RSS Global Temperature Anomaly also down in May, halving the April value

Love the website, love the data, man made global warming is a farce, I have always believed it, but this website just keeps enforcing my opinion (and just about everyone I speak to).
Now, how are we going to stop the idiot politicians before they ruin us all?
What can we all do? Any guidance? Any ideas for positive action? We have to get this insanity stopped?
P

“Dr. Spencer was right.”
All of this research and reporting – atmosphere, oceans, solar, weather stations – is multifaceted and globe spanning. Thus, it is difficult to keep up with small parts of it. I always find Dr. Spencer’s reports and statements encouraging because he always writes in a very accessible manner, makes sense, and knows how different parts relate to one another. In the current case I feel confident that these data are reasonable because Spencer says they make sense to him and tells why.
In contrast, and very discouraging, when presented with a report from an avowed or closet “warmest” the assumption is one of being conned and trying to figure out how they are doing it.

Always a pleasure to see the cherry-picked examples of lower temperatures. Reading this site, one would get the impression that the world is getting colder, and would hardly know that we are in the midst of the hottest decade ever, or that last year was hotter than the average of the previous record holder for the hottest decade ever (1990s).
BTW, I noticed the NSIDC has resumed reporting arctic ice loss. Sadly, it shows that 2009 loss is well below normal and has almost exceed the record year for this time of year. I remember you had quite a number of posts when it was only a little less than average, and a few more when it went offline. Will you run a few more now that it shows results inconsistent with your hypothesis?

Tracking each month’s values is about as exciting as watching the paint dry on this (& the UAH) thirty year data collection project. In eyeballing the thing, I can see why the more fanatical of AGW proponents are sounding hysterical of late — after leveling off for a few years, the last 4-5 years seem suggestive of a falling temperature trendline. Ah well, such are the vagaries of climate – those damn cycles keep hiding all that warming.
Speaking of the vagaries of climate – remember the big disaster in the making last year in the SE US – the record setting drought? Atlanta’s water supply in Lake Lanier was drying up (man-made lake). Well, it seems it’s been a soggy spring in the SE this year with weekend plans washed out too often. As for the drought conditions…
http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
So much for the hysterics of the talking heads.

“Well the Met Office predicted a “BBQ Summer” and yet here we are 2 weeks from midsummer and we have snow in England on the Pennines.”
You have to be kidding me. Were you the only man in england who missed the heat wave we just had? Barbeque weather..in spring. But 3 days of average temperature means that the Met Office is wrong….ahh
Oh and Midsummer isn’t actually “mid summer”. We’ve only had 5 days of summer so far.

“”” skeptic (12:20:59) :
Always a pleasure to see the cherry-picked examples of lower temperatures. Reading this site, one would get the impression that the world is getting colder, and would hardly know that we are in the midst of the hottest decade ever, or that last year was hotter than the average of the previous record holder for the hottest decade ever (1990s).
BTW, I noticed the NSIDC has resumed reporting arctic ice loss. Sadly, it shows that 2009 loss is well below normal and has almost exceed the record year for this time of year. I remember you had quite a number of posts when it was only a little less than average, and a few more when it went offline. Will you run a few more now that it shows results inconsistent with your hypothesis? “””
Well you need to watch your words anonymous skeptic. We know for absolute certain that planet earth has had periods of ten years (decade) where it was considerably hotter than the last ten years, and would beat the warmest of the last ten yeras in every one of those earlier hotter decade years.
So clearly this is not the hottest decade ever. It very well might be the hottest decade since about 1978 when polar satellites were first launched, and also the Argo buoys were first put out in the ocean.
Prior to that we don’t have any idea what the mean global surface or lower troposphere temperature was; because we never measured it before then.
So you are simply wrong in your assertion. But lets give you the hottest decade since 1978.
Have you ever noticed how high values of a function tend to congregate around the peak of that function. Conversely, numerous studies have also shown that low values of a function tend to congregate around the minimum of that function ? Don’t you think that is odd ? It’s almost like the observations that some of the highest altitudes on the planet can be found up in the mountains.
Weird, if you ask me.

