From IEEE Spectrum – How to Fix the Climate-Change Panel
Questions for climate modeler and IPCC insider Kevin E. Trenberth
New Zealander Kevin E. Trenberth has been a lead author in the last three climate assessments produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he shared in the 2007 Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC. He is head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. IEEE Spectrum Contributing Editor William Sweet interviewed Trenberth about the impact of the theft last year of climate scientists’ e-mails from the University of East Anglia and proposals for reforming the IPCC.
IEEE Spectrum: You were a lead coauthor with Phil Jones of East Anglia of a key chapter in the latest IPCC assessment, and messages of yours were among the hacked e-mails that aroused such consternation.
Kevin E. Trenberth: One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100 000 hits online. But it was quite clear from the context that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in terms of short-term variability.
Spectrum: It seems to me the most damaging thing about the disclosed e-mails was not the issue of fraud or scientific misconduct but the perception of a bunker mentality among climate scientists. If they really know what they’re doing, why do they seem so defensive?
The full interview at IEEE Spectrum
h/t to WUWT reader Mark Hirst
Trenberth: …Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
😮
It’s a travesty that we didn’t notice the missing heat escaping to space.
==============
The Interview is the normal rubbish, but the comments show the way the wind is blowing, IEEE members are not happy. A Royal Society type climbdown coming soon (I know it was not much of one but one small step on the right path).
Wow. “Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Has the scientific method just been redefined?
It’s over buddies!….we know already bosses now forgot about all of you “climaterians”, now they are hiring biologists for the new tale of “Bio-diversity” for the ASAP procurement of a Brave New World Progressive Governance Agenda.
Good data just has to be prepared for presentation (for example, choosing scales so it’s easy to see the effects being described, and eliminating parts of the curve where the instruments are being calibrated, etc.) You can disregard all data that does not contain error bars. “Massaging data” is slang for taking ambiguous results and making them look better than they really are. The “hide the decline” maneuver with the first versions of the hockey-stick graph is an excellent example of this, as is carefully selecting the proxies used to construct that hockey-stick graph. Another good example of massaging data would be the attempts to find the high-altitude atmospheric hot spots predicted by AGW climate models by looking at the change wind speed with height while ignoring (because they do not show the expected hot spots) the actual high-altitude temperature records collected by weather balloons.
People are skeptic about their septic science… it stinks!
Juaraj V.
Yes, that statement jumped out at me right away. I suspect it might generate another 100000 hits… lol
MikeEE
Trenberth answers like a politician, not a scientist.
Ah yes, I dropped my IEEE membership a couple of years ago too. I do not suffer fools gladly.
It’s a travesty that they have to massage their data.
I hope by fixing the IPCC he means neutering.
In answer to the question at the end of the quotation above:
This is rubbish. Any fair reading of the emails betrays the kind of desperation characteristic of a group that knows its position is indefensible and so is willing to take any kind of action whatever, regardless of law or ethics, to suppress dissent. The brittleness and incoherence of the IPCC’s CO2-driven AGW theory is well-known to Mann, Briffa, Jones, Trenberth, Santer and the rest, as it is to any intelligent person who looks into the matter carefully — witness, most recently, Dr. Curry.
“Error bars” forsooth! He’s clearly been spending far too much time with Santer.
What would be the reaction if a big pharma company admitted to massaging data in a clinical trial to hide or minimize unacceptable side effects in a new drug?
Trenberth slips around the really interesting phrase in that email of his where he stated that the data must be wrong. If data are wrong, no amount of “massage” would correct them. In effect if the data are wrong, then “massaging” the data to “correct” it would mean that the “new” data is fictitious. It isn’t data properly at all. The absolute and only recourse would be to collect new data, if that were possible. With a historic time series like temperature measurements which cannot be recollected, the “Team”‘s emphasis on proxies becomes more meaningful. Proxies are a desperate effort to replace “bad” data with numbers that behave as they “should.”
Wow just wow!
From the comments to the IEEE interview
“A lot of measurements are actually driven by facts. One of the key facts is Earth was not fit for human dwelling until a lot of carbon has been captured in the fossils. Hence we need to understand what would happen if all this carbon captured in fossil fuels is released back to the atmosphere. I hope everybody is curious to find out….. of course the fossil fuel industry wont care.”
That’s a justification for carbon control I had not seen before.!
Trenberth: “What looks like defensiveness to the uninitiated can just be part of the normal process of doing science and scientific interaction. Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded. When they talk about error bars, referring to uncertainty limits, it sounds to the general public like they’re just talking about errors.”
Wow! Trenberth certainly has a knack of shooting himself in the foot. No wonder people doubt the IPCC cargo cult school of climate science.
It’s like playing a prize fish – the fight continues. If the IPCC / AGW fish are landed it’s a hard blow to the head(s) for me – no catch and release here.
Followed by their emergent re-incarnation, the biodiversivists (is there such a word?), and then the politicians. Here in the bankrupt UK we are committed to spending obscene billions on climate change measures over the next 4+ years. That’s to mitigate a 0.8 degree C rise by 40 years time.
“Mark Twang says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:01 am
What would be the reaction if a big pharma company admitted to massaging data in a clinical trial to hide or minimize unacceptable side effects in a new drug?”
Little to nothing as they do it all the time. In some cases they don’t even do studies.
I think the good DR. should get his head out of his A$$ and look around planet EARTH. He might see that life has been moving along just fine, Like it has been for Eons!
