For those of you who are local, we are co-organizing a talk and panel discussion with colleagues at NCAR, to take place at the Mesa Lab main seminar room, 3PM on Friday. Here are the details:

July 8, 2005 -
Joint CGD-ISSE & CIRES Seminar – Panel Discussion

Hockeysticks, the tragedy of the commons and sustainability of climate science.

Hans von Storch – Director of Institute of Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht. Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg , Germany

Panelists: Warren Washington, Caspar Amman and Doug Nychka, NCAR, and Roger Pielke Jr. (CIRES)
Location

Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room
Time 3:00pm

Abstract

The “hockey stick”, elevated to icon-status by the IPCC, plays a crucial role in debate regarding climate change. Yet the methods used to develop it have not been completely explicated. We have tested the method in the artificial laboratory of the output of a global climate model, and found it to significantly underestimate both low-frequency variability and associated uncertainties. Our work focuses on multi-century simulations with two global climate models to generate a realistic mix of natural and externally (greenhouse gases, solar output, volcanic load) forced climate variations. Such simulations are then used to examine the performance of empirically based methods to reconstruct historical climate. This is done by deriving “pseudo proxies” from the model output, which provide incomplete and spatially limited evidence about the global distribution of a variable.


Our simulation study was published in “Science” but received less response than expected – almost no open response, a bit in the media; but many colleagues indicated privately that such a publication would damage the good case of a climate protection policy.

In this talk the methodical critique of the hockey stick methods will be presented, followed by a personal discussion about the problem of post-normal climate science operating in a highly politicized environment.?

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on the science of the hockey stick in the context of high?profile political issues. Panelists: Warren Washington, Doug Nychka, and Caspar Amman, NCAR and Roger Pielke Jr., Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado (CIRES).