criticized as "intellectually dishonest" by his peers"; Lindzen was a professor of meteorology at MIT and has been called a contrarian in relation to climate change and other issues.[242]), Roy Spencer (who has "repeatedly made errors that always resulted in lower temperature trends than were really present"), John Christy ("his decisions on climate work and statements appear to be heavily colored by his religion"), Roger Pielke Jr, Christopher Landsea, Pat Michaels ("long associated with the Cato Institute, he changed his bombastic tune gradually over time as climate change became more evident").[241]: 95 

Sherwood B. Idso is a natural scientist and is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. In 1982 he published his book Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe?, which said increases in CO2 would not warm the planet, but would fertilize crops and were "something to be encouraged and not suppressed".

William M. Gray was a climate scientist (emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University) who supported climate change denial: he agreed that global warming was taking place, but argued that humans were responsible for only a tiny portion of it and it was largely part of the Earth's natural cycle.[243][118][244]

In 1998, Frederick Seitz, an American physicist and former National Academy of Sciences president, wrote the Oregon Petition, a controversial document in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. The petition and accompanying "Research Review of Global Warming Evidence" claimed that "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. [...] This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution".[165] In their book Merchants of Doubt, the authors write that Seitz and a group of other scientists fought the scientific evidence and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time, like the harmfulness of tobacco smoke, acid rains, CFCs, pesticides, and global warming.[128]: 25–29 

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Was Huge Weekend Nor’easter Actually Caused by Global Warming?

by James Murphy January 31, 2022

Was Huge Weekend Nor’easter Actually Caused by Global Warming?

dovate/iStock/Getty Images Plus

For decades, climate hysterics have been warning that global warming would eventually lead to a world with far less snow. In the year 2000, British climate scientist David Viner, a senior researcher at theClimatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the same East Anglia of the “climategate” e-mail scandal) went so far as to say that within just a few years, snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event,” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Currently, children from Maine on down to the mid-Atlantic region of the United States are having no trouble remembering what snow is. A ferocious winter storm dropped over 30 inches of snow on parts of Massachusetts from Friday into Saturday. On Saturday, Boston reported snowfall of 2-4 inches per hour. To the south, portions of Long Island, New York, reported more than two feet of snow and blizzard conditions.

So, how does last weekend’s gigantic nor’easter, which dropped literally feet of snow on the U.S. eastern seaboard, fit into the global warming narrative?

Just fine, according to some climate scientists. A large weather event such as last weekend’s nor’easter — or bomb cyclone, if you prefer — jives just fine with global warming, especially when you consider the re-branding of global warming into the catch-all term “climate change.”

A Market Watch story written by Rachel Koning Beals explains, “This is global warming, actually.”

“Although climate change is expected to lower the amount of overall snow the U.S. receives on an annual basis, it’s going to increase the number of nor’easters we see annually, according to a recent report from the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research’s nonprofit arm, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR,” the story states.

So, less snow overall but more frightening, dangerous, and intense weather? Got it.

The report cited by Market Watch claims that smaller storms dropping only a few inches will decline, while massive and potentially dangerous storms such as last weekend’s bomb cyclone will increase.

“What this research finds is almost all of the decrease in snow occurs in weaker, more nuisance-type events,” according to Colin Zarzycki, the author of the study cited by Market Watch. “The really crippling storms that have major regional impacts on transportation, on the economy, on infrastructure are not significantly mitigated in a warming climate.”

Isn’t that convenient for the climate alarmists? No matter what they predict in terms of snowfall or winter weather they can be right.

Still, it seems a bit counterintuitive to claim that climate change brought on by global warming will lead to stronger winter storms and even more snow, doesn’t it?

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano explains in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,

Predictions of less snow were ubiquitous by global warming scientists. But once that prediction failed to come true, the opposite of what they predicted instead became — what they expected. How did global warming scientists explain record snow after predicting less snow? Easy. More snow is now caused by global warming. “Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists” blared a UK Telegraph headline in 2009. The Financial Times tried to explain “Why global warming means … more snow” in 2012.