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Really… Well, let me run this one by you and see how it sits:
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Would you drive across that bridge?
How about: “My banker almost always has to massage my checking account numbers, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Wish I was such a banker and could get away with that!
Data collected in natural sciences is messy. Anthony’s Surface Stations revelations are not an isolated problem. What is at the core of the IPCC/AGW problem isn’t just that the data is messy though. Its how they have tried to cover up the issue, to attribute far too much certainty in the models and other derivative products of these data, and to try to foist a radical realignment of human civilization around their products.
Trenberth’s “The whole IPCC process is intrinsically conservative” comment is a very good illustration of the problem. The IPCC is very far from conservative, but does perhaps show just how radical folks like Trenberth really are.
Trenberth describes Climategate as “one cherry-picked message”, but I say–by all means, let’s SEE THE REST!
Open up that email server and let’s inspect ALL of the communications. That would be a fitting thing to do a year after the initial revelations.
Very economical with the truth “100,000 hits online” just like his work out by factors of 1000.
It is simply impossible for a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration to cause any kind of climate change.
The climate models have been hard wired using ‘radiative forcing constants’ to ‘predict’ global warming where none exists.
Bernie Madoff got a 150 year jail sentence, Trenberth & Co. should not get any less.
hmm..
“Scientists determine what is said, but governments determine how it is said.”
Don’t let scientific facts get in the way of a political argument.
I wonder if they know, or rather, if they could eventually reconstruct the original raw data, it’s must be like trying to know the original face of an actress after 25 cosmetic surgeries!…or like recovering files wrongly deleted several times…..BTW….Do you know what model did the bosses tell us to use for having a proof of climate change of more than 3 degrees Celsius for the year 2050, before they go to Cancun?...
Fool. Most of the carbon is in carbonates, not hydrocarbons.
================
I was an applied mathematcian who worked extensively with data with noise for various government agency.including NASA. I believe that the current climate scientists throw out the good data and keep the bad. The station data combination introduces bias and filling of missing data that uses other stations that may have no relationship adds junk. The temperature calculations are an average of an average of an average of an average and then is further smoothed to be completely meaningless.
Stunning hubris from Trenberth and therefore IEEE as usual! This seems but an attempt to defuse the well deserved fraud charges. IPCC and the UN’s meddling in climate must all go.
Well color me red faced.
A former New Zealand Prime Minister once observed, that when New Zealanders emigrate to Australia, it raises the IQs of both countries. Eh! fair go Mate; we still are both the same species !
Evidently emigration to the USA, Conveys the same mutual benefits. Ernest Rutherford emigrated to great Britain; and the Royal Navy no longer rules the seven seas !
Well America, I can’t promise to fill in all the pot holes that Dr Trenberth makes; (he’s a damn side more handsome than I am though).
First off, I get off on the wrong foot with that “theft last year…..”
I hadn’t heard that they actually had caught the varmint(s) who put together that FOIA2009 file of extranea and accidently left it in the loo.; so the Russian Red Cross could find it.
I’m rather convinced that models of earth climate like Dr Trenberth’s famous “Energy Budget Cartoon” will never give credible results; Dr Lacis Radiative Transfer theories, notwithstanding; so long as planet earth is regarded as an isothermal sphere at a constant 288 K surface Temperature; receiving a static 342 W/m^2 of 6000K BB spectrum EM radiation over 4pi steradians 24/7 even at the south pole in midwinter midnight, and emitting 390 W/m^2 of 288 K thermal spectrum LWIR EM radiation from every point on the globe.
Also the idea that 324 W/m^2 of LWIR thermal radiation at ??? Temperature spectrum downward radiation can simply be added to that 342 W/m^2 of solar spectrum as if lobsters, and coconut trees were the same thing and affected life on earth exactly the same.
I’m rather used to a planet that rotates once in about 24 hours, and has a big 1366 W/m^2 blow torch shining down on just a tad more than half of it for only part of the time in most places.
Earth is NEVER in thermal equilibrium; no matter what; and making up models that presume it is; just flies in the face of common sense.
I might have to apply for a new birth certificate; and say I was born in Hawaii; which is the 56th State of the USA.
The morning started off with such good news; and here I find out that I might have hoof and mouth disease.
Well Rutherford turned out OK anyway; and our chaps do play good Rugby; and as for our Sheilas; well you just don’t want to get out on a Rugby field with them; World Champs they are. And for the gentlemen from our shores; we know how to sail sailboats too. Climatism evidently is not our strong suit; so my apologies for all the trouble we’ve caused.
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
I wonder if the FDA would be happy with that, when bringing new drugs onto the market????
In truth, we are pretty sure it’s warmed in the past hundred years, perhaps as much as 0.8C. Trenberth and like are pretty sure that 0.5C or so of this is due to AGW. Of course, if they were honest, they would have to admit that that 0.5C could be 0.1C.
Google Translated from the Italian blog:
http://daltonsminima.altervista.org/
“The country which was ruled ruled for years by ecologists”.
This is real history and not my imagination and I do not give reviews of history, except to say that the past is the teacher for the present and the future, at the end of the article you have all the explanations and understand.
A few years ago a nation was ruled by ecologists pure and hard.
Let’s see what they did for the salvation of the planet in this great country and how they ended their history of power.