Germany has really been sold on this whole global warming thing. Here’ a good chuckle the Goode’s would appreciate.
June 4 (Bloomberg) — Germany’s last glacier, located above the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, is getting a protective tarpaulin to help shield it from summer melting.
Ubuntu (left tackle extraordinaire)

skeptic (12:20:59) :
[…]
BTW, I noticed the NSIDC has resumed reporting arctic ice loss. Sadly, it shows that 2009 loss is well below normal and has almost exceed the record year for this time of year. I remember you had quite a number of posts when it was only a little less than average, and a few more when it went offline. Will you run a few more now that it shows results inconsistent with your hypothesis?
Both sides in the global warming debate overstate the effect of global temperatures on the Arctic sea ice extent and thickness. As another commenter pointed out, regional atmospheric circulation patterns may be the biggest factor. This is acknowledged by the NSIDC, which closes its 6/3/09 Report with this statement:
“Whether or not Arctic sea ice reaches a new record low this summer will depend on the circulation patterns that set up over the next few months.”
(From http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/.)
This was also acknowledged by NASA after the great 2007 summer melt:
“[Dr.] Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters. “The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,” Nghiem said.”
(From: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html.)
And:
“A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming. ”
(From http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/ipy-20071113.html.)
Finally, Anthony has recently posted two excellent animations of changes in Arctic sea ice over time based on satellite imagery. You can see the dramatic effect of the circulation patterns with your own eyes.

For those who missed Przemysław Pawełczyk’s link to it a few days ago on the Lindzen thread, I prepared a post about the RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude plot that many of you would find interesting:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
I tried to use one of the figures from it in a comment at ClimateProgress, on the latest post in which Joe Romm attacks the “BREATHAKING ignorance” of WUWT by misspelling breathtaking in his headline. I wonder if Romm sees the humor in that.
But alas! My comment, which I saved, did not make it past Joe Romm’s filter. Each time I try to post a comment there with graphs that show cause and effect, my comment is deleted. Here’s the comment I posted at 12:37PM today (6/6/09) that failed to make it through:
Regarding the well-documented Polar Amplification, refer to RealClimate thread here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends
Real Climate writes, “Whether the warming is from greenhouse gases, El Nino’s, or solar forcing, trends aloft are enhanced. For instance, the GISS model equilibrium runs with 2xCO2 or a 2% increase in solar forcing both show a maximum around 20N to 20S around 300mb (10 km):”
#
The following are two illustrations from the RealClimate thread. The first shows the tropical enhancement and polar amplification for a doubling of CO2 and the second illustrates the same effects for a 2% increase in solar irradiance.
http://i33.tinypic.com/10fu8p2.jpg
http://i38.tinypic.com/w8l4c0.jpg
RealClimate continues: “The first thing to note about the two pictures is how similar they are. They both have the same enhancement in the tropics and similar amplification in the Arctic. They differ most clearly in the stratosphere (the part above 100mb) where CO2 causes cooling while solar causes warming. It’s important to note however, that these are long-term equilibrium results and therefore don’t tell you anything about the signal-to-noise ratio for any particular time period or with any particular forcings.
“If the pictures are very similar despite the different forcings that implies that the pattern really has nothing to do with greenhouse gas changes, but is a more fundamental response to warming (however caused). Indeed, there is a clear physical reason why this is the case – the increase in water vapour as surface air temperature rises causes a change in the moist-adiabatic lapse rate (the decrease of temperature with height) such that the surface to mid-tropospheric gradient decreases with increasing temperature (i.e. it warms faster aloft). This is something seen in many observations and over many timescales, and is not something unique to climate models.”
#####
To create the polar amplification profile illustrated in the above figures in the GCMs, there had to be a doubling of CO2 or a 2% increase in solar irradiance. Neither happened in the last 3 to 4 decades, so what created the polar amplification profile? Real Climate provides the answer. El Nino events.
Since 1976, did we endure a string of El Nino events whose frequency and magnitude greatly outweighed La Nina events? Most assuredly.
And when did polar amplification become evident in the Northern high latitudes? Immediately after the 1997/98 El Nino. It’s very visible in the RSS MSU Time-Latitude plot. I’ll make it easier to see with a time-series graph along side.
http://i42.tinypic.com/e9b04g.jpg
Regards

we need to get this t shirt for Dr Spencer and lief and all the true scientists out there http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/sciencemath/ba6a/

Always a pleasure to see the cherry-picked examples of lower temperatures.
That is dead on, rather than cherry picking some outlying data point to try to make some bogus point, Steve should be looking at the most current data.
Oh. Nevermind.

