Likely outcome from Ringberg

This week it appears that many top … I was going to say people  but will be only academics … are meeting at the Max-Planck institute in Ringberg ostensibly to talk about “climate sensitivity”. But in reality it will be to work out how to respond to the criticisms (indeed fact) that the climate models have failed.
Unfortunately, it is pretty easy to predict what will happen. The best we can hope for is that they will say “sceptics rightly recognised there were problems”. However what is entirely predictable is that whatever they admit (in complex language opaque to all but us sceptics), the narrative will be that sceptics are to blame. I suspect we will be criticised for attacking them which no doubt they will say is the reason it took so long to decide something was wrong. Hypocritically, we will then be attacked for not being willing to work with them (when not one sceptic will have been told let alone invited to Ringberg), for misunderstanding the science (when we were the only ones who correctly predicted the pause), etc. etc. Academics will be portrayed as victims and sceptics as the nasty bogeymen who do not recognise the true “unadulterated brilliance” of the academics.
The reality, is that they haven’t a clue what caused the pause. But such is the power of group think that there a real danger that if you put a lot of like minded people in a room with a planet full of parameters they can cherry pick and tweak, that they will manage to convince themselves that “something” caused the pause: that “the models work but needed tweaking”, and that they will effectively say that “sceptics misunderstood the climate but just happened to misunderstand in a way that just happened to fit this ‘pause explainer'”.
But we sceptics always knew we’d never get thanks so water off a duck’s back. The key question is this: “what will be the effect of the coming paradigm shift?” – or even will it be big enough to be considered a “paradigm shift”? I think the following scenarios are possible either individually or in combination:

1. That they come up with a statistical excuse for the pause saying “short term forecasts are invalid and we are even more confident in the models, but they can only be assessed over e.g. 30 years. (That’s scientific bullshit for “we are kicking this into the long grass).
2. That they identify a “pause explainer” which they can convince themselves is the reason the pause occurred. BUT this is not seen as fundamentally changing the massive feedbacks their models have for CO2. So they do not change their predictions but just add a bit on (e.g. oceans – to say “it’s total heat that matters”)
3. That they identify a “pause explainer” AND it requires a reduction in climate sensitivity
4. That they recognise the climate has “natural variation” which cannot be directly modelled and that much of the 20th century warming is due to this. They dramatically cut down predictions sceptics are given nobel prizes for their work and hamsters start flying.

Option (1) has been the excuse for the last 18years without significant warming. But clearly 18 years without warming is getting just a bit too long so it is the failure of option (1) to be convincing which is causing their angst.
Options (4) is the real answer and one which climate science will eventually adopt – but very likely long after I’m dead. I’m not going to try to explain it, except to say that all scientists who become engineers learn this same lesson and climate academics are no different – it will just take longer.
Therefore, the only likely outcome of Ringberg will be option 2 or 3 or “a little bit of both + a bit of 4”. So, I believe either directly after Ringberg or perhaps after Paris (in the hope they can get through Paris), they will make a statement to the effect that they have an explanation for the pause that climate sensitivity must be reduced slightly, that there is more natural variation than they hitherto thought and that we must just accept their verdict for another 30+ years because that is how long it will take now to prove them wrong. (And it helps they will all have retired by then).

Political implications

The behaviour of the climate academics is fairly easy to predict, mainly because it is constrained by the reality of what has occurred and they really don’t have much room for manoeuvre. So, it will be the political implications of the shift in emphasis (aka failure of the millennium climate theories) that will be important.
The biggest problem here, is that there simply has not been any of the predicted climate problems. Global ice back at normal, severe weather not trending, droughts, floods, snow doing what they always did and global harvests increasing whilst Hurricanes decrease.
As such, not only is the force on climate sensitivity ever downward as the pause continues, so predicted warming is lower, but the lack of any harm is also going to be a force on the perceived threshold of climate harm pushing it ever upward from the current almost arbitrary “2C”.
However, all this is occurring at a time when politicians have invested massive amounts of their own reputations on “climate cataclysm”. It will be difficult if not impossible for them to step down from this with reputations intact – but then again – politicians don’t get where they are without having skins as thick as leather to criticism of their own hypocrisy.
And with the collapse of the oil price, the possible “plan B” of “we aren’t destroying the Scottish scenery to stop global warming – but to keep down fuel prices” – has also collapsed.
Politicians are as the proverb goes,  “have lost their paddle whilst in shit creek and the only way out is for them to get further in the shit.”