When they came to power they planted a whole system of laws which had as its objective the protection of nature and its animals and especially plants and animals threatened with extinction. So those were the first laws to prohibit absolutely the medical scientific research with animals. The friendly H.G. (1) threatened to turn into a field of “reprocessing” anyone who threatened to disobey the law. A fisherman was jailed for six months for having cut off the head of a frog (or toad, the story here is not very clear) that was used as bait, the sentence was upheld because it was shown that the animal was still alive when suffered decapitation.
As believers of the “organic medicine” political leaders of this nation declared that the people had to eat only fresh fruits and raw vegetables, for their preservation, sterilization and pasteurization meant an alienation of Nature. ”
They also hated the white bread and 19 .. (2) Health Minister GW (3) waged a fierce fight against the change of the ancient customs that they wanted the bread must be integral rather than highly refined white bread. Minister denounces the use of white bread was a saying that ‘chemical’ and return to use the relation of whole grain bread to return to a diet with less meat and fat, more fruits and vegetables and less white bread.
In the 19 .. (2) The Minister G.W (3). creó then the Committee of the Whole of Government Bread, whose goal was to pressure the bakeries not to produce more white bread, the campaign was fully supported by G. (4) who created propaganda posters which emphasize the `(5) with wholemeal bread. The propaganda and the pressures threatening imprisonment and had their effect “positive” so that if in 19 .. (2) the bakeries producing bread in the country were only 1% during 19 .. (6), this percentage had already grown to 23%.
The Government was also strictly anti-pesticide being the personal physician of the Head of Government TM (7) states that DDT was dangerous and unnecessary and prohibits their use and its commercializzzione.
The government funds research on various environmental hazards to human health of the “background radiation” (a weak radiation that exists in all parts of the world) of lead, asbestos and mercury.
They made campaigns against food colors and preservatives, and require more use of organic medicines, cosmetics, organic food and organic. The government accused the newspapers of red meat and chemical preservatives such as those affected by the increasing incidence of cancer.
Alcoholic beverages were diligently destimolate streets and Rano heavy penalties for those who had been caught driving drunk having any alcoholic beverage. Police first gain the ability to force anyone to do blood tests to check the level of alcohol in the blood of people.
The Head of Government (8) was a vegetarian and enthusiastic fan of natural and organic foods and of course it was a teetotaler. HH (9) shared hatred of (8) for alcohol and order that (10) promote the production of fruit juices and mineral water as substitutes.
But I hate the principal of (8) was directed against cigarettes and smoking, and he could not tolerate anyone smoking in his presence. When the University of (11) created the Institute for Tobacco Control elements gave a lot of money (12) of his own money. Naturally it was banned smoking on trains and on autubus of the city.
I just rulers believed in natural childbirth and breast milk. Women lactating their children as a mother Nature teaches, received a grant from the state. Already in the middle of the year (13) rulers had prohibited the births attended by doctors as it is sufficient for the strong women in the country give birth only with the help of a midwife.
The leaders had also fervent promoters of herbal medicine and farms of (10) to (14) were wrapped proudly entitled “greater Research Institute of Medicinal Plants”.
The ecological sacred fury emanating from their eyes hallucinating was not much different than that of some die-hard supporters of `environmentalism at all costs.
Sounds like a fantastic story and incredible?
You are wrong it’s all true! That’s what the match numeretti with whom I “censored” and hidden the dates and names in this article.
1) Hermann Goring
2) 1935
3) Gerhard Wagner
4) Goebbels
5) Arianism
6) 1943
7) Theodore Morell
8) Hitler
9) Heinrich Himmler
10) S.S.
11) Jena in Saxony
12) 100.00 R.M. Reichsmark
13) thirty
14) Dachau.
Naturalemnte the Government was Nazi.
The studies were conducted by Robert N. Proctor, who has summarized them in the book “Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis” Racial Hygiene: Medicine of the Nazis).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589276/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625954/
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenetica_nazista
Dr. Trenberth would do well to read Feynman’s “cargo cult science” address at Cal Tech, and to think about why Feynman spoke of the need for “leaning over backwards” honesty in science. Dr. Trenberth’s talk of the need for scientists to “massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded” simply shows he has no idea of why climate science and climate scientists are viewed with suspicion by so many. His statement is a perfect example of the problem. He just doesn’t seem to get it.
19.kevin says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:27 am
“Little to nothing as they do it all the time. In some cases they don’t even do studies.”
References please!
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.” – says Trenberth in the interview.
Is that so?
Perhaps in climate ‘science’ …
Mark Twang says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:01 am
What would be the reaction if a big pharma company admitted to massaging data in a clinical trial to hide or minimize unacceptable side effects in a new drug?
A more effective interviewer would have asked a similar question:
Perhaps…
“Would you find it acceptable for a pharmaceutical company or an oil company scientist massaging data and deciding what results to withhold?”
That then puts the interviewee in difficult position – if he won’t accept it from them – why would he feel its OK for climate ‘science’?
Best quote from article :
” Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.”
But good science fully discloses what the raw data looked like, what choices were made as what to disregard & the logic for doing such. Also, a full discussion on the implications that these assumptions have on the results, as well as uncertainty this introduces into the analysis. Yet NONE of this is done by the IPCC & climate modelers in general.
If they actually followed this, everyone would see that the science is not settled & there are huge uncertainties in the AGW hypothesis, including that it may not be valid at all. If the followed this, we would be here on this blog discussing this issue.
The lack of following proper procedure only further emphasizes that this is a political issue, not a scientific issue (politics are always black & white, no room for uncertainty because you can’t push your agenda with uncertainty.
