Obama ‘must act now’ on climate

The planet will be in “huge trouble” unless Barack Obama makes strides in tackling climate change, says a leading scientist.

Prof James McCarthy spoke on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which he heads.

The US president has just four years to save the planet, said Prof McCarthy.

“The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional.

Reply: comparison not allowed on either side ~ charles the moderator.

Good luck in convincing the world that the National Academy of Sciences and the analogous bodies in all the other G8+5 countries are merely “AGW propagandists” or stooges for them and that Sen. Inhofe and Viscount Monckton represent the voice of scientific reason! I think even most of his Republican senate colleagues think Inhofe is off his rocker on this.

http://www.accuweather.com/us/ca/lake-tahoe/AB957/forecast.asp?partner=forecastfox&traveler=1&zipChg=1&metric=0

That’s just silly. It is not ad hominem at all. You are the ones who are introducing this list of Inhofe’s as some sort of important piece of evidence.

Nonsense, Joel. Of course it’s ad hominem. Now you are simply being disingenuous. It is a deliberate attempt on your part to try to tar skeptics with the same brush as the anti-evolutionists. Nice try.
Besides, you conveniently ignore all of the other evidence debunking the consensus myth in the recent posting on this blog giving a number of links to articles totally debunking the so-called “consensus”.
Finally, your mythical consensus is purely a political construct, useful for propaganda purposes. In no way does it validate the flimsy science of AGW, but people who aren’t familiar with how science works often don’t know that, which of course is what the AGW propagandists are counting on.

“Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming,” said Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

“If it wasn’t for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.

“As for snowfall that could actually increase in the short term because of global warming. We have all heard the expression ‘too cold to snow’ and we have always expected precipitation to increase.

“All the indicators still suggest that we are warming up in line with predictions.”

[...SNIP...]

Dave Britton, a meteorologist and climate scientist at the Met Office, said: “Even with global warming you cannot rule out we will have a cold winter every so often. It sometimes rains in the Sahara but it is still a desert.”

So, Allan M R MacRae, please be so kind and point out, where exactly your “Warming causes cooling” quote comes from.

“Warming causes cooling… … Down is up… …Less is more.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4436934/Snow-is-consistent-with-global-warming-say-scientists.html

Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 6:41AM GMT 03 Feb 2009

Britain may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years and grappling with up to a foot of snow in some places but the extreme weather is entirely consistent with global warming, claim scientists.

Temperatures for December and January were consistently 1.8 F ( 1 C) lower than the average of 41 F (5 C)and 37 F (3C) respectively and more snow fell in London this week than since the 1960s.

But despite this extreme weather, scientists say that the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years…

icecap.us comments:

Sorry guys, the jig is up. Yes weather is different from climate but a climate regime change has taken place which will mean this kind of weather will happen more frequently. Your excuses and claims will seem more and more ludicrous with each passing storm or cold day/season. Better either open you minds or start looking for another line of work.

http://www.erh.noaa.gov/car/News_Items/2009-02-10_item001.htm

Minus 50 degrees F on 16 January 2009, breaking the old record of -48dF set in 1925.

I recently read a news report out of the UK that claimed the extreme cold just experienced in Europe was caused my global warming. No, it did not seem to be a satire – just another tall tale from that lovable but goofy global warming gang.

I really wish the warmists were right – I am getting tired of all this damned cold – but the groundhog and I expect the LT anomaly to drop considerably by May 2009.

Stay tuned, and bundle up!

Regards, Allan

I’m not sure how you can determine uncertainty with a incredibly short 30 year data set. How do you know a 30 year trend is “certain” over a 10 year one? And given that, a thousand year trend would be even more certain.

There are standard ways to compute the uncertainty in a linear trend from a data set on the basis of how much the data deviate from a straight line. For data that has noise that has no correlation in time, it is pretty straightforward. For temperature data sets, where such time correlations do exist, it gets more complicated.

Admittedly, such trend analyses can’t speak to the point of whether the trend is part of a longer term cycle (over some time period longer than the data) …but it can speak to the question of how reliable the estimate of the linear trend is for the data over the time period that the data is analyzed.

Joel Shore (19:08:54) :

Well, compared to the sort of lengths of time over which trends seem to have attracted interest around here, I would say they are considerably more than just blips in time. Furthermore, the sort of statistical evaluations that one can do to determine the uncertainty in a trend from the behavior of the data show the trends to be much less uncertain than for the trends over the shorter time periods of, say, ~10 years or less that have been so popular of late.

You won’t have seen me say anything about so-called trends in recent years. So I can’t speak to that. I’m not sure how you can determine uncertainty with a incredibly short 30 year data set. How do you know a 30 year trend is “certain” over a 10 year one? And given that, a thousand year trend would be even more certain.

You might want to read what Lucia says in full. I like this from your link in particular: “I find that the IPCC projected trend for this period would be rejected if we use 90% confidence levels.”

