Waxman Malarkey 3: Impact Zone Alaska

Willis, sorry to pick, but “endless font of misinformation,” should read “endless front of misinformation,”?
Having lived in that north side of hell for 4 years, I can tell you that even if it were 7 degrees F warmer, during the winter, it wouldn’t make one whit of difference.

One scary thought is that these falsehoods are typical of the law making ‘process’.
It happens that engineers and scientists have become interested in this case and so the dishonesty is slightly more apparent.
What would happen if the lies went unquestioned?
Would health care be ‘reformed’ to the benefit of insurers and lawyers? Would bankers be subsidized to steal taxpayer money? Would wars be started and maintained on false pretexts?
I guess we know the answers to those questions. Depressing.

Sitka, Alaska from CRU data
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/Sitka.GIF
Can you say: long-term cooling?
Melt the wax and pass the melarkey.

This warming is real. It traces back to the Tesoro sponsored snow machines at the Palins house.

It would appear that Hansen might agree with you on this one.
Or at least a GISS trend map for warming between 1950 and 2009 shows that most of Alaska is covered by the 1-2 deg C zone for warming, which is 1.8-3.6 F.
As for the PDO, a PDO trend from 1950 to 2009 is definitely positive. A PDO trend from 1922 is just barely negative, and a trend from 1950 to 2009 in GISS shows Alaska mostly in the 0.5-1 deg C warming zone.
From 1980 to 2009 the PDO trend is strongly negative. A temperature trend in GISS shows the southern part of Alaska cooling (faster than just about anywhere else in the world on land), and the northern part warming, and this area really stands out as the only area on land that far north that is not dominated by warming (funny enough Yamahl being another one….)
And on UHI, satellite trends show a similar trend globally to GISS (20% lower if you pick Uah from 1980, but closer if you go with RSS, or limit to either UAH or RSS data since 1992 when an instrument change occurred)

Mark Albright-Are you the Mark Albright, who was fired from your position as Wasington State’s Assistant climatologist by Phil Mote for having the temerity to tell people that the “declining snowpack” claims were not the whole story?
If so, you sir are a true scientific hero, in my opinion.

sorry, I didn’t mean the bold. one of these days I will learn to blockquote.

@ jeff brown says:
June 30, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Far be it from me to to carry Steve’s water, but did you look at the graph? First, that’s not Steve’s. Secondly, it seems to go to 2009. Click on the graph, read the bottom. See, who you can yell at about hiding stuff. Poor dumb Alaskans, they don’t even know how to read their own thermometer. Is that your assertion? Or are you just being unreasonable to Steve? Personally, having lived near the Arctic for a few years, I can tell you that a little warmer up there is a good thing. Weather that’s happening or not, I can’t tell, neither can you. How do I know that? Check where the official thermometer is for that area north of the Arctic. I’d be happy to enlighten you, just ask.

The PDO is also clearly seen in salmon populations. Salmon survival is extremely sensitive to temperatures at the time of ocean entry. In the warm phase of the PDO (which commenced in the 1970s) we see a strong decline in the southern populations (California and Pac NW) and an increase in the northern stocks especially Alaska. The relative geographic abundance reverses in the cool phase. A several thousand year record of the PDO is shown in the paper by Gregory-Eaves et al “Diatoms and sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) population dynamics: Reconstructions of salmon-derived nutrients over the past 2,200 years in two lakes from Kodiak Island, Alaska” http://www.springerlink.com/content/wx55814002x7v823/

All Mr Malarkey er um I mean Markey and Mr Was between his ears er I mean Waxman have to do to see that their theory is nothing but **** (self censored) all they have to do is go live in Alaska.
I was in Alaska in 2008, a fine year to be there for the first time ever.( If you like being frozen in two seconds flat) Anchorage had the third coldest October on record and Ft Yukon almost broke the record of -80F.
Last year it wasn’t as cold, does that mean that Alaska is warming? Has anyone seen the Yukon river in June the last few years?
You know you’re in a cold place when there is a 65+ degreeF change in temperature and it’s still only 42 degrees F.
I’ve had several discussions with warmist about Alaska’s catastrophic warming and I just give up because they are typically basing their facts on Waxman/Markey or Hansen or Mann/Jones.