So I guess all the people indignant over the idea of judgments being made on data and having it “massaged” don’t think there should be any correction for UHI or that a scientist shouldn’t decide to eliminate urban data in preference to rural.
Now see this:
I hope Trenberth can reassure us that bias never creeps into his climate moelling work. The same goes for the astronomer and physicist James Hansen.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/how-to-fix-the-climatechange-panel
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Schmidtetal-QSR04.pdf
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html
The hole keeps getting bigger! Keep digging, Trenberth!
Typo:
his climate modeling work.
Trenberth said “Hence we need to understand what would happen if all this carbon captured in fossil fuels is released back to the atmosphere. I hope everybody is curious to find out….. of course the fossil fuel industry wont care.”
Obviously, is it not the goal of every self-respecting oil company to kill all of their customers?
kim says: October 29, 2010 at 11:19 am
“Fool. Most of the carbon is in carbonates, not hydrocarbons.”
At what speed does calcium carbonate and its ilk come out of the ocean?? The deep silicate/shallow carbonate divide in the oceans is a very interesting dynamic, in particular the historic record it leaves behind in the sediments.
Pharma companies and their data: One time I worked for a pharmaceutical research company. One day, one of the researchers came to my office with a question: Could I write him an editor that he could use on his raw data?
I asked why. He said there were a few out-lier results he wanted to remove because they disrupted the graph he was preparing.
I asked if it was not more appropriate to just do more runs. If the out-liers were really an aberration they would average away, if they became more pronounced, then there was probably something there he should be looking at, either in his experiment, or in the behavior of the drug.
He didn’t want to do that. It would take too long.
I told him that the best I could offer was that he described the shape of the graph he wanted, and I would write him a program to generate data to produce that curve.
I never heard from him again.
Funny, Mr Trenberth ought to conduct himself more according to custom, and from what it looks like he is the product of his ancestry from northern France and Southern Belgium. And he should really adhere to the same standards as everyone else from that region, which means keeping to the truth no matter what stupidity descended upon one self, uhm so to speak like, right.
Trenberth –
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.”
Had a case when working with suspended solids in streams in and around coal mines in British Columbia where one value was “off scale”. Coworkers , all good environmentalists, strongly recommended that I delete the sample as an outlier. I constructed a log/log plot of suspended solids vs stream discharge rate which resulted in all values, including the disputed value, plotting on a straight line and thus were valid. If my memory is correct the disputed sample was from a pristine stream not impacted by coal mining operations.
I suspect that my report was deeply buried when I left government.
Well, in partial defense of Trenberth re scientists selecting some data and rejecting others.
This is common in engineering (my late field) also. I see it all the time in the legal arena where engineering data and engineering judgment are at issue. The attorney questions not only his client, but also the expert witness on how the data were obtained, and why some were rejected. The appropriate time to reject data is when that data point clearly is not representative of the other data. Several techniques are used to classify data into “keepers” and “rejects.” Legitimate criteria include failed instrumentation or badly calibrated instruments, errors in data transcription (the famous “M” in Anthony’s recent posts on minus-degrees Celsius comes to mind), sometimes a badly written algorithm that was suitable for some data but failed with others, inattentive laboratory technicians or one who used the wrong laboratory procedure, and there are others that are used depending on the type of data.
The entire field of data selection, rejection, and interpretation is ripe for pursuing an agenda.
So, the biggest problem is the one of uncertainty that comes from Trenberth’s work.
Carefully compare the 1997 energy budget: Trenberth 1997
with the 2009 energy budget: Trenberth 2009
Notice the differences in almost every process are significant if not much greater than the 3 or so Watts per meter squared of a still unrealized CO2 doubling.
This is the science that’s supposed to be settled!
We don’t have a clue!
Solar input: 342 (1997) versus 341.3(2009)
Solar constant: 1368 (1997) versus 1365.2(2009)
Albedo: 31.3%(1997) versus 29.9%(2009)
Absorbed Surface 168(1997) versus 161 (2009)
LW Emitted: 235(1997) versus 238.5(2009)
As far as I know, Trenberth is making a good faith effort to understand and catalog the various components, but I cannot look at the uncertainty from study to study and still believe that we know that 0.9 W/m^2 is going into the oceans.
As a member of the general public and ‘uninitiated’, can I say thank you Ken, for understanding the limits of my rather average inteligence and not bothering me with those hard to understand error bars and that difficult to discipher raw data.
It is scientists like you, with your larger than average intelligence, who know what is truly best for me and for all mankind.
Clearly we need more IPCC resource to sieze upon every negative weather event so that we can warn the world that they are ALL GOING TO DIE!
Sadly, that is not very different from my understanding of his thinking. I had hoped for much better.
PJP says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I worked for Large Pharma for 40+ years, retiring last year.
So true. I had to produce data on stability and purity for drugs that were in clinical trials. I recently imagined what would have happened if back then I would have reported “happier” results sometimes. We had QC (Quality Control) the QA (Quality Assurance). For QC, we had to have all of our measurements witnessed, then initialed by a scientist with credentials in that particular discipline. Then the notebook had to be completed, signed and countersigned as “Read and Understood”. It did not stop there. At key times QA would come in. QA would have to insure that all of the numbers in the book comported with a computer printout, all of the instruments used had to have inspector’s certificates and calibration logs, all SOPs (standard operating procedures) had to be attached to all instruments, and all personnel involved had to have training certificates, updated at intervals. If the machine reported out in 8 significant figures, we had to report all 8. Then, according to protocols, rounding off numbers had be be done in only one way, and at fixed stages. All equipment software had to be determined by an automation expert, validated, and certified to make sure all of the numbers reported were accurate (since digital readouts were performed by spreadsheets, they had to be stepwise validated. The machines had to be assured that xxx voltage did indeed represent yyy digital magnitude.
