Seeing the environmental forest

It seems the canard about how IPCC models are inaccurate just won't go away.  I've covered it before on this blog .  The newest incarnation of that canard revolves around a new paper by Risbey et al. ( 2014 ).  It seems that many just don't understand what Risbey et al. did and they definitely don't understand the results of that paper.

A childhood acquaintance on Facebook posted a link to a CBN News article that serves as a good example of what is wrong with conservative news media.  Written by Dale Hurd, it is a mash-up of science denier canards with little in the way of actual science or evidence. The first paragraph sets the tone, making fun of the scientists who were trapped in Antarctic ice.  Nowhere does Hurd mention HOW the scientists were trapped: A storm packed sea ice into the bay their ship was in.  Now this can happen at any time of the year but it doesn't mean that the ice is growing.  It's summer down in Antarctica, a time when Antarctic sea ice melts from ~19 million km 2 in September down to ~2-3 million km 2 by March.  That leaves plenty of broken pack ice for winds to blow around, especially in the early part of the melt season such as December when the ship was trapped.  So the irony is that those scientists were trapped by MELTING sea ice, an irony completely los...

One of the dominant memes among climate deniers are that climate models are inaccurate.  While true, particularly since 1998 (see Fyfe et al. 2013 ), that fact doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening or that global warming is due to a natural cycle and not CO 2 as many deniers claim.  For those leaps of logic to be true, the entire field of radiative physics, 152 years of experiments, and 40+ years of satellite observations would all have to be wrong.  Nor does it mean that climate isn't as sensitive to changes in radiative forcing as multiple studies have shown it to be (i.e. Paleosens 2013 ).  What it means is far more complex. To illustrate this complexity, I compared IPCC AR5 climate models with surface temperatures (GISS).  The AR5 models were run with four scenarios, labeled RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5.  Data for each scenario, along with global temperature data, AMO, PDO, etc. are available at Climate Explorer .  The RCP s...