The Alaskan warming is regional. It did not warm Sitka, Alaska as much as it was from 1860 to 1940.
100 years ago, one could make a global warming case by cherrypicking Sitka….and ignoring everything else.

Brad,
The PDO and El Nino are two different events. The PDO operates on 20 to 30 year time scales while El Nino cycles in less than 2 years. http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/fgz/science/pdo.php?wfo=fgz. Both influence salmon abundance. It is interesting that it was a salmon researcher -Steve Hare-that “discovered” the PDO while looking at the cyclical abundance in salmon populations. (There may also be much longer ocean cycles within which the PDO operates)

Willis has it right.
It is a “font” as in “baptismal font” or “font of all knowledge”.

Hmm. got the href tag wrong. My link is in the source but hidden. Doh.
REPLY:just type in URL’s as you would a browser, WordPress will automatically make a link. Fixed – Anthony

Here’s what the Apple dictionary defines as a the correct word:
fount 1 |fänt; fount|
noun
a source of a desirable quality or commodity : our courier was a fount of knowledge.
• poetic/literary a spring or fountain.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: back-formation from fountain , on the pattern of the pair mountain, mount.

Doug Proctor: June 30, 2010 at 4:14 pm
I used to think that outright lying was not going on, but preferential, self-serving selection. Now I think that outright lying is going on.
As the old aphorism goes, “Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.” But with the present crew in Congress, my money’s on malice.

@willis
A font is either a typeface or a bowl of baptismal water. A fount is either a typeface or a plumbing fixture that provides a flow of water. Font doesn’t make much metaphorical sense in describing a stream of misinformation where fount is quite apt.
Your ad populum appeal (logical fallacy) showing font is used more often than fount does nothing except prove that it’s a common mistake.

Hu McCulloch
A several thousand year record of the PDO is shown in the paper by Gregory-Eaves et al “Diatoms and sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) population dynamics: Reconstructions of salmon-derived nutrients over the past 2,200 years in two lakes from Kodiak Island, Alaska” http://www.springerlink.com/content/wx55814002x7v823/
And some abstracts fro a conference of the subject
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:yx6W7_AnpTYJ:www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/meetings/paclim/pdf2009/paclim_abstracts2009.pdf+diatom+salmon+pdo+finney&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShYCOg8_Lw9ukkFV7p6aYensOwgPGD9hajoKXZXywGDsD5llvCM_fHk8jJ4DyAFooQ5MeL0VyZbfJutbvR0qk2kxEEHRwq-IrZisBDRqee9XIqRPU6w7APrAdz41FT8ef9l1VVB&sig=AHIEtbQeSazkiMN_VmXa6siaYc02sGvUDg

Definition of malarky – wind, empty rhetoric or insincere (or exaggerated) talk.
Seems to aptly describe what Markey is trying to do. How can you tell when a politician is lying? ….

@Willis Eschenbach,
If you can find time to defend your figures of speech, please make some time to defend your science. I noted that your p-values do not match those actually calculated from the data in the first of your Waxman Markey posts. How can you keep posting this series without addressing the evidence that you are making false claims?

First, Fig. 1 clearly shows the dependence of Alaska temperatures on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Spilled my coffee over this one!!
Fig. 1 is your picture of Baked Alaska. This seems not to have been picked up by previous commenters.
In any case, this figure, as a pictorial rendition of climate trends in Alaska, is about as accurate as the Waxman Malarkey.

Willis Eschenbach says:
July 1, 2010 at 2:07 pm

The crazy thing about language is that when a mistake becomes common enough … it becomes standard English, and it is no longer a mistake. That’s how the language changes.