Real pain in the butt! This happened in stages over the years, and each “assurance” step was a new headache. If your associate was out to potty break, you had to wait to do your measurement so he could look over your shoulder and sign and initial.
When QA came, it was like the Spanish Inquisition. If a mistake were made, and the data had already been submitted to archives or to FDA, then letters had to be written to start an investigation into cause and remediation, then write reports, etc.
But it seems to me that these “climate scientists” have no QC, no QA, no validation steps, no requisite training into SOP, no internal investigations into errors, no remediation, no RECORDS, no witnesses, or no operational reports.
No nothing! Not only do they have no witnesses to see if the weighings were recorded accurately, no QC or QA, but they had their fingers on the balances the whole time!!!
It just struck me: Trenberth is actually not a real scientist. He acts like one; goes through the motions of collecting data and analyzing it and reporting on it. But, how he actually does all that and the epistemology he uses in doing that is not that of a scientist, but that of an alchemist. What’s amazing is that, like in Islam, the “moderates” (by which I mean the real keepers of the faith) refuse to denounce the radicals among them. And so it was with the Crusades.
I’m just really flabbergasted by this realization — most climate “scientists” are not really scientists, despite their PhDs, university/ science agency employment, data, peer reviews, and conferences….
True scientists try to figure out how nature truly is. Most climate scientists try to prove that nature is the way they believe it to be. They KNOW they are right, but since the data won’t cooperate…
I’m… I’m speechless. Kevin Trenberth does not realize he is not a scientist. He truly thinks he is and his fellow are….
They have been caught in the act and guess who is hallucinating? Us of course…
Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
The Universal Credo of Elitists: “Only by evading reality can we maintain our position as Elitists. The more the evasion, the greater the Elitism, the more we deserve to control the real World!”
sharper00 says:
October 29, 2010 at 11:50 am
So I guess all the people indignant over the idea of judgments being made on data and having it “massaged” don’t think there should be any correction for UHI or that a scientist shouldn’t decide to eliminate urban data in preference to rural.
Absolutely not true.
Of course there should be adjustments for issues like that.
But they should be fully documented and overt with the reasons and how they were done and the effect on the results,. Ideally for each site with reasoning for each site’s adjustments.
But that is NOT what happened – the ‘decline’ of the proxies was hidden as it would reduce their validity if it was shown that they had no relation to temperatures actually measured.
This is subterfuge not science. How do we know what other issues are being hidden that were not in the email release?
The entire field needs a little daylight on its data, inner workings and ‘adjustments’ – currently climate science has too high an albedo for anyone to be assured of the correctness of what they are told.
“….scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded…”
What informs that judgment?
I suspect Trenberth doesn’t realize how damaging that comment is.
IPCC ‘science’ is not a science at all, but a form of black art.
I was kind of hoping that Spectrum would pull itself out of its dive. But even after strong negative reaction from the engineering community over stuff they have been publishing the last 5 years or so, that they still publish propaganda pieces, proves to me that they have been consumed by the dark-side. IEEE itself, has been making decisions that have had me scratching my head.
Alas, poor Scientific Method, I knew it well, lo those many years ago. Now, it seems, Scientific Method has mostly been killed off by those to whom its care was entrusted, for their desire of government grant money and fame.
Their fame will be short lived, and they will proceed from fame to notoriety ere long. The last process has begun. Oh, how hard the mighty shall fall.
The point about the bunker mentality which was the focus of our book was this.
The bunker mentality drove the scientists to misconstrue steve McIntyre as a SKEPTIC backed by OIL, rather than a watchdog driven by his love of puzzles. Further, the bunker mentality drove them to change from being people who shared data (Jones gave Mcintyre data in 2002) to people who Fought the release of data. That change precipitated climategate as their efforts to fight the release of data took them to a place where they broke the law.
The chief spokesperson for the bunker approach was Mann.
——–
George E. Smith,
For me that was a useful summary of the earth system status versus model assumptions. Thanks.
John
RockyRoad says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:47 am
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Really… Well, let me run this one by you and see how it sits:
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’.
“…the theft last year of climate scientists’ e-mails from the University of East Anglia…”
I prefer to think of those copies of e-mails as having been liberated. Kinda like “Free Willie,” ya know.
I don’t think someone at UEA looked on a server and said, “Hey! Some e-mails are gone! I think they’ve been stolen.”
If UEA checks their server, I’m sure they’ll find nothing is missing.
“”””” Trenberth: There are three working groups—on the science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and options for greenhouse-gas mitigation. “””””
The Third group Trenberth says consists mostly of “Social Scientists”. Just what is a social scientist and just what would one know about the physical chemistry of greenhouse gases.
Does it not seem odd that right at the outset; before they even get to study the “Science” of climate, they already have a whole group who do nothing except figure out how to fix what they have already decided is the cause; namely greenhouse gases.
Odd; very odd !
I hold a NZ passport, how embarrassing.
Viv Evans says:
October 29, 2010 at 11:47 am
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.” – says Trenberth in the interview.