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Morano concluded, “So no matter what happens, the activists can claim with confidence that the event was a predicted consequence of global warming. There is now no way to ever falsify global warming claims.”

All scientific testing requires falsifiability; without the ability to falsify those claims — it’s not science.

Even some of the most ardent climate-alarmist scientists have trouble toeing this particular climate-change stance. In 2019, one of the climate-change movement’s most highly regarded scientists, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, rebuked colleagues who were claiming that the polar vortex of that year was a consequence of global warming.

“Frankly, it is a stretch to make that link,” Trenberth told The Daily Caller [ really? vshttps://principia-scientific.com/bizarre-theory-linking-global-warming-to-polar-vortexes-resurfaces/.[ “There is always cold air over the Arctic in the polar night and the question is whether it sits there or breaks out,” Trenberth said. “So all this is in the realm of weather. Not climate.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-climate-change-impacts-risk-wildfires

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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke evaded questions yesterday about the extent of rising temperatures during a Senate budget hearing for an agency that oversees fossil fuel development on a fifth of the nation's land.

During a heated exchange with Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Zinke punted on basic questions about climate science. The secretary declined to engage in a line of inquiry that focused on government predictions of rising temperatures over the next 80 years. He claimed instead that climate models are inaccurate, a frequent talking point among climate skeptics.

"I'm concerned about whether you are clear about the magnitude of warming that is occurring," Franken said at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.

Franken repeatedly asked Zinke, a former congressman from Montana, if he could "tell me how much warming government scientists predict for the end of this century under a business-as-usual scenario?"

Zinke parried.

"I don't think government scientists can predict with certainty," he said. "There isn't a model that exists today that can predict today's weather given all the data."

Over the last few decades, scientists have come to use more than 30 climate models to project how climate could change in the future. The models often combine decades of weather, physics and the forcing effects of large-scale climate drivers, such as the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in order to predict future climate.

The Earth is expected to warm between 8 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 if emissions continue to rise unfettered, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said Zinke's explanation was "a stupid and ignorant answer."

Climate models, he said, are getting better. The simulations increasingly line up with observed changes. By using temperature records and atmospheric measurements of carbon dioxide, scientists know that in the past 200 years the planet has warmed about 1.4 F and CO2 has risen 40 percent. The present level of atmospheric CO2 is higher than it has been in the past million years.

"Well, all models are wrong, but some are useful," Trenberth said. "Weather models aren't able to accurately predict if it'll be sunny or rainy two weeks from now because they are sensitive to small disruptions.

"But the patterns of weather may still be predictable in the same sense that summer is different than winter," he added. "And that is what climate is all about: determining the effects of the sun, the atmospheric composition, the oceans, the ice and ... looking for systematic influences."

While climate modeling and weather forecasting are similar, they rely on different sets of data and measure vastly different time scales, said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Weather forecasting is based on our ability to track weather systems (fronts, storms, wave patterns etc.) and is excellent at the 1 to 5 day range," he said in an email. "Climate forecasts by contrast predict statistics of weather as opposed to specific events."

When looking over long periods of time, the external drivers of climate — things like how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere trapping heat, and how many trees have been cut down and are no longer sequestering greenhouse gases — can be used to make statistical predictions about the climate, Schmidt said.

In a statement to E&E News, Franken said he wanted Zinke to recognize the real threat of climate change and the role his agency plays in setting policy that can affect it.

"I wanted Secretary Zinke to acknowledge that climate change is real, that without action the increase in temperatures will be large, that he listens to the climate scientists in his agency, and that he grasps that climate change will affect our public lands," Franken said. "I find it troubling, to say the least, that he failed to address any of those very important issues."