There is no easy way out of this

When I started writing, I was trying to work out the most likely outcome and had assumed that the future would be probabilistic: that one scenario would be more likely than another, but politically there is only one scenario and that is almost complete utter humiliation and climbdown. Because even a small admission that sensitivity is lower, will also mean that potential damage is much much lower and so even a very small change in nuance at Ringberg will effectively remove political support entirely – because no politician wants to be left with political responsibility for a failed policy.
OK – this climb down is something politicians do daily without any dirt sticking – so perhaps I’m overstating the problem politically. But they will not like it.

Oh …. (realisation) … do I see what just happened?

The only way out of this for politicians (both in academia and government)  to come out of it all with any reputation at all, is a formula along the lines of this:

Climate sensitivity is lower – but we only say it is lower because we are ALL even more certain about the science.

This will allow the politicians to say “yes the potential damage is not as great – but we still need precisely the same policy because now we are certain we have to act – because EVERYONE now agrees”. And for this, they will need at least some sceptics like e.g. Judith Curry to back them.
And there is only one fly in the ointment of this approach. Rather than a 97% “consensus”, they now need to portray a “100% consensus”. This is what I’ve just realised. Are these attacks on sceptics a shot across the bows: “accept the new consensus or take the consequences“?
And I think this explains why we had the recent “witch hunt of sceptics”. The policy makers were trying to remove all possible opposition to the new policy-driven-science statement on climate. They were telling sceptic academics they have a stark choice: join the new consensus or suffer.
And no doubt they will somehow find a way to say that their new “consensus” figures encompasses the views of Judith Curry, Nic Lews and even Watts, and they will claim that if they do not agree it shows they are only motivated liars (cue Lewandowsky attack paper).

Can they convince everyone to back one pause explainer and slightly lower sensitivity?

This clearly is the purpose of Ringberg – to try to hammer out an overwhelming “consensus” to present to the public and try to re-establish credibility before Paris (which we can take for politicians really means “before the next election” – which in the UK is May!). The answer is probably not. With over 50 different suggestions as to why the pause did not occur, academics have found a new rich source of almost endless speculation proposing new ideas in this area. And as each new paper comes out, yet another person stands to lose credibility by switching to common “consensus” explanation – and more importantly a valuable source of funding dries up if there is a “consensus”.

Conclusion

I’m going to be pretty bold and say what I think will come out of Ringberg. I can’t see them coming to a “consensus” about any explanation for the pause. They will not wish to substantially reduce climate predictions so they will either say:

A) Climate sensitivity is marginally lower – but because we better understand climate, the confidence is higher so there’s more need to act

B) Climate sensitivity is marginally lower – but because there is more natural variation than we had thought, future trends (supposedly currently depressed)  will be* much greater so there’s more need to act

*Notice the “could depress – will increase mismatch”!!

My guess, is that because academics don’t understand natural variation and don’t want to have anything to do with this “nasty thing” called natural variation they do not understand, so they will feel more confident with option A.
But because, they don’t have much wriggle room, they will find it very difficult to both say “business as usual” and “this includes what Nic Lewis has been saying”.
I can’t see a big enough change that it will even dent the criticism from sceptics nor will it make politicians at all happy.
So, my conclusion is that the final statement will satisfy no one. No doubt they will be very soon back at another similar meeting to go through this whole process again.