Weather versus climate: sine of the times

Finally, this vexatious question has been settled with a meteorological time series analysis.

I’m sure the media and all who support their important work in factual climate reporting will approve.

Thanks to Josh of cartoonsbyjosh.com

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pat
August 28, 2010 1:08 pm

yep. Just ask the Bolivians, while the global climate boils, they are having a spot of cold weather.

Pete
August 28, 2010 1:18 pm

Brilliant! They just keep getting better 🙂

Milwaukee Bob
August 28, 2010 1:25 pm

Well that explains it – there is NO weather. Little wonder then why we haven’t been able predict it accurately – it doesn’t exist. However, this startling scientific finding is causing me great vexation. Think I’ll just have to have my scotch neat this evening…..

Leon Brozyna
August 28, 2010 1:27 pm

Ever the fertile mind of Josh, finding golden humor in the ludicrous. In this case, the silliness from NatureNews about the S. American cold snap.

August 28, 2010 1:27 pm

If Josh wants to borrow money on this cartoon I’ll cosine for him.

August 28, 2010 1:34 pm

*snerk!*
Good one, as always…

Phil's Dad
August 28, 2010 1:53 pm

This comment might be at a bit of a tangent but isn’t it weather when it’s going down and climate when it’s going up?

Patagon
August 28, 2010 2:00 pm
Terry Jackson
August 28, 2010 2:02 pm

there goes this thread on another tangent…

August 28, 2010 2:32 pm

OT.
Our best wishes to tallbloke and his fiancée on their engagement.

jorgekafkazar
August 28, 2010 2:33 pm

Secant you shall find.

Gordon Ford
August 28, 2010 2:54 pm

Now I understand Climate Change!

Edward Bancroft
August 28, 2010 2:55 pm

Patagon: re New Scientist article.
It appears that AGW supporters are now trying to blur the distinction betwen isolated weather events and climate trends. This may be to distract attention from the increasingly discredited global warming, which has ceased to be shown in actual weather data for the past fifteen years.
They are looking for something apparently man-induced with which to frighten us, and which can move themselves away from their currently shaky position on climate trends. By concentrating on the more headline grabbing localised weather events, and by carefully planting links to possible manmade influences, they no doubt hope to ensure their continued existence as paid doomsters.
Is it a coincidence that the forthcoming meeting in Exeter to review the CRU global raw data records is also using the line that the emphasis on climate data analysis should now be to look at localised impacts?

August 28, 2010 3:06 pm

Love it!

rbateman
August 28, 2010 3:19 pm

Weather has now been promoted to the level of provisionary Climate Citizen.
However, warming weather is more equal than others.
So, all the rest of you take a number and be seated. The Adjuster will call you when it’s your turn to be modified.

kadaka (KD Knoebel)
August 28, 2010 3:25 pm

jorgekafkazar said on August 28, 2010 at 2:33 pm:

Secant you shall find.

Ah, I wouldn’t believe that for a secant.
Well, it appears this cartoon has struck a chord.
——–
vukcevic said on August 28, 2010 at 2:32 pm:

OT.
Our best wishes to tallbloke and his fiancée on their engagement.

Here’s a link for future reference.

Claude
August 28, 2010 3:35 pm

I hear Josh will soon issue an updated version. It’s based on homogenized data, which pushes the trough above zero anomaly, as all successful homogenizations do.

August 28, 2010 3:37 pm

So…when does the age of political/meteorological correctness end, and the real truth about climate change return? I doubt very soon, too many agendas to fulfill.

Neil
August 28, 2010 4:04 pm

Hmmm… So the integral of climate, then, must be the wacky taxes that can be levied. The absolute value of the first derivative must be the number of scary stories than can be written / made up / recycled from years ago.

August 28, 2010 4:21 pm

The weather/climate folks are spinning their stories so fast they’re approaching liftoff. They wouldn’t know straight talk if it bit ’em on the ankle.

Robert of Ottawa
August 28, 2010 4:22 pm

Succinct. Very succinct.

Njorway
August 28, 2010 4:46 pm

40 cm snowfall today August 28, 2010, (It’s late August, but it’s still summer) in Norway:
http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10026614
(use Goolge Translate or something like that)

Enneagram
August 28, 2010 5:13 pm

OT: My best wishes to Tallbloke too. Good weather and climate!

pwl
August 28, 2010 6:30 pm

The cartoon certainly strikes a chord of an arc.
Weather, a conditio sine qua non for climate.
aka
Weather, an indispensable essential ingredient for climate.

Gary Hladik
August 28, 2010 7:12 pm

Something wrong…doesn’t look right…
Wait, let’s just “correct” the left side of the graph down a little…
Ah, that’s better!

Editor
August 28, 2010 7:22 pm

I see, can’t everyone else?
Yeah, sorry – it’s forced a little bit, but I hope it’s a positive forcing.

noaaprogrammer
August 28, 2010 7:40 pm

Njorway says:
August 28, 2010 at 4:46 pm
“40 cm snowfall today August 28, 2010, (It’s late August, but it’s still summer) in Norway…”
Six days ago, some of the higher peaks in the state of Montana had their first snowfall of this coming fall/winter.