Oh, I can’t resist, even though I may be totally wrong.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several reporters referred to the decimation of the area. Decimate, I believe according to Richard Lederer, referred to a Roman Army practice of encouraging troops who hadn’t performed their best by killing every 10th soldier. That would provide the impetus to the remainder to offer more than 111% in the next battle.
Decimation seems to have spread from New Orleans to other areas and has also remained in Louisiana – it seems the oil spill is decimating the area now.
Hmm, I searched for Richard Lederer decimate and got http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Commonly-Misused-Words which says in part
Oftentimes, “decimate” is misused to mean “devastate,” which means “overwhelm or lay waste to.” Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, but did not decimate its population.
Yay. Decimate Global Warming.

In re to font, fount, front, etc (and more than slightly OT):
The American language, mostly an enlarged set of its principal precursor…the English language…is a dynamically growing language which for better or worse is constantly evolving. Words which may have held a single principal meaning or preferred pronunciation a Century ago have diferent meanings today. A brief summary of the problem this presents to lexicographers can be found in the definition of “irregardless” in the Eleventh Edition of the i>Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary which publisher I consider to be the most authorative source for the contemporary American language.
In my middle years I was very resistant to even subtle changes in what was at the time the “accepted” definition (or pronunciation) of words. In recent decades I’ve grown more tolerant in accepting these changes…abrupt or nuanced…which leads to the irony: an accepted definition 0r pronunciation reigns supreme, until a majority of the population thinks otherwise. There is nothing so scorned by the elite as a formerly
“correct” word which has been redefined or replaced by common usage.

@Willis Eschenbach,
Bad manners on my part shouldn’t be an excuse for not giving a complete explanation of the numerical disagreement in our estimates.
As for autocorrelation, what model did you use that gave you your results? The correlograms I plotted for the time series showed no lags that were significant, with the exception of a marginally significant 8 year lag for the annual series but not the winter series.
When I added the 8 year lagged temperature to the annual models, the yearly trend for 1895-2009 was unchanged at 0.007 °F / year (p = 0.04). For the 1970-2009 period, the trend attributable to year alone decreased to 0.03 °F / year (p = 0.01), and this is clearly a conservative estimate since the lag term absorbs some of the trend. For the winter data, there’s no significant autocorrelation, so my results are unchanged.
As before, I’m making all of my work public, and I’m asking that you do the same.

@Willis Eschenbach,

Try the method of either Quenouille or Nychka for dealing with autocorrelation, that’s what I use.

Thanks for your kind and to-the-point response.
I didn’t think to correct for AR1 non-independence in the residuals because the data do not suggest that there is any, with the exception of the weak signal at 8 year lag in one of the two series.
With your mention of Nychka, are you suggesting that the corrected sample size

n_e= n * [1 – rhohat – (0.068/sqrt(n))] / [1 + rhohat +(0.068/sqrt(n))]

be used? When I run that analysis, I get significant trends for the annual means, both full (p = 0.05) and 1970-2009 (p = 0.01) and trends that are not significant for the winter means, both full (p = 0.07) and 1970-2009 (p = 0.09). The p-values you give for these trends are p = 0.06, not given, p = 0.06, and p = 0.12, respectively. I still don’t know why are figures are in disagreement.
From Nychka et al. (2000):

However, to date a correct treatment using maximum likelihood or Bayesian approaches requires specialized statistical software […] By comparing this approach to the more sophisticated maximum likelihood estimators we find negligible difference.

In 2010, using (the freely available) R, the MLE approach is much easier than kludging around with Nychka. Directly adding an AR1 term, I get p = 0.04, p = 0.02, p = 0.06, and p = 0.06 for the four time series. This agrees with the admission in Nychka et al. (2000) that “when the ADJUSTED effective sample size is large, the coverages may become somewhat conservative.” This is the case with this data, where the number of samples is large and the estimated lag-1 autocorrelation is low.
tl;dr Thanks for citations. Annual data may have autocorrelation but it doesn’t matter. Winter data doesn’t have autocorrelation but assuming it does weakens the tests just enough to miss significance. Our numbers still disagree. I’ve shown where mine come from. You haven’t. Your claim that “there is no statistically significant trend anywhere” is falsified.

@DirkH,
Please don’t derail.
I can try to fix up anything I didn’t explain well enough, if you’d point it out.