During the hearing, Zinke also seized on the Trump administration's decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement. He characterized the move as not being about climate change, but about the agreement's being a "bad deal." President Trump has repeatedly used the same language.

He then cited a White House talking point that if the agreement were implemented, it would only produce a 0.2-degree-Celsius reduction in global temperatures. Zinke called that "insignificant."

Zinke said his data point came from a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But researchers from the Climate Interactive project, which collaborates with MIT, have refuted that point.

In fact, the study shows that the Paris Agreement could lower the expected temperature increase by 0.6 to 1.1 C (*Climatewire*, June 2).

An exasperated Franken again pressed the Cabinet secretary to answer his question about the science.

"I just want you to answer the question that I asked you. That's all I want you to do," Franken said. "Can you tell me how much warming government scientists ... predict for the end of the century under a business-as-usual scenario?"

Zinke didn't bite. Instead, he began questioning Franken.

"Can you tell me, sir, whether or not China increased its CO2 between now and 2030 under the agreement, and by what?" Zinke asked. "I will be glad to give you that answer."

The two agreed to finish the discussion in written comments submitted for the record.

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UCAR

Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth is a Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize which went to the IPCC. He served from 1999 to 2006 on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and he chaired the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel from 2004 to 2010 and chaired the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) scientific steering group from 2010-2013 (member 2007-14); and chaired the 2014 7th International Scientific Conference on the Global Water and Energy Cycle Committee. He has also served on many national committees. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2000 he received the Jule G. Charney award from the AMS; in 2003 he was given the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award; in 2013 he was awarded the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, and he received the Climate Communication Prize from AGU. He edited a 788 page book Climate System Modeling, published in 1992 and has published 524 scientific articles or papers, including 60 books or book chapters, and over 238 refereed journal articles. He has given many invited scientific talks as well as appearing in a number of television, radio programs and newspaper articles. He is listed among the top 20 authors in highest citations in all of geophysics.

Research Interests

Trenberth has been prominent in all aspects of climate variability and climate change research and is a leader in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments and in the World Climate Research Programme. Recently his primary research has focused on the global energy and water cycles and how they are changing. His work mainly involves empirical studies and quantitative diagnostic calculations. Trenberth is a primary advocate for the need to develop a climate information system that is an imperative for adaptation to climate change. He has evaluated many datasets and been the primary promoter of the need to reanalyze global data into fields in ways that meet climate requirements for continuity and consistency.

"The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human activities."

Kevin Trenberth, 2011 on attribution of extremes to climate change.

Research Topics

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A History of Inquiries

Smith's investigation is just the latest in a long line of probes into climate scientists by conservative politicians. In 2005, Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who was then Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, examined the work of climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State and Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts. Over the last decade, the scientific community has had to field an increasing number of public records requests from conservative groups looking to cast doubt on their research.

"Overall, scientists whose work is policy relevant are certainly under more scrutiny than ever before through a variety of means, from subpoenas to open records requests, and need to be prepared to respond to that scrutiny," said Halpern. Such investigations, he said, "can send the wrong message to researchers about how valuable their expertise is to society. We need scientists to engage in public conversations on science-based issues, no matter how contentious the topic."

The biggest difference between Smith's investigation today and the one Mann and Bradley faced in 2005, Mann said, is that "back then, there were a number of moderate pro-science, pro-environment Republicans who came to my defense. Chief among them was Sherwood Boehlert—an old-school Republican from upstate New York."

"Unfortunately, we no longer have moderate republicans like Boehlert chairing the House science committee," said Mann.

Shukla and his colleagues' letter was sent three weeks before an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News showed that ExxonMobil's own research confirmed fossil fuels' role in climate change in the 1970s and 1980s. The company then spent the next two decades funding a campaign to derail climate regulations and question climate science.

"If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible," Shulka and the other climate scientists wrote in the letter.

Holdren wrote back to the researchers that "the [Obama] administration shares the concern expressed in the letter about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change," according to ScienceInsider.

