"The 2019 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement – often described as the "Nobel Prize for the environment" – has been awarded to climate scientists Warren Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University."Here's a description of the prize:
"The Tyler Prize recognized the efforts of both men in explaining key tenets of climate science to influential audiences. Washington advised six consecutive U.S. presidents, while Mann has spoken extensively with media organizations and leading public figures."The press release also contains a biography of each winner.
Each laureate receives $200,000 and a medallion. Past laureautes include some very important scientists: Wallace Broecker, Richard Alley, Jared Diamond, Charles Keeling, Jane Goodall, Roger Revelle and Edward O. Wilson.
Mann has won so many prizes now that I've lost track. As far as I know, Steve McIntyre was once co-winner of the immensely prestigious 2007 "Weblog Award for Best Science Blog."
Added: HuffPost has a nice article on Warren Washington. He was born and raised in Portland (Oregon), and went to Oregon State University, where his freshman advisor said he "shouldn’t stay in physics because it was probably too hard for me."
15 comments:
One advantage of doing modeling in business rather than in academia is that one is judged by nature, rather than by human opinion. In my work, when my models were right, our deals were sound and the company was successful, regardless of what other people thought of my models. In academia, the key to getting an article published is if it convinces other people.
Mann's many prizes show that his work has successfully convinced many other people. OTOH nature has not fulfilled his catastrophic predictions. The actual troposphere temperature has been rising at a rate of around 1.25° C to 1.5° C per century. This rise confirms that global warming is taking place, but so far, the rate has not been catastrophic.
Cheers
David: Mann's work doesn't make predictions. He reconstructs temperatures in the past; he does not predict them for the future.
David wrote:
"The actual troposphere temperature has been rising at a rate of around 1.25° C to 1.5° C per century."
You did this again.
You cannot meaningfully calculate a trend if the factors making up the physics (or the statistics) have not been approximately constant over that interval, or, for a linear trend, changing linearly.
In the case of climate, the forcings have certainly changed a lot in 100+ years, and not linearly. So calculating a century trend has no value for projecting it into the future.
For example, for HadCRUT v4.6, the total trend (since 1850) is +0.051 C/decade. The trend of the last 30 years is +0.17 C/decade. In 1975 the 30-year trend was -0.01 C/decade.
David - you make some valid points. However, the satellite-based troposphere temperatures have been available since 1979. CO2 has been pretty steadily increasing since 1979, so I would say the factors making up the physics have been approximately constant.
The trend based on satellite measurements is lower than the land-based trend. I think the land-based trend is less reliable, because there have been innumerable adjustments, many of which cannot even be checked because the full data wasn't retained. YMMV.
I agree with you that 30 or 40 years isn't sufficient to make a solid long-term prediction. I don't rule out the possibility that the rate of warming might speed up in coming years.
P.S. to say that Mann doesn't make predictions is just quibbling over words. Mann has said that global warming was likely to proceed at a catastrophic rate. That's the kind of "prediction" I was talking about.
DiC:
"The trend based on satellite measurements is lower than the land-based trend"
Only if you focus solely on one of the satellite records, and ignore the other:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/trend/offset:0.2/plot/uah6/from:1979/trend/offset:0.215/plot/best/from:1979/trend/offset:-0.08/plot/gistemp/from:1979/trend/offset:-0.135/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/trend
I did my best to get them all to start in the same point, but even with the small differences it is clear that at least ONE of the satellite measurements actually gives a *larger* trend than the surface station records.
And 1-1.5 degrees per century is, for earth, a very, very, very fast change in temperature, one that we may only have seen at times where actual catastrophic events took place (like ice lakes bursting through, or large meteor impacts, or Yellowstone erupting). To put that 1-1.5 degrees per Century in perspective: going from glacial to interglacial, globally about 5 degrees, took thousands of years. Even if it were only a thousand year, the current warming rate is at least a factor 5 faster!
And there's a third satellite series for the LT, RatPac, which I haven't calculated with, that
agrees with RSS -- it finds a troposphere trend of +0.21 C/dec from 1970-2018:
https://twitter.com/OleBoule/status/1086929680396177408/photo/1
David in Cal said...
"P.S. to say that Mann doesn't make predictions is just quibbling over words. Mann has said that global warming was likely to proceed at a catastrophic rate. That's the kind of "prediction" I was talking about."
Why is (or isn't) global warming proceeding at a catastrophic rate?
People have discussed warming of 2° C by the end of the century as a vital, but difficult goal, requiring immediate major action. But, if the rate of warming remains below 1.5° C per century, then this goal will be achieved automatically. That's not to say that we should take no action. There's no guarantee that the warming rate will remain where it is.
Also, in the long term continued warming at any pace will eventually be catastrophic.
DiC wrote:
"People have discussed warming of 2° C by the end of the century as a vital, but difficult goal, requiring immediate major action."
No, it's 2°C total warming. At current rates that will happen in about 50 years. And sooner if China and India take steps to clean up their major air pollution (assuming it doesn't get replicated in Africa.)
"There's no guarantee that the warming rate will remain where it is."
It could increase (and is expected to over the next stronger decades, as feedbacks get stronger).
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-07-680x1024.jpg
David in Cal wrote:
"I think the land-based trend is less reliable, because there have been innumerable adjustments"
David, the satellite algorithms do adjustments too. I've written about how high they were, on average about three times higher than the surface algorithms. Some of UAH's v6 adjustments for their North Pole region were > 1 C. Contrarians never said a word about it.
https://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/04/some-big-adjustments-to-uahs-dataset.html
Carl Mears, the Senior Research Scientist for the satellite group at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), thinks surface measurements are more reliable:
"A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets...."
http://www.remss.com/blog/recent-slowing-rise-global-temperatures
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BnkI5vqr_0
David and David - when it comes to adjustment to satellite records, just see the following comparison:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah5/trend/offset:0.038/plot/uah6/trend
That's UAH version 5.6 and 6.0.
The difference in trend is ca. 15%.
The trend between UAH versions deviates considerably more since 1998.
The V5.6 trend is almost twice the v6.0 trend. The v5.6 version agrees with other satellite and land based records. The v6.0 version does not. Does anyone know what was broken in the v5.6 version that it needed to be retired?
I don't know about the change in UAH versions from 5.6 to 6 -- this satellite stuff is, by now, VERY complicated and technical, and I've chosen not to put too much effort into understanding its details (life is short) -- but here is Spencer explaining v6.0:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/
He gives a link to a PDF of their paper here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/03/uah-version-6-dataset-paper-published-online/
they give three reasons for creating version 6:
1) They wanted to test an alternate method for diurnal drift correction.
2) They wanted to provide better regional results.
3) They wanted to refactor the code.
For item 2, they say that the old method was sufficient for "global and hemispheric average calculation". If the old method gave a correct result for GMT then the new method should be consistent. Instead it's drifting further away from the previous version - and from all other data sets.
But, it's version x.0 and a represents a complete rewrite using an alternate method. It would be surprising if there weren't kinks to be worked out.
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