Who Decides?

8 03 2008

decision.jpg

Who Decides?

A Guest post by Evan Jones.

We are currently in the midst of a serious policy debate on the highly technical subject of world climate change. What is it happening? Why is it happening? What are we to do? And ultimately who is to decide what we will do? I attempt only to answer the last of these questions here.

The important decisions facing this world will, in the future as in the past, be decided not by experts but by laymen: the public at large and/or our elected officials. In a significant majority of important policy cases, the decision makers are not expert in the field. They are (usually) not scientists, economists, historians, or strategists.

It is notable that a technocratic, authoritarian “solution” has been advanced on many occasions, including, recently by David Shearman, Joseph Wayne Smith in The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, which seriously recommends rule “by experts and not by those who seek power”.
http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/C34504.aspx

Seeking power but not in the name of seeking power is, however, an inherently self-contradictory proposition. The free citizen and his elected representatives alone have the right, and wherewithal to make these decisions. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 196 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, politics

Putting myths about UAH and RSS satellite data to rest

8 03 2008
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The NOAA-N Polar Orbiting Weather Satellite

There have been some questions posed recently about how the satellite global temperature record is created by UAH and RSS from the MSU (Microwave Sounder Unit) on weather satellites. For example, Andrew recently posted this comment:

“I keep hearing rumors that the satellite data was “adjusted” to match the surface data better. Is that true? If so, that would be disturbing.”

It is always best to ask the source, so I put the question to Dr. John Christy, who is the lead scientist at UAH that produces this dataset:

“I’ve had some queries on my blog recently that are suggesting that the UAH and RSS satellite data is somehow “tuned” to the surface data, or that the surface data is used to provide some offset function. Given that the MSU looks at microwave emissions from oxygen, essentially a first principles measurement, I don’t see any reason that surface data would be used in any way to adjust the MSU data.

But I figured I’d ask the source, if you’d care to elaborate. If not, no worries.”

To which Dr. Christy graciously responded within a couple of hours:

“No other data are used in the construction.  That is why we can do comparison studies without any interdependence.”

So from Dr. Christy’s response it is clear that there is no data sharing or comparative adjustment of any kind between that satellite global temperature record and the land-ocean global temperature record such as is produced by HadCRUT and GISS. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 33 Comments »

Categories : Science, Technology, climate_change, weather

3 of 4 global metrics show nearly flat temperature anomaly in the last decade

8 03 2008

It has been 10 years since the super El Niño of 1998 helped to spike global temperatures dramatically. Now since it appears we are in the opposite phase, I thought it would be interesting to look at the 10 year trend from January 1998 to January 2008.

Here’s a link to a 2-minute video called “The El Niño Factor”. Bob Tisdale points out to me this interesting graph: (slightly modified the key placement to fit the image in this blog)

elnino-vs-hadcrut.png

Here’s the link to the Webpage that’s the source of the data for the above graph.

Now let me be clear that a 10 year trend period is not typical for climate analysis. Typically a 30 year period is used to establish a climate baseline. For example, NOAA publishes climate summaries for cities in the USA based on 30 year periods. I’m not trying to do anything to compare to the last 30 or even the last 100 years. I’m simply curious about what the trend looks like since the last big El Niño event in 1998 now that we are in a La Niña. Of course this may upset some folks, and I’ll probably get the usual invective hurled at me and furious scribblings on other blogs refuting this as “He’s doing it wrong”, but I think looking at what has happened globally between a large a large El Niño and La Niña is both interesting and useful.

To do this, I used the same global temperature anomaly datasets that I’ve used for the last few posts I made on the subject of global temperature anomalies. I created a new file, using all four global metrics, with only the last 10 years of data, which you can inspect here: 4metrics_temp_anomalies_1998-20081.txt

Here are the four charts of global temperature anomalies, note that there are links to each original organizations data source below each graph. Click each image to get a full sized one.

University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) Dr. John Christy:uah_1998-2008
Reference: UAH lower troposphere data

UAH shows a slightly positive anomaly trend of 0.028°C for the last ten years. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 96 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, weather