Are people still not understanding what long-term trends are?

Cheers

Slides of Nir Shaviv’s presentation to the 2004 Florence Conference.

“The Cosmic Ray/Climate Connection”

Nir J. Shaviv
Racah Institute of Physics
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
19th European Cosmic Ray Symposium
Firenze, 1/9/2004

http://www.fi.infn.it/conferenze/ecrs2004/Pages/Presentazioni/04%20Shaviv.pdf

The following is excerpted from an article written in November 2002 by Sallie Baliunas, Tim Patterson and me.

Computer models that predict catastrophic human-induced global warming have consistently failed to accurately reproduce past and present climate changes, so their predictions of future climate changes are highly suspect. These models incorrectly assume that increased CO2 concentration is a major driver of atmospheric warming, and also assume large positive feedbacks arising from increased CO2 concentration, for which there is no scientific evidence. Without these speculated positive feedbacks, even a doubling of CO2 concentration would lead to a theoretical warming of only approximately 1º C.
Full paper at http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm

QUESTION: How did we know all this way back then, and have the confidence to write it, sign it with our real names, and publish it?

MY RESPONSE:

The point of my above question was that our 2002 article was based on the valid climate science of recent decades, as opposed to the then-new alarmist global warming dogma of the IPCC.

Since then, the IPCC has had to revise its warmist positions ever-downwards, and to throw out previously-sacred touchstones such as the Mann hockey stick.

In contrast to the IPCC’s ever-shifting positions, our 2002 article still stands, with few if any revisions required by recent data.

As we learn more from new instrumentation, we will determine that the catastrophic global warming hypothesis is discredited, both in scientific circles and in the public forum. The failure of Earth to warm, and a possible cooling trend will hasten the demise of the IPCC’s alarmist nonsense.

Hopefully, climate science will soon return to its roots and develop much better predictive tools.

NEXT QUESTION:

Will the cooling of the next few decades be modest or severe, and what, if anything, should we be doing now to prepare for it??

Regards, Allan

Agreed. I’ve looked at enough results of these to have seen quite a few sensors iced up after rising through cloud etc.
However note that even the temperature results are being questioned by those who don’t like the results (no tropical troposphere hot spot). The RH sensor history I don’t know about, the sixties were before my time with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, however the averaged results in the graph seem to be free of steps except for the slope change around 1965.
The RAOBs were to support short term weather forecasting as was the surface station network. That we need to go to extreme statistical techniques to extract dubious results from sensors never designed for this tells me not much of great significance is going on. Except for the world going insane that is.

George E. Smith: I’m actually surprised that the pressure levels are still quoted in millibars in the paper. Weather forecasts in Australia use hectoPascals even in TV weather reports.
The relationship between pressure and temperature in the atmosphere depends on the mean temperature in the layer in question. The quoted relationships are only approximate. Aircraft “altimeters” don’t measure altitude(except radar altimeters) they measure pressure and assume an ISA standard atmosphere for calibration. This has serious consequences for clearance from the ground which is allowed for in calculations of lowest safe altitude in a given area.
“Airspeed Indicators” don’t measure speed either.

water vapor positive feedback does exist though, but only when a source of evaporation is present, ie only at the surface. If there is no water present then you cant increase the concentration via evaporation can you!

Water vapor positive feedback generally goes by another name though :)
The positive feedback loop leads to an explosion, also called convection, a well know cooling process!
All explosions are forms of negative feedback for those who don’t know!
They remove energy from the system undergoing positive feedback when the energy in the system exceeds the structural bonds holding the system together, resulting in kinetic dissipation of energy!
cheers

The various professional societies will only poll their members when they are sure they can control the results. They will certainly not allow polling questions to be non biased or to allow anyone to easily disagree with the hype. Federal funding is too important to the financial health of both the members and the organizations for them to risk being on the black list.

As a result AAPT has our winter meeting polluted by Al Gore’s baloney and people on line use pseudonyms.

Thanks. I posted twice on that already, and neither has been allowed out of the spam filter yet.

HASITBEEN4YEARSYET: “2/3 Earth surface area is about 131,293,600 miles^2
= 340,048,861 km^2
= 340,048,861,000,000 m^2″

umm a km is 1,000m not 1,000,000…..

Just an FYI.

He did’t say that. 1 km² = 1,000² m² = 1,000,000 m².