ScienceInsider also reported that Shulka is not the only signatory of the letter facing backlash. Attorney Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank, filed a public records request with several of the signatories' universities for emails contained the words "RICO, racketeer, racketeering, DOJ, prosecute or prosecution."

"If they believe this is part of their job, we will not dispute that, but instead would like to see how the institutions were used in this innovative application of public education resources," Horner told ScienceInsider.

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Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.

A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.

This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:

  1. I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
  2. I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
  3. There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
  4. Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.

A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.

This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.

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http://www.skepticalscience.com/Understanding-Trenberths-travesty.html

Understanding Trenberth's travesty

Posted on 12 December 2009 by John Cook

Throughout the Climategate controversy, the second most cited email is from climate scientist and IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth. The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Is this what Trenberth is saying? If one takes a little time to understand the science that Trenberth is discussing, his meaning becomes clear.

If you read the full email, you learn that Trenberth is actually informing fellow climate scientists about a paper he'd recently published, An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global energy (Trenberth 2009). The paper discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going. It also discusses the systems we have in place to track energy flow in and out of our climate system.

Trenberth states unequivocally that our planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. This energy imbalance was very small 40 years ago but has steadily increased to around 0.9 W/m2 over the 2000 to 2005 period, as observed by satellites. Preliminary satellite data indicates the energy imbalance has continued to increase from 2006 to 2008. The net result is that the planet is continuously accumulating heat. Global warming is still happening.

Next, Trenberth wonders with this ever increasing heat, why doesn't surface temperature continuously rise? The standard answer is "natural variability". But such a general answer doesn't explain the actual physical processes involved. If the planet is accumulating heat, the energy must go somewhere. Is it going into melting ice? Is it being sequestered deep in the ocean? Did the 2008 La Nina rearrange the configuration of ocean heat? Is it all of the above? Trenberth wants answers!

So like an obsessive accountant, Trenberth pores over the energy budget, tallying up the joules accumulating in various parts of the climate. A global energy imbalance of 0.9 W/m2 means the planet is accumulating 145 x 1020 joules per year. The following list gives the amount of energy going into various parts of the climate over the 2004 to 2008 period:

These various contributions total between 45 to 115 x 1020 joules per year. This falls well short of the total 145 x 1020 joules per year (although the error bars do overlap). Trenberth expresses frustration that observation systems are inadequate to track the flow of energy. It's not that global warming has stopped. We know global warming has continued because satellites find an energy imbalance. It's that our observation systems need to be more accurate in tracking the energy flows through our climate and closing the energy budget.

So what may be causing the discrepancy? As the ocean heat data only goes to 900 metre depth, Trenberth suggests that perhaps heat is being sequestered below 900 metres. There is support for this idea in a later paper von Schuckmann 2009. This paper uses Argo buoy data to calculate ocean heat down to 2000 metres depth. From 2003 to 2008, the world's oceans have been accumulating heat at a rate of 0.77 W/m2. This higher trend for ocean heat would bring the total energy build-up more in line with satellite measurements of net energy imbalance. However, von Schuckmann's results were published after Trenberth's paper so I look forward to seeing how this plays out in future papers.

So to summarise, Trenberth's email says this:

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

After reviewing the discussion in Trenberth 2009, it's apparent that what he meant was this:

"Global warming is still happening - our planet is still accumulating heat. But our observation systems aren't able to comprehensively keep track of where all the energy is going. Consequently, we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"

Skeptics use Trenberth's email to characterise climate scientists as secretive and deceptive. However, when one takes the trouble to acquaint oneself with the science, the opposite becomes apparent. Trenberth outlines his views in a clear, open manner, frankly articulating his frustrations at the limitations of observation systems. Trenberth's opinions didn't need to be illegally stolen and leaked onto the internet. They were already publicly available in the peer reviewed literature - and much less open to misinterpretation than a quote-mined email.

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