John Finn (12:25:06) :
[I]…Hadley and GISS anomalies are likely to increase over the next few months with RSS and UAH following suit by the end of the summer….[/I]
End of summer, possible. But for the next one or two month, I’m GISS-ing,
all four may go down a little bit further.
I like to compare UAH MSU (Global, Sea) to Pacific WWV from TAO.
The warm water volume does cange direction from month to month only
slightly, so accumulation will be for two more month.
Pacific Warm Water Volume vs. UAH MSU (Global, Sea), here:
http://i39.tinypic.com/20u5u8m.jpg

John D.Aleo gives a reality check from ICECAP regarding the El-Nino prospects
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Romms_Fairy_Tales.pdf
Also, didn’t EarlHapp say something of something he expects will hold up this development before El-Nino is official, don’t forget the PDO cool signature and the dropping of the AMO according to Unisys (which gets its daily readings from Bouys with no heat sinks because of ships)
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html

Ubuntu (13:25:29) :
{i}…Germany has really been sold on this whole global warming thing.
Here’ a good chuckle the Goode’s would appreciate….{/i}
Yeah, and the national german weather service (DWD, http://www.dwd.de)
did already on the 27th of April give a note to the press, that
according to first analysis, it was the hottest April ever.
Was on the biggest tabloid here.
A week later, the update (April was only 2nd hottest ever),
nobody took notice. Same was with: December/January/February
as season was among the coldest three seasons of the last 25 years.
Sure, that’s only weather.

Dave Middleton (14:17:50)
very good Dave, very witty, but you forgot to give Joel the mechanism so i will give him a hint. It’s big and yellow and it rises to damn early every morning and goes down to damn early when I’m fishing. 🙂

sorry should be TOO damn early

“”” jh (14:08:45) :
Off topic I know but does anyone know if there is a historic gloabal temperature anomally data set available that corrects the bucket problem discussed here a while back – link below. As far as I know data sets like Hadcrut3 are uncorreceted, as you would expect, have they been superceded? “””
Well jh, there couldn’t be any such corrected data set; and there never will be.
Check Geophysical Research Letters for Jan 2001. John Christy et al.
They report on about 20 years of the Argo buoy data. Actual water temperature measurements from a fixed (?1 metre) depth, and simultaneous air temperatures at a fixed (?3 meter) height.
The air temperaturews reported only about 60% of the warming that the water temperatures reported for the succeeding 20 odd years; showing that the previous 150 years of oceanic temperature measures were wrong vaslues to use as a proxy for the lower troposphere temperatures that the land sensors measure.
More importantly the data shows that the air and the water temperatures are not even correlated; let alone identical as had previously been assumed.
Consequently the lower air temperatures over the ocean can never be reconstructed prior to about 1980. That’s data for more than 70% of the earth’s surface.
So prior to 1980ish; we have no idea what the global mean lower troposphere temperature was.

“Skeptic,” I wonder how long it will take for you to catch up. You are apparently still stuck on the original Mann “hockey stick” assertions about the relationship between temperatures in the Nineties and previous times.
Please read this. It will help you catch up. And, as you read it, keep at least these two things in mind: (1) “plausible” doesn’t mean anything like “certain,” and (2) the Little Ice Age was near its coldest period 400 years ago, so the warming that ended the LIA may have simply continued since the year 1600 cited in this report.
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676
The report was requested by Congress after a controversy arose last year over surface temperature reconstructions published by climatologist Michael Mann and his colleagues in the late 1990s. The researchers concluded that the warming of the Northern Hemisphere in the last decades of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past thousand years. In particular, they concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year. Their graph depicting a rise in temperatures at the end of a long era became known as the “hockey stick.”
The Research Council committee found the Mann team’s conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies — in fewer locations — provide temperatures for periods before then. Because of larger uncertainties in temperature reconstructions for decades and individual years, and because not all proxies record temperatures for such short timescales, even less confidence can be placed in the Mann team’s conclusions about the 1990s, and 1998 in particular.

Hi Frank, can you tell me the difference between dynamic and statistical models and which ones have been shown to be more accurate?
Also I noticed there was no cool pool in the spot you described and BOM.gov is showing the surplus warm water in the western half of their depth maps almost gone. (after declining for a while). It depends on whether or not El-Ninos are supplied by water from the west near Indonesia or from the east near South America, if the west then El-Nino’s starting to look a bit more unlikely without that anomalously warm water supplying it to kick it into full gear, one more indication of a domino or two refusing to fall is the recent increase in cloudiness near the date-line.