Bjorn Lomborg politely challenged Al Gore to debate one point. As always, Gore runs and hides out from any debate. But what’s really interesting is the preponderance of readers’ comments, which view the AGW hypothesis with great skepticism.

The fact that the general public is skeptical of the AGW/CO2 claim verifies the charge by Prof. Richard Lindzen that climate journals, and other scientific societies joining in the climate debate, and the climate peer-review process itself have conspired to game the system, publishing that which supports their point of view and blocking contrary points of view through various maneuvers.

If that is not the case, would someone please explain why none of the organizations in question are willing to do a blind polling of their membership on the AGW question? It’s as if the leadership AMS [for example] deems itself to be the arbiters of science — and the membership is tolerated only because they pay the dues.

Cold water, yes. Hot air, yes. Warm or cold food, yes. Any physical entity can be said to be cold or warm, but temperature is not one of them. One can cool down or heat up water or air or food but you cannot heat up a temperature. Semantically, the expression “cold temperatures” is unintelligible.

FYI

So, these guys need to correct their site?
http://www.theconvertersite.com/conversions/area/square-meters-to-square-kilometers.php

1E06 sq m(eters) = 1 sq km

You can also check the miles to square km here…
http://www.theconvertersite.com/conversions/area.php

I don’t see that I’ve made any errors.

Anything else?

umm a km is 1,000m not 1,000,000…..

Just an FYI.

George E. Smith (14:20:59) :

So I’ll bite !

Just what the blazes is 300-700 mb ? Would that be millibarns, or is that some other unit; and unit of what ? and how does it relate to relative humidity ?

Inquiring minds want to know.

George, “bar” is a unit of pressure measurement “”"

Well thanks for that Roger; I didn’t know; but then IANAL, and I just reread the evidence above and nowhere on that garph did I see the word “bar”. I’d swear in court, on a stack of bibles that it said “mb”, and not “bar”.

And in the normal Science lingo (m) is the standard prefix for “milli” meaning 1/1000th, or 10^-3. and (b) in my Handbook of Physics, in the section on Kinetic theory of gases, lists the unit (b) for “barn” as 1b = 10^-28 m^2. It is also used for nuclear reaction crossections, in the sense that if an incoming particle strikes a “target” area equal to the “crossection” for the specific reaction, centered on the target species, that reaction is likely to occur; probably with some associated statistics.

It literally comes from the simple concept of hitting the side of a “barn”.

So when I see mb, that means millibarn or 10^-31 m^2.
Now my handbook says use “bar”, short for “barometer” to mean barometric pressure; and evidently from subsequent readers, they actually meant “altitude” measured in “feet”; a totally bizarre misconstrusion if there ever was one.

The only other use of the lower case letter (b), that I could discover was in units of m^3/mol, as the constant of internal volume in Van der Waals equation:- (p+(n/V)^2 a)(V-nb) = nRT

But I couldn’t find any peer reviewable support for using (b) to measure altitude in feet.

But thanks for clearing up that “bar” thing for me; even if it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the story.

George

Hair hygrometers were replaced much earlier than that — maybe the late ’50s. I say that in regard to U.S. equipment and have absolutely no idea what happened in the rest of world as to equipment adoption.

It needs to be said over, and over, and over again that these instruments were absolutely NOT laboratory quality instruments. They were measuring the atmosphere to support weather forecasts, and they were perfectly adequate for that. They were NOT launched for climatological studies, nor are they operated in a pristine laboratory environment.

Also most radiosonde operators would have admitted that the altitude and temperatures reported were far, far more accurate than humidity measurements. Actually, RH played a very small part in calculating heights of pressure levels. But second guessing what an RH value should have been years ago is surely less accurate still!

Finally, it needs to be said that not many critics seem familiar enough with WMO level selection criteria over the years to opine about what was done, or what should have been done, or even how external forces play on these devices. What happens when they ascend thru thunderstorms, hail, or maybe a jet stream? How far away, and in what direction from the launch point was the tropopause measured? How much difference would you expect in RH values when the instrument rises through the middle of a nice juicy cloud instead of skirting it. What about getting caught in a down draft? How about the rules for reporting super-adiabatic lapse rates? How accurately can operators estimate Mean Virtual Temperatures for a layer? How much difference does it make? How accurate is the instrument calibration before launch?

RAOB runs involve considerably more operator expertise and involvement than recording two temperatures once a day on a USHCN site, but data from USCHN is a primary source of data for AGW calculations. I’d bet the farm that RAOBs furnish far more accurate data than any USHCN site.