Actually she then goes on to say, “The trend would fail to reject at 95% confidence.”

Furthermore, you have to be very careful in how you play the game with these confidence levels. This is best illustrated by the point that if you repeat a study 10 times, it is very likely by chance to find that in one of the studies, you reject a hypothesis at the 90% confidence level even if it is correct. In this case, we have lots of years of data that are somewhat analogous to the repeating of a study many times (not quite because of correlation in the data and such). And, we know for the fact that we are now just coming off a significant La Nina that caused a significant cooling over the last couple of years. So, it would also be interesting to ask: Did the trend through, say, 2006 also reject at the 90% confidence level? And, a few years from now, what does the trend show?

Along these lines, here is a study of how the temperature trends were comparing with the IPCC predictions through 2006: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;316/5825/709 At that point, the temperature trends were not only within the IPCC projections…They were actually toward the high end. So, I would caution against trying to jump to conclusions too quickly unless you want to give yourself whiplash!

Not really. The sat records aren’t nearly long enough to have covered several of the known and emerging (as far as our knowledge is concerned) ocean, atmospheric and solar cycles. They’re just blips in time, really.

Well, compared to the sort of lengths of time over which trends seem to have attracted interest around here, I would say they are considerably more than just blips in time. Furthermore, the sort of statistical evaluations that one can do to determine the uncertainty in a trend from the behavior of the data show the trends to be much less uncertain than for the trends over the shorter time periods of, say, ~10 years or less that have been so popular of late.

No Joel. The Inhofe list is evidence that whatever “consensus” there was is actually losing ground, and is one example only. Do try to keep up.

It is not evidence of that at all. I would look toward more objective measures than Inhofe press releases. Some such measures: The Global Climate Coalition has gone defunct and many of the companies that were part of it now accept the science on AGW. And, more and more corporations, including ones in the power industry, are accepting the science. Amongst scientific organizations, even the American Society of Petroleum Engineers, which was the only major scientific society with an openly challenging statement on AGW has adopted a new statement which one would best characterize as “non committal” (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change ).

And Joel, your feeble attempt to compare skeptics with anti-evolutionists is nothing more than a blatant ad hominem, and is very typical of the sleazy tactics you and your ilk continually use. It is a measure of the complete lack of any scientific foundation of your arguments that you feel the need to resort to that.

That’s just silly. It is not ad hominem at all. You are the ones who are introducing this list of Inhofe’s as some sort of important piece of evidence. Now, we can tell you ’til we are blue in the face that the credentials of most of the signers are not very impressive (and a few of the more impressive ones have apparently asked to be taken off of the list). [And, as an aside since you mention it, we can also tell you 'til we are blue in the face where you get the science wrong...and have actually spent considerable time here doing so.]

However, sometimes when someone presents a piece of evidence such as this list which they somehow think is so compelling, the easiest way to point out why it is not compelling is to show how a similar list can be created to argue for a point of view that I think a much wider group of us here, in both the AGW and skeptics-of-AGW camps, would agree is not scientifically tenable. It’s sort of “a demonstration is worth a thousand words” statement.

I have sort of an interesting story / analogy in this regard: Several years ago, Harper’s Magazine published in their “readings” a piece by an English professor by the name of Wallace who took various paragraphs from Lewis Carroll’s work and created anagrams that were quite ghoulish and in some cases even somewhat confessional, and tying this in with Carroll’s known enjoyment of anagrams and word games, he tried to argue that this suggested that Lewis Carroll should be considered the prime suspect of having been “Jack the Ripper”.

Now, I am sure that someone could give a nice lecture about how easy it is to anagram a long enough piece of text to say virtually anything…and he might manage to convince some people to be very skeptical of Wallace’s thesis. However, what two brilliant readers did instead was to take the first paragraph of Wallace’s piece and produce from it an anagram that had him confessing to killing Nicole Simpson and framing O.J. Their anagram was so good…in fact so much better than any of them in Wallace’s piece…that I was skeptical that it was an an exact anagram and actually wrote a piece of code to verify to myself that it was!

By providing such a compelling demonstration, what these two people did was to create a stronger argument why Wallace’s thesis was bunk than anyone could possibly have made directly. And so (in an admittedly less brilliant and creative way), that is what I am trying to do here: I can argue until I am blue in the face about how easy it is to find the names of 650 scientists to agree with something, especially if you set your standards low enough, or I can simply provide a demonstration of the fact that similar lists do indeed exist to defend a scientific idea that I think we could have quite wide agreement here is not tenable.

I don’t see how Simon’s use of all the data available from when the satellite record started until now is cherrypicking. It is simply comparing the datasets over the entire time period for which one could possibly compare all 4 data sets…And, importantly, it is over a long enough time period that the error bars for the trends are relatively small and thus the comparison is meaningful.

Not really. The sat records aren’t nearly long enough to have covered several of the known and emerging (as far as our knowledge is concerned) ocean, atmospheric and solar cycles. They’re just blips in time, really.