“Joel Shore (13:48:43)
Why are we still recovering from the LIA? What evidence do you have for this and what is the mechanism that is leading to this warming?”
As you and the rest of the alarmists have apparently ‘settled the science’ shouldn’t you be telling us?
Whilst you are it you can also explain to the rest of us IQ challenged people what caused the Earth to warm up to the MWP and then subsequently cooled down to the LIA and then caused it to warm up again to the start of the 20th century.
You can then explain what caused the global temperatures to increase from 1910 to 1940 at a similar rate to 1975 to 2000 even though there was little change in atmospheric CO2 and atmospheric aerosols showed a very large increase.
Please be specific as to all the forcing factors involved, the measured changes etc and please explain in simplistic language so that IQ challenged people viewing here can understand.
Alan

Steve Hempell: Be cautious about Mann’s DVI data in recent years. My first blog post was about the MBH manipulation of even that dataset:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/04/mann-et-al-weighted-dust-veil-index.html

Snow in the UK?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191089/Its-June–snowing-From-sweltering-shivering-just-week-happen-great-British-summer.html

2009 may not be cooler than 2008, but it will be a LONG way from the record. At this pace, it would need a monster of an El Nino to beat 1998. And I’m not seeing that….

I see a 1977 type winter coming to a nation near you, that’s my theory. I hope I am incorrect, but the cards are lining up. I can’t wait to see what AGW says then. Oh that’s right, “we reached the tipping point and man made global warming caused it”.
AGW people are never wrong, it’s an interesting system they have.

Just had a thought. That temperature signal is quite noisy, with much more high frequency than low frequency content.
Is this not indicative of a control system with a large amount of negative feedback, but where there is a low pass filter in the loop, so that there is less feedback at higher frequencies, and more negative feedback at lower frequencies? If so, then low frequencies are suppressed relative to high frequencies because of the negative feedback. The low pass filter is formed from consideration of the stabilizing effects of the oceanic heat capacity.
A feedback system with positive feedback and a low pass filter in the loop would have quite a different spectrum. Its gain would be a maximum at zero frequency, because positive feedback creates gain. However higher frequencies would tend to be filtered out and have reduced feedback, resulting in reduced closed-loop gain, and the overall signal would look smoother.

“”and that Dr. Spencer was right.””
He probably was—he seems to just want truth.

Thank you Anthoney for such a quick answer.
Question to Skeptic: Doesn’t the name of this website answer your question on the lower number of posts regarding the sea-ice level?
In other words, information worthy of posting on this website generally has the same premise:
* If we are warming – What is up with *fill-in-the-blank*?
* If the MSM and AGM outlets are saying “X”, then wattsupwith”Y”?
Forgive me for pointing out the obvious. From where I’m sitting, there is no crime of omission. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the tone of the contributors to this website are much more open to interpreting ALL of the data than anywhere else I know of.
Tip to Skeptic: Try not to gloat about our planet warming… if that is indeed what is happening. Even the snarkiest anti-AGW comments on here have one common denominator: Disaster Might Not Be Eminent. There is no place for snarkiness on your part. Don’t cut off the nose to spite the face. If your brothers are deceived, shouldn’t your tone reflect less “I’m right” and more “Please listen me – The end is nigh!”???

Bob Tisdale (16:40:53) :
Bob, I used Mann’s because, by eyeballing it, it seemed to me to be the most conservative. I also used Lamb/Mitchell – by using a bmp chart of their results. In my previous post I mixed up the two results as I was doing it from memory.
Mann gives: 19th compared to 18th – 62% greater DVI for 19th
20th compared to 18th – 6% less DVI for 20th
Lamb/Mitchell 19th compared to 18th – 86% greater DVI for 19th
20th compared to 18th – 33% less DVI for 20th
Big difference. Who do we trust?

“Disaster Might Not Be Eminent.”
Not all Nobel Peace Prize winners are particularly eminent. Yasir Arafat is a war criminal and Al Gore is windbag mediocrity.

