Eric Hoffer, 1951 – “The True Believer – Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”
P.11
“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors , shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the actions that follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And p.12
“People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement…Their innermost craving is for a new life – a rebirth – or failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both…”
and P. 13
“ It is true that in the early adherents of a mass movement there are also adventurers who join in the hope that that the movement will give a spin to their wheel of fortune and whirl them to fame and power.”
And

Eric Hoffer, 1979 – “Before the Sabbath”
p. 7
“ I am curious about Pechorin, a Russian intellectual of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote a poem on “How sweet it is to hate one’s native land and eagerly await its annihilation.”

REPLY: The only “unadjusted” surface data in existence in on the B91 forms stored in the basement of NCDC and online as PDF files. Yeah, I’ll get right on that.

The Hodrick-Prescott analysis just smokes! It is so much more revealing than the loess. Major kudos for your discoveries! When is the paper to be published?

Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now:
(http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg)

The oft-cited paleo record may not be as conclusive as it first appears. There are instances where water vapor unlocked during interglacial periods rises and falls in a pattern unrelated to CO2 levels. Both water vapor and CO2 levels lag temperature increases, and other interesting dyssynchronies appear in the paleo data: (http://i30.tinypic.com/izon5h.jpg)

Regardless, there are a number of approaches to a “best fit” line that will give you significantly different end points. For example, on the graph of local temperatures this winter/spring, I used a polynomial 3rd order expression and it shows a slightly declining trend at the end. The same data with a 4th order results in a somewhat different line.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/06/cold-start-to-2008.html

Part of the problem is that the data itself is longer term oscillating more than trending and 10 years may be just the beginning of the down leg of an oscillation.

Hadley CRUT temperatures plotted against CO2 levels. Note how the two trend lines start to diverge in the 1980’s – temperature is less and less correlated to CO2 levels, which is to be expected. This is because additional CO2 introduced to the atmosphere has less and less warming effect:

http://i32.tinypic.com/28h3dqh.jpg

Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now:

http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg

Unless it can be shown the oceans are absorbing ever more heat – and evidently the Argo data show far lower heat content than expected (as per Kevin Trenberth of NCAR) – the AGWers don’t have a case for dangerous AGW. Less than ideal, perhaps. Dangerous, that remains to be seen.

The higher latitudes are far more responsive to changes. The greatest damage to Greenland’s ice has been caused by snow-warming heat absorbent soot, the effect is greatest at the peripheral glaciers where the sooty runoff accumulates and compounds the effect. Arctic sea ice has suffered from sootfall similarly and wind dynamics have been causing a great deal of recent ice thinning. So the Arctic soot situation – which constitutes something like 20 percent of all warming since the mid 19th century – can be ameliorated.

The Antarctic is not under any grave threat of melt-off, it has been shown to be much drier than modeled (like the ice ages) and less prone to warming.

The same goes for the Earth’s middle troposphere, also drier than expected by the AGW climat models.

I read the bit you quoted as referring to the climate trend, as it’s my policy to read casual blog comment in a way that makes them correct if at all possible. (Mostly because I know I dash off blog comments quickly, and I figure everyone else does too!)

The link to RC threw me, as, it seems to me, Gavin sets out to rebut some idea that that the IPCC claimed weather itself will increase monotonically. The individual scenarios are like “weather”, but I don’t think the IPCC is ever understood by anyone to project any individual weather trajectory.

Still, I do see how someone might intepret the person you quoted as thinking the IPCC predicts monotonic weather. The IPCC doesn’t do that, partly because they don’t predict weather. (Partly because weather can’t do that.)

Why not Anthony? Seems legit.
AGW alarmists are only going to make life for poor Pakistanis even more difficult.

“You mean just like how financial sites usually have things like 30 and 60 day trend lines in stock price charts?”

What did the market trends look like just before the market crash in 1929? Just before the crash, Irving Fisher said, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

All I’m saying is that while data analysis can help us understand what is happening or, more appropriately, has happened, that same analysis is a blunt tool for predicting the future, immediate or long term.

I know that average people don’t come here, maybe they should though. My point is that its the average people who have to be convinced one way or another so they won’t support stupid ideas like carbon cap and trade schemes and biofuels, etc.

Hello Dear and Respected,
I hope you are fine and carrying on the great work you have been doing for the Internet surfers. I am Ghazala Khan from The Pakistani Spectator (TPS), We at TPS throw a candid look on everything happening in and for Pakistan in the world. We are trying to contribute our humble share in the webosphere. Our aim is to foster peace, progress and harmony with passion.

We at TPS are carrying out a new series of interviews with the notable passionate bloggers, writers, and webmasters. In that regard, we would like to interview you, if you don’t mind. Please send us your approval for your interview at my email address “ghazala.khi at gmail.com”, so that I could send you the Interview questions. We would be extremely grateful.

regards.

Ghazala Khan
The Pakistani Spectator
http://www.pakspectator.com

“how well it jibes with the cosmic ray idea”.

Not just another catchy sign on, ‘eh. Comparing 5/1996-9/1996 minimum at swpc with today’s one must be struck by the ongoing abscence of flares.
Not only part of a solar indictment in Arctic warming; also 85% of TSI, but for increased albedo, falls between the tropics.

What does the raw data tell us about next year or the next 5 or 10 years? Nothing at all. The analyzed, data shown by the trend lines, has no predictive value either.

If the trends, be they Loess or Regression or Rolling Average or what ever, were predictive, they would have predicted the 2008 cooling. All the trend analysis does is tell us what happened in nice smooth lines instead of jagged peaks and troughs.

I know why we apply the tools of analysis but I’m less certain than ever that those tools are useful in conveying a clear picture to average people, the ones without advanced degrees in statistics.

I would also like to see temperature lines represented as real degrees of C rather than anomolies based on a chosen year. I think if people could see that temperatures have gone up or down by a few tenths of a degree in real terms it would be far less scary than seeing a graph that makes a 0.6 degree anomoly look like a massive increase or decrease. All the manipulation tends to obsfucate the real story. Its like making successive photocopies of photocopies of the Mona Lisa.

The more we massage the data, the less clear it is to just plain folks. So Gore and Hansen can trot out their charts and Anthony and Steve Mc. can trot out theirs, both sets of charts can be statistically valid and both could be wrong, at the same time.

“Imagine the charts above as cold, hard cash, replace the degrees with dollar signs. Then imagine trying to convince your banker that you are not really losing money or conversely convining your tax auditor that you are indeed losing money.”

You mean just like how financial sites usually have things like 30 and 60 day trend lines in stock price charts?

The real answer is that science is more than pretty pictures, it’s all about numbers. Pictures, like anecdotal evidence, can provide good guidance about what to study, but ultimately what we compare are numbers, e.g. average temperature, rate of change, etc. While that opens up a pandora’s box packed with doubt, finger pointing, etc, it has served science better than reading the tea leaves in the raw data.

“Loess lines, linear regression, Markov Chains, T Test, Chi-Squares aren’t going to convince them, only the raw numbers will. Any average person, ”

Sorry, average people don’t come here, only people with a stronger than average interest in climate do. The discussion here is not about what to put on the front page of USA Today, its about what the climate has done and is doing and that requires numerical analysis to pull the signal out of the noise within the raw data. That it comes up with pretty pictures is partly a bonus.