Is that so?
Sure, consider how much massaging Spencer does to his MSU data, don’t like the very high anomalies last January, just apply an ad hoc massage to move it to the summer.
“
Scientists almostMichael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Ben Santer and Tom Karl always have to massage their data, exercising judgment aboutwhat might be defective and best disregardedhow not to get caught”.“About 700 scientists can be involved in producing a single assessment report, and when the draft goes out for expert review, it might get 1400 to 1600 comments. Every comment goes into a huge Excel spreadsheet, and every comment is explicitly addressed”
REJECTED… REJECTED… REJECTED…
Steven Mosher says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Climate Gate was about Climate Bunker, now it’s time for other enlightening books about other Bunkers/Holy churches. 🙂
There is plenty of work for you ahead and for us to enjoy it. Buy more popcorn!
Kevin E. Trenberth said: “One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100 000 hits online. But it was quite clear from the context that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in terms of short-term variability.”
But his actual email message read:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Trenberth can’t seem to tell warming from lack of warming, and despite his attempted spin, he actually meant “we don’t know where the heat’s going, and that’s a travesty for our side.” It wasn’t a travesty for science, but for the CAGW gravy train he and his cohorts are so anxious to keep riding.
OT: We are in need of the possibility of actually Smily faces to season our comments, specially devilish smileys.
Well, silly me. I forgot it was all about context – morons like me wouldn’t understand that – in context – that is just how scientists talk to each other every day. I suppose that includes conspiring to delete emails subject to FOI requests, using tricks to hide declines (which was really just a “clever thing to do” stupid me for even thinking otherwise) and old Kev there declaring that it is a “travesty” that they cannot show any warming for the last so-many years. It’s not like we should infer from that statement that these guys have an agenda to show warming, is it? No, don’t be such a lamebrain uninitiated idiot. Context. Always remember context.
Phil. says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Or this one.
http://www.rocketboom.com/blog/images/bridge_tay.jpg
Although Millikan discarded two thirds of the results from his oil drop experiment when calculating the charge on the electron. He also kept quiet about it. See (scroll down a bit).
http://www.practicalphysics.org/go/textonly/Guidance_162.html?topic_id=$parameters.topic_id&collection_id=%24parameters.collection_id
HAHA! Trenberth telling engineers that scientists always have to “massage” their data… WOW… I can’t help but laugh out loud. I think in the age old battle between scientists and engineers, the Engineers finally got a leg up on that comment alone.
Earth to Mr Trenberth, if Engineers massage their data, people die.
——————
Steven Mosher,
I enjoyed the book by Tom Fuller and you when it first came out. Lately, I have enjoyed Montford’s book.
A question for you. What predisposed them toward a defensive mode (bunker mentality)? Why, when faced with their situation, didn’t they pursue a positive openness mode instead? Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?
Thanks.
John
Its like putting lipstick on a pig then asking folks to kiss her.
Phil Wrote:
/startquote
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’.
/endquote
No Phil, it’s called understanding error bars and dealing appropriately with them.
The data stays the same, the designers confidence in their accuracy is what is being displayed when they “over-engineer” a design. Climate scientists would do well to gain the same understanding before making pronouncements about the outcomes of their models.
John Whitman says:
October 29, 2010 at 2:43 pm
“Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?”
It was an enormous fear that the public would find out about how flakey the science is.
What annoys me is that Trenberth seems to think it is us who are “uninitiated” i.e. ignorant of how science works.
” Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded. When they talk about error bars, referring to uncertainty limits, it sounds to the general public like they’re just talking about errors. ”
If any credible scientist, at any credible univerist or research center publicly admitted this, they would lose their funding, and possibly their job.
Unfortunatly, in this case, the university in question here was probably activeley encouraging “massaging”.
For Trenberth and rest of the CRU Team, there will be no “happy ending” with this massage.
The tacoma narrows bridge was perfectly adequate for the expected static loads. It was however, flexible and the designers had not taken aerodynamic flutter(resonance) into account.
Nice to see the [trimmed], Trenberth, get a hammering in the comments to the article.
Phil dot and the bridge,
Good thing those engineers weren’t climate scientists. After the bridge collapsed, they would have just said their plan was only a “scenario” and told us all the uncertainty bars were wide enough to include catastrophic failure as a “normal” part of the scenario.
Trenberth is the second most cited scientist on climate science papers that contributed to the IPCC working group one report in 2007.
You should be proud that someone originally from NZ has achieved such a height in his profession.
It has never occurred to me to draw a parallel between IPCC and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It’s the following section of the whole article that made the connection:
‘The chairman exercises influence and authority mainly in the initial selection of the lead contributors for each of the three reports’
One major problem I see in this dynamics is the control over the message by the power of nomination. Just like in the IOC, it’s the IPCC chairman who decides who gets to be part of the group. As membership in this group gives gratification (part of the community, trips to Bali, Nobel Prize…) the temptation is enormous to adhere to the dogma. You agree, you’re in, you disagree, forget the next trip, event… Identically, members of the IOC, nominated by the Chairman, get to be part of the biggest sporting and show business event on the planet, get to travel to countries for candidate assessment and final selection etc… How can anyone expect any of the chosen to be against the group and against the Chairman and against the dogma?
As a result, both IPCC and IOC are amongst the most obscure, corrupt groups with everlasting Chairmen and bunker mentalities.