Freeman Dyson’s interview with Yale environment 360 is instructive, do i detect a softening of the AGW absolutism on this site.
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

John B (19:23:10) :
What’s up with Arctic Roos? The graphs show 2009 at the 1979-2007 average for April and May:
But now its dropping and may, if it follows the thin ice trend of 2008, result in an ice free arctic later this summer – Just in time for Cap’n Trade (Arghh!).(/sarc)

Always great to read through the comments and observe the process.
But on the theory that you get more of what you pay for/give attention to, Y O Y the troll-feeding? Darn things are worser than seagullz.
Science will out, and hey, read the agriculture pages: yields, estimates, reviews of the season – it’s all in there if you’re looking for Troof. And it’s done by and for folks with real skin in the game – their livelihoods depend on correct choices of variety, planting time, treatment over the growing season, and harvest time.
Plants, as has been my refrain here for some years, don’t lie, aren’t swayed by the person they last read or the one next to them in the crowd, and don’t react to research funding scrum-screwing. They do, however, react exquisitely to sun, temperature and what they’re growing in. Listen to them….
After all, oh, 200 years ago, it was Herschel who noted the inverse correlation between wheat prices and sunspot counts. Plants!

Mr Hempell said: (16:17:29) :
“One of my favourite things to do is to determine the area under the curve for the TSI chart”
Oh Mr Hempell, there is a huge range of hobbies available to you. Model-making, sports, even crochet (I only mention crochet because my sister wrote the best selling beginner’s guide to crochet over here in England).
Surely you can find a better thing to do that burrow under curves. But I am a fair and broad-minded fellow, each to his own. If the under-curve world does it for you I won’t argue.

Dr. Svalgaard, with all due respect, re defining “theory”. That word can mean:
1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena,
2. An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.
Neither of those definitions uses the word “truth.” Truth is an elusive thing. Many scientific theories have been proved false, or at least wanting, even Newton’s Laws of Gravity (see Einstein’s Theory of Relativity).
Thomas Kuhn observed that the scientific community operates on a set of received assumptions. Normal science endeavors to defend those assumptions. But sometimes anomalies (empirical evidence at odds with traditional assumptions) arise to such an extent that the traditional assumptions (old paradigm theories) are shattered. When that happens new theories (new paradigms) must be formulated.
In the case of AGW theory, that paradigm is closer to #2 above than to #1. The anomalies are huge, as has been observed by numerous contributors to WUWT (and elsewhere). You can call the anomalies anecdotal, or weather instead of climate, but the increasing body of anomalies is rapidly swamping a rather poorly formulated (highly conjectural) theory.

“” Mike D. (22:06:28) :…observed by numerous contributors to WUWT ”
Aren’t you glad WUWT exists? I am!

Outside temperature on my window thermometer read 5C (41F) at 6:00am this morning, June 6. And this is in South West Wales!
O/T… I wonder why the North Pole Webcam has stopped updating?
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/webphotos/noaa1.jpg
Is there something they don’t want us to see?

I am not ridiculing the -0.4degree prediction, just pointing out that it may have been overambitious. You see when people predict things with great confidence; it seems natural for people to remember and check if it came true.
Looking at a record of various scientists’ predictions is extremely useful, because those that get them right with very little error means that it is likely they have a technique that works and that will be very useful in predicting future events!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
The SOI has dipped to similar values as in 2007, the year of the last El Nino disturbance…
We will wait and see. Records show that it is common to see an El Nino after a La Nina and vice versa. We have had 2 mild/moderate La Ninas in consecutive order, what is the chance that given that the SOI has dropped to El Nino territory that there will be no El Nino and a third La Nina?

Whilst you are it you can also explain to the rest of us IQ challenged people what caused the Earth to warm up to the MWP and then subsequently cooled down to the LIA and then caused it to warm up again to the start of the 20th century
I think this is an important question. As far as I can tell, there are two possibilities:
(1) There is some unknown cause (forcing) which can result in significant temperature changes over tens or hundreds of years.
(2) The climate is somewhat chaotic over such time periods, i.e. a little ice age can develop in the same unpredictable way that a storm can develop.
Either way, it completely calls into question all these simulations which are alleged to be able to predict global surface temperatures in 2100.
And I have never seen or heard a warmist address this problem beyond hand-waving and ad homenim attacks.

And by the way, my instinct is that the chaos option is correct. I think it’s impossible to accurately predict whether 100 years from now we will be in another LIA or another MWP.
Modern so-called climate science is founded on the hope that the chaotic elements in the climate system will largely cancel eachother out over periods of 50-100 years resulting in a process which can be predicted. But there is absolutely no evidence to think this is so. And until it is understood what caused the LIA, the natural assumption should be chaos.