Rob Dawg
August 28, 2010 7:52 pm

I don’t believe it for a second. It must be a trig.

Wes M
August 28, 2010 9:46 pm

Aw, that evil anti-greenie Josh has it all wrong. See, when temperatures go down it is called “not worth reporting” but when temperatures go up then it is “extreme warming trends”, “undeniable evidence of global warming”, and so forth. This “weather” I’ve never heard of in my life, Al Gore told me so! Then he went out for a massage and I haven’t seen him since.

Editor
August 28, 2010 10:30 pm

OK, so I missed the engagement announcement. Tallbloke, may your climate always be sunny and warm.

timheyes
August 28, 2010 11:40 pm

There’s no need to be so graphic!
Now I get it. I always wondered whether weather was really weather or clearly climate.

John Marshall
August 29, 2010 1:53 am

Weather is what you actually experience day to day and climate is the long term weather you should get for your latitude.

Editor
August 29, 2010 4:32 am

One of the “problems” with the way climate data are handled is in the obsession with applying linear trend lines to non-linear data.
A sine wave has no linear trend…
Sine Wave (From Wood For Trees)
But… What happens if my data represent only a portion of a sin wave pattern?
A partial sine wave apparently has a very significant secular trend.
The r-squared of a linear trend line of this partial Sine wave is 0.88… 88% of the data fit the trend line. This implies a very strong secular trend; yet, we know that in reality sine waves do not have secular trends.
If we take the entire HadCRUT3 series and apply a linear trend line, we get an apparent secular trend…
HadCRUT3 Temperature Anomaly 1850-2009
The r-squared is 0.55… 55% of the data fit the secular trend. This implies that there is a real long-term warming trend.
What happens to that secular trend if we expand our time series like we did with the sine wave?
The apparent secular trend vanishes in a puff of mathematics…
Moberg et al., 2005 Climate Reconstruction and UAH Lower Trop
How can such a clear secular trend vanish like that? The answer is easy. Each “up hill” and each “down hill” leg of a sine wave has a very strong secular trend. Unless you have enough data to see several cycles, you don’t know if you are looking at a long-term trend or an incomplete cycle… Unless you use “Mike’s Nature Trick.”

Olen
August 29, 2010 6:50 am

More important, is it stable, can it be regulated by bureaucrats and taxed. And can you buy credits on it to ease your guilt. If the sine wave is not right it will take trillions of dollars to fix “it”. And thats just one cycle.

stephen richards
August 29, 2010 7:07 am

John Marshall says:
August 29, 2010 at 1:53 am
Weather is what you actually experience day to day and climate is the long term weather you should get for your latitude.
So John, as iI thought, they are all weather. Whether it’s weather or weather is climate.

barry
August 29, 2010 8:07 am

It appears that AGW supporters are now trying to blur the distinction betwen isolated weather events and climate trends.
If so, that’s page one of the skeptics’ handbook.
“It’s cold in my city/town/region – what global warming?”

Tenuc
August 29, 2010 8:27 am

Great Josh cartoon, which as usual in dead on the money:-)
The warmist cabal of cargo cult climate scientists are getting desperate now their CAGW conjecture has bit the dust. Perhaps they’ll try to muscle into the meteorologists territory once there funding has been withdrawn, although they’ll find it tougher working in this speciality as their forecasts can be easily falsified within a few days.
I don’t think many of them would hack the grade.

barry
August 29, 2010 8:51 am

Moberg et al., 2005 Climate Reconstruction and UAH Lower Trop
How can such a clear secular trend vanish like that? The answer is easy. Each “up hill” and each “down hill” leg of a sine wave has a very strong secular trend. Unless you have enough data to see several cycles, you don’t know if you are looking at a long-term trend or an incomplete cycle

That is not a graph of a sine wave. A sine wave is a smooth, repetitive oscillation.
The sea ice graph Steve Goddard posted a while back is a sine wave with regular, annual peaks. He made a mistake running a trend from a trough to a peak, and admitted it, but it appears some people are finding it hard to move on from that kerfuffle. Now every other thread, any rise and peak, is sine waves and cycles. Enough with the knee-jerking already.

Bart
August 29, 2010 11:27 am

barry says:
August 29, 2010 at 8:51 am
“That is not a graph of a sine wave.”
But, it can be represented as a sum of sine waves. Google Fourier Series.
“A sine wave is a smooth, repetitive oscillation.”
Only if the observation time is greater than the period. That was the point.

Bart
August 29, 2010 11:30 am

“That is not a graph of a sine wave.”
Plus, the error bars over 2000 years are so large that, for all you know, it could be.

Sarge
August 30, 2010 9:20 am

I used to think that weather was to climate as acceleration is to velocity.
Now it’s become clearer to me:
“Weather” is like having sex.
“Climate” is like a time-series graph of your personal history of annual sexual activity.
“Climate prediction” is like expecting the amount of sex you will have in the future should be dictated by calculating a linear projection of the deviation from the curve of your average annual frequency of sexual activity, based on picking an arbitrary starting year, and discounting influences like puberty, financial success, and old age.
Frankly, I’d prefer to spend all that time on weather.

PhilJourdan
August 30, 2010 10:28 am

Ah the English language! Designed by a committee apparently as the Puns just keep on coming!