What if only each country or government had the power to nominate the people representing it, and subject that nomination to a public debate in each country?
@Ian W
“Of course there should be adjustments for issues like that.”
Then it’s a bit silly to take a quote from a scientist about adjustments and present it as a bad thing when he’s actually completely right isn’t it? Judgements about the data and adjustments are absolutely necessary.
“But they should be fully documented and overt with the reasons and how they were done and the effect on the results,. Ideally for each site with reasoning for each site’s adjustments.”
The adjustments are documented. They’re not necessarily written in plain non-technical English and tagged to each individual station but they are documented. Just because you see various articles from people who don’t know why data was adjusted at a particular site doesn’t mean that it isn’t known why it was adjusted (or that the adjustments were either incorrect or nefarious).
A number of people have reconstructed GISS and found the effect of the adjustments is basically zero. No effect on the recorded global warming trends. Sure if you go down to a particular station or a particular region you’ll find some that come out differently after adjustment but that’s to be expected.
“But that is NOT what happened – the ‘decline’ of the proxies was hidden as it would reduce their validity if it was shown that they had no relation to temperatures actually measured.”
I don’t know how this fits into anything. You’re not talking about an adjustment but whether a particular graph properly represented proxy versus recorded temperature.
“This is subterfuge not science. How do we know what other issues are being hidden that were not in the email release?”
Well to take your proxy example the “divergence problem” was a matter of published research before the email was even written. It would be therefore tough to say the email revealed anything that wasn’t known on that issue.
“”””” Phil. says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:50 pm
RockyRoad says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:47 am
“Scientists almost always have to massage their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Really… Well, let me run this one by you and see how it sits:
“Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’. “””””
Unless I am completely mistaken; which has happened before; exactly the same thing happened to the “Second Narrows Bridge” across the harbor at Vancouver BC. That seems to be one of the few things about Vancouver that sticks in my mind; but I could be wrong on that; but you certainly heare of the Tacoma bridge more. Maybe there’s no video of the Second Narrows Bridge.
Geez….,take a look at his CV
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/full_trenberth-cv.pdf
It is astounding that he gets any time to do any actual research with the mind boggling speaking schedule and publication list.
A number of people have reconstructed GISS and found the effect of the adjustments is basically zero.
Of all the howlers in that post, I cannot allow this one to pass.
The effect of GISS adjustments is basically zero. But GISS is not adjusting raw data. It is adjusting ALREADY-ADJUSTED NCDC data!
Raw NCDC data for USHCN stations shows +0.14C per station from 1900 – 2006, fer crissake! Compare THAT with GISS “adjustments”.
Engineers look up material properties. They don’t have to measure them.
If the people making the original measurements of the strengths, hardness, or modulus of a material had just let anomalous measurements through instead of repeating if it didn’t make sense, people would die too.
Happily they weren’t engineers, by your definition.
Note too, (as the Oxfam case has shown), that people are dying from anthropogenic climate change.
“Who’s Who in America
Who’s Who in American Men and Women of Science
Who’s Who in Technology Today
Who’s Who in Technology
Who’s Who in Frontier Science and Technology
Who’s Who in the West
Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders in America
New Zealand Who’s Who
Who’s Who in Australasia Pacific Nations
The International Directory of Distinguished Leadership
Men of Achievement
International Leaders in Achievement
5,000 Personalities of the World
American Men and Women of Science
Dictionary of International Biography
Honored member Strathmore’s Who’s Who Registry
2000 Outstanding Scientists of the 20th Century
The Twentieth Century Award for Achievement
Featured as one of the top ten climate scientists, compiled by the Financial Times of London, 22 Nov 2009”
Someone is rather fond of their celebrity. Vanity has replaced the scientific method.
Wombat says:
“Note too, (as the Oxfam case has shown), that people are dying from anthropogenic climate change.”
Give us a few names of the deceased, please.
ClimateWatcher says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:56 pm
…
As far as I know, Trenberth is making a good faith effort to understand and catalog the various components, but I cannot look at the uncertainty from study to study and still believe that we know that 0.9 W/m^2 is going into the oceans.
Here’s most likely were the missing 0.9 ºC is:
(tongue in cheek, it’s a figment)
1365.2/4 = 341.3 Wm-2 (2009) Dr. Trenberth 1361.6/4 = 340.4 Wm-2 (2010) Dr. Svalgaard ––––- 0.9 Wm-2ref: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
For Trenberth keeps computing the Sun as warmer than it currently is. The energy is not going into, and hiding, in the oceans or anywhere else, the simple fact is there is no ‘missing’ energy.
Are there two-legged wombats?
Species diversification maybe? Therefore biodiversity driven ideological environmentalism has suffered another setback in its infancy as the next apocalyptic agenda.
John
@Evan Jones
“It is adjusting ALREADY-ADJUSTED NCDC data!”
In the case of the United States only. Even if you want to argue that the NCDC adjustments are completely wrong/unnecessary/whatever you’re not going to impact the global trend by any significant amount and it’s the global trend we’re all interested in.
Personally I’m not convinced by graphs of adjusted/unadjusted temperatures for particular stations/cities along with declarations that their unknown or unexplained. All it tells me is the person writing it doesn’t know why they were adjusted. What I do is expect is for someone to tell me why it was adjusted, why the adjustment produces incorrect results and ideally propose either a better adjustment or make a case for simply dropping it. So far it seems to be more the case that some people “like” data which shows particular trends and if they can find that in unadjusted data then they claim the adjustments must therefore be, by definition, wrong.