” This is a common misconception about the meaning of ‘theory’ as scientists use the word. It does NOT mean that something is vague and hypothetical and ill-founded, ‘just a theory’. On the contrary, a ‘theory’ is something that expresses the truth given by a great mass of observations. E.g. instead of extensive tables of planetary positions they can be calculated from Newton’s theory of gravitation that can be written on a single page of text. E.g. instead of huge tables of empirical data on spectral lines of chemical elements, these wavelengths can be calculated from quantum theory, etc. A ‘theory’ of a phenomenon is but a shorthand for all our observations of that phenomenon up to now.”
My overly-cultivated inner semanticist whispers to me that we would do well to distinguish between ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’. I would never use the phrase ‘just a theory’, although I might say ‘just a hypothesis’.
A judicious appeal to etymology can often be of service when clarifying terms. Very briefly and inadequately, then, in classical Greek, the noun ‘theoros’, in its earliest usage, denoted an individual who was sent by a city as something like a cross between an ambassador and a secret agent to observe carefully goings-on elsewhere; ‘theorioi’ also might be sent to Delphi to consult an oracle. A further development of the word led to its application to the spectators at games or at theatrical performances. The verb ‘theoreo’ means ‘to act as a theoros’, i.e. to engage in the kind of careful, synoptic observation characteristic of a good ‘theoros’.
Of course the term is used in every day parlance, as epitomized in the expression ‘just a theory’, to mean something that has not yet been proven to be true; hence the opposition of ‘theory’ to ‘fact’. But that is not the meaning I intended in the post Dr Svalgaard responded to. What I mean by theory is a generalizing account of a phenomenon or a particular set of phenomena. Dr Svalgaard mentions quantum theory, which is still ‘theory’ in the sense I intend although it is, at least in its descriptive function
(the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’), triumphantly and grandly proven by the indisputable fact that it works and that much of contemporary technology is based on upon it. The theory of relativity and the theory of plate tectonics provide further grand examples from the 20th century. On the other hand, as much as I enjoy reading ‘weird science’ and despite the fact that I am a great fan of Brian Greene, superstring theory and ‘brane’ theory remain just attractive hypotheses.
To sum up: a theory is the simplest synoptic account of phenomena that ‘saves the appearances’. That is, I think, a rough-and-ready paraphrase of ‘Occam’s razor’, although the phrase ‘save the appearances’ is attributed to the 7th c. AD philosopher Simplicius.
Yes, O you unthinking adherents of the Whig theory of intellectual history, one of the basic tenets of natural science can be traced back to a 14th century monk and further back to the midnight hour of the ‘dark’ ages.

Re: different definitions of summer.
Astronomically, summer begins with the solstice. Meteorologically, summer means the months of June, July and August.
My favorite definition of summer, however, is implied in the line ‘I spent the summer one day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.’
No summer yesterday here at 40.7 N, 74.5 W, but this afternoon, we will have summer. Or so we are promised.

Another useful definition of summer would be the ninety-day period, 45 days on either side of the solstice, when the sun is highest in the sky. In the northern hemisphere that would mean the period from the second week of May
through the first week of September.

International Falls, Mn bottomed out at 27F this morning, the fourth day this month of record lows for the date and the lowest temp ever recorded this late
(though not the record low for the month).

E.M.Smith (05:47:24) :
Summer has a cultural component to the definition:
Indeed. According to the ancient Norwegian calendar stick (“primstav”), the first day of summer (“Sommerdag”) is 14. April. http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primstav
It is still referred to in modern culture as the first day of summer, even by some TV-meteorologists 🙂

‘Veritas est adequatio rei intellectus’–truth is the conformation of thought to a state-of-affairs, as St Thomas Aquinas saith. I have never found as better definition of truth than that.

Of course a theory can be either true or false. The 18th c. theory of the chemistry of combustion involved a posited substance called ‘phlogiston’. Priestly and Lavoisier exploded that consensus with their description of the chemical reactions involving oxygen. In the 19th, the standard theory of the propagation of light posited a medium, ‘ether’, through which electromagnetic waves traveled. Einstein gave this thoretical construct the boot.

Actually I think it was Michelson & Morely who gave the concept of the ether the boot.
Kindest Regards

anna v (11:49:35) :
Well, well, and I can confirm that we are getting a warmer than average June at the moment in central Greece. Seems there is no democracy in the division of summer heat :).
I knew someone had stolen our share of heat but I always thought you were a good girl anna 😉
Steve Hempell (13:18:22) :
What I find fascinating about theories is that, even though they can be supplanted by another they can still be useful.
For example, I believe that Newton’s theory of gravitation is all that is required to land a probe on Mars or to go to Pluto. However, GPS would not work without Einstein’s theory of relativity.
And it’s likely Einsteins theory will either be supplanted or extended while remaining useful in some applications.
DaveE

Has anyone here read Walter Isaacson’s fine biography of Einstein, published, I think, in 2006?
Dr Svalgaard. Isn’t the Higgs boson still an elusive beast? There is also the strange resuscitation of Einstein’s ‘great mistake’, the cosmological constant.
“The data is the truth the theory has to explain.”
Well, not if you are a philosopher in the analytic tradition of Frege and Russell, where truth is a characteristic not of states-of-affairs but of propositions, which are most clearly set out in the terms of symbolic logic. This is certainly not the position I would take. But I would insist that that ‘data’ are best characterized by being either accurate or inaccurate, not as being true or false.
Sensu stricto, the word ‘datum’, which means ‘given’, is misleading. The world does not present itself exclusively as a set of ‘givens’ passively received by an observer; rather, data have to be worked up out of ‘the booming, buzzing world’ of human experience (William James) by what the Aristotelean tradition calls the ‘active intellect’.
I feel an urge to introduce Husserl’s concept of noetic/noematic analysis, and urge the fulfillment of which I shall forego, I am sure to everyone’s relief.
Natural scientists have an unfortunate tendency to trespass, blundering on two left feet, into the territory of philosophy.

” data just is”
Depends upon what ‘is’ is, as that great philosopher Bill Clinton once said.

This is my last post on this thread, I promise.
Here was my original post:
“Well thanks be to God for that! Putting ‘theory’ before the collection of empirical observations is voodoo-do, not science.”
I can’t see how this sentence can be understood in any other way than as expressing the primacy of empirical observation and the working up of data therefrom as preliminary to any attempt to formulate an adequate synoptic theory. So I can’t see that I am in disagreement with Dr Svalgaard on the general subject of scientific method.
But then, maybe I am a poor reader. Too much indulgence in medieval Latin?

“…the truth that lie”
“when the truth turns out to be lies
And all the joy within you dies.”
By the way, I do a tolerably good karaoke version of ‘White Rabbit’, preferably after two or three beers.

Ah, Leif Svalgaard, I promised no more and will not be baited.
“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant
And an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”

Arthur Glass (07:02:28) :
UKIP (08:03:18) :
You fellows might like this

Just Want Results
Although I am somewhat confused by that diagram, which seems to show that at the solstices, the sun is direct overhead at the equator. I thought that on Jun 21, the sun was directly overhead along the Tropic of Cancer and on Sep. 21 along the Tropic of Capricorn. The sun would be directly overhead along the equator twice a year, at the equinoxes.
A friend of mine from Quito, Ecuador once told me that for him the hardest adjustment to make when he moved up here to 41N was the variation in the length of daylight from June to December. I told him he should try living in Fairbanks for a year.

First a word of warning: putting cats in boxes is difficult enough but opening the box is extremely dangerous because I have observed that not only does the cat turn out to be alive but is absolutely furious at being put in the box in the first place.
LS I think M&M did for the ether in the sense that Fresnel and Stokes thought of it, although their views differed: but admit that debate and experiment rumbled on for another forty years.
And if we cannot test either by experiment or by observation some hypothesis then it is no better or worse than any other untestable hpothesis. And mathematical argument, however elegant, does not necessarily mean that the effect described eventuates in the real world.
Likewise I differ over philosophy, many here are fond of quoting Popper, few Betrand Russell who did very important work on numbers. Science after all is Natural Philosophy, the title Aberdeen University used for its physics department until recently. It is simply that NP has been so successful in providing practical answers that it has encroached on other areas of philosophy. And its reach is enormous, who even thirty years ago would have thought that evolution and economics would turn out to be the opposite faces of the same coin?
If the common modern view of Western philosophy has a weakness it is the idea that there is nothing useful between Aristotle and Descartes: not least because it was mainly the province of clerics. Wrong, the notion you cite of an electron being both one and many has its roots in debates about the physical nature of the world in the 10th and 11th centuries: even earlier in Oitnetla philosophies of course.

Sorry the end of my last post got scrambled by a keboard glitch and I asked the Moderator to chop the resulting gobbledegook.
So errata: I should have said untestable COMPETING hypothesis. And it should be Oriental in the last line.
What I was also going to say was that Bishop Berkley’s ideas altho’ often ridiculed remained a subject for debate for a very long time in the Oxford school of Metaphysics. And the ideas still resonate today in terms of the observation of quantum mechanical processes.
Still robust as Dr. Johnson’s refutation might be it lacks both the elegance and subtlety of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s twin limericks: there are many versions this is the one I know:
A young Oxford fellow said God
Must find it exceedingly odd
That this tree that I see
Simply ceases to be
When there is no-one about in the Quad.
Sir your predicament’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
So you see that the tree
Continues to be
As observed by yours faithfully God.
And for all who use Matlab and such like to busily work out statistics, trends and so on I first heard this one in the late 1960’s and suspect it is by that famous and prolific poet Anonymous.
A computer to print out a fact
Will multiply divide and subtract
But the output can be
No more than debris
If the data is not quite exact.
Kindest Regards

If the common modern view of Western philosophy has a weakness it is the idea that there is nothing useful between Aristotle and Descartes: not least because it was mainly the province of clerics.’
Bertrand Russell’s potted history of philosophy is the villain here.
I read recently, in immediate sucession, The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle’s classic demolition of the Cartesian ‘ghost in the machine’, and Sir Anthony Kenney’s Aquinas on Mind, which argues that Aquinas, and indeed scholastic philosophy in general, had more in common with 20th c. English phiosophy’s emphasis on logic and language than did the tradition descending from Descartes.
It seems to me that Aquinas, and the Aristotelean tradition in general, is more in touch with the experiential realities of human thinking than post-Cartesian theories of mind and epistemologies.
Russell demotes Aquinas from the ranks of philosophers because instead of following a free inquiry, he constructed rational accounts of what he already believed on other grounds. Kenney makes the point that in the
Principia, Russell takes a hundred pages to prove that 2+2=4, something that Russell had belived all his life.

Arthur Glass: ‘Putting ‘theory’ before the collection of empirical observations is voodoo-do, not science.’
Perhaps you could test that proposition: collect some empirical observations and report your findings.

“”” Leif Svalgaard (12:24:13) :
Arthur Glass (11:49:40) :
Of course a theory can be either true or false.
It seems that people around here can’t read. The truth is not about the theory, but about the data. The data is the truth the theory has to explain. “””
Amen to that.
“””This explanation itself is neither true nor false. It is a useful theory if it allows predictions of not yet observed values and those predictions come out correctly within the bounds of observational error. The phlogiston theory was useful when it was proposed, because it explained observed facts. When further facts [the truth] became available, the theory failed, as will [probably] all theories eventually. “””
The “theory” describes the behavior of a “model”. All of it is fiction including the mathematics which we made up out of whole cloth to manipulate the models.
It is comparison of the data “the facts”; from real observations, with the fictional behavior of the model; that leads to conclusions as to whether the model is a sufficient facsimile of the real universe. In a sense, the model doesn’t have to “be like” the real universe; it doesn’t even have to be unique; you could have a dozen models all described by a dozen theories; but what we require of any of them is that their behavior replicates the “facts” ; the real data gathered by real observations of the real universe.
As for the models; they have no reality; just usefulness as tools to perhaps predict what other observations we might be able to make in the real universe to glean new “facts”.
George

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One thing that has bothered me (as a confirmed AGW skeptic) is the diametrically opposite views we get on the global temperature anomaly each month. In WUWT we often get articles showing how the anomaly is decreasing back towards the long-term average, and yet frequently on the Weather Underground, a post from Jeff Masters (who seems to be a confirmed alarmist) posts the exact opposite. A case in point is today’s post on wunderground that May 2009 was the “fourth warmest May on record” when measured globally. He cites the National Climatic Data Center and sure enough, if you visit their site, that’s exactly what they do say. They give a figure of +0.53 C for May which seems vastly different from the figure of +0.09 C quoted here. Who is right, or does anyone have a clue what is going on?