Trenberth said the they could not find the missing heat. As a New Zealander this is easy to explain.
In New Zealand they have now been found out for adding heat to the temperature record.
John Whitman,
“What predisposed them toward a defensive mode (bunker mentality)? Why, when faced with their situation, didn’t they pursue a positive openness mode instead? Was it a case of noble cause corruption? Or was it their internal knowledge of the lack of objectivity in their science?”
That is a very good set of questions. My personal take is that they were corrupted (intellectually) by a combination of 1) a common, strongly held left/green political POV and 2) the perception of sufficient power via the IPCC to ‘change the world’ to conform with their ideals. This led them to lose all perspective about the certainty of their scientific work, and to close ranks when they perceived a threat to their science from outside.
Many people outside of climate science were simply appalled by the content of the UEA emails, but those directly involved (to this day!) see absolutely nothing wrong; they are simply blinded. If their funding is substantially cut in the future, then they may begin to see things in a different light, but based on all that has happened in the last year, I honestly doubt it.
I’m thinking that he really needs to define his processes for removing data that should be “best disregarded” as this is the start of a very slippery slope.
The third working group doesn’t look at the physical science basis. That’s what working group one looks at.
That greenhouse gasses cause the greenhouse effect has not been controversial for over 100 years.
Well, in a word, “no”.
Volunteering to the IPCC is a large drain on time. It detracts from your career, because you’re not writing your own papers, and partaking in the long review process is not that interesting for most scientists.
Also, it doesn’t pay any money.
Wombat says:
October 29, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Note too, (as the Oxfam case has shown), that people are dying from anthropogenic climate change.
Wrong. People die from, among many things, weather and other naturally-occurring events. Those most vulnerable are the poor, particularly in underdeveloped countries.
Trying to blame those deaths on a myth, anthropogenic climate change/disruption etc., and on “carbon” sidesteps the real issues and actually allows even more people to die. Poverty and ignorance kills. But, AGWs don’t care about that.
Yoo-Hoo, Wo-o-o-o-m-ba-a-a-t!
Still waiting for the names of the folks killed by AGW …S’cuse me, I mean, killed by A-C-C.
While you’re at it, a linked photo showing the coroner’s death certificate showing Cause of Death would help your credibility immensely.
“Cause of Death: Anthropogenic Climate Change.” heh
Ok Phil, since you seems so privy with all of the warmists data, just how much “safety factor” temperature rise HAS been added to the temperature records as a warming “safety factor”? You know, to prevent failure. It’s seem all OK to you. Trenberth is speaking of massaging climate data, i.e. temperatures, not engineering bridges.
And:
Have you taking the time to converse with Dr. Spencer, I thought not. Moving data to correct something scientifically incorrect is not the same as adding a safety factor to climate science data”.
The ruling was pretty clear. There is sufficiently strong scientific evidence to attribute the deaths to anthropogenic climate change.
I’ll have to leave working out their names as an exercise for yourself.
How does he walk upright? The team is great at shooting their own feet off. More interveiws please mr climate scientist. ( a special and outlier branch of science?)
There have been at least seven investigations into the UEA emails. None of those have found any wrongdoing, except that they didn’t respond to the FOI requests.
So a fairer statement would be: “Nearly everyone outside climate science or inside it see absolutely nothing wrong. A few vocal extremists remain hardened against this view.”
That was more or less the claim of the case against Oxfam.
And the ASA found to be wrong.
I believe what the Tacoma Narrows bridge got us was open grating roadways on long bridges.
Wombat says:
October 29, 2010 at 5:01 pm
As Judith Curry says, how’s that working out for you?
ASA’s actual finding:
“We noted that Oxfam’s claim was reasonably restrained in that it stated deaths were occurring at the present time as a result of climate change but that it did not claim specific numbers of deaths were attributable and it did not speculate about future numbers of deaths,” added the ASA.”
1? 10? 15?
In the case of the United States only. Even if you want to argue that the NCDC adjustments are completely wrong/unnecessary/whatever you’re not going to impact the global trend by any significant amount and it’s the global trend we’re all interested in.
What I am arguing is that the NCDC 20C raw trend data per station is +0.14C and that NCDC adjusted data is +0.59. Therefore, it is quite incorrect to imply that adjustments don’t matter. Quite apart from whether those adjustments are justified or not.
You say this is only true for the US? Well, since we can’t even get raw data for most of the world, who knows? Of course, the fact every country we’ve examined so far shows a whopping warming trend adjustment so far should provide a clue as to WHY we can’t seem to get that raw data . . .
Don’t sell me that raw data and adjusted data show anywhere near the same trends since 1900. If there is, as you imply, basically no difference between raw and adjusted data, then fine — make mine raw. Since it makes basically no difference this should be more than acceptable to you.
Personally I’m not convinced by graphs of adjusted/unadjusted temperatures for particular stations/cities along with declarations that their unknown or unexplained. All it tells me is the person writing it doesn’t know why they were adjusted.
“Personally I’m not convinced by graphs of adjusted/unadjusted temperatures for particular stations/cities along with declarations that their unknown or unexplained. All it tells me is the person writing it doesn’t know why they were adjusted upward.”
Fixed your post.
Wombat and Brother Smokes:
Lomborg shed some light on deaths from AGW (with or without the “A”).
He calculated that the temperature rise in recent decades has definitely resulted in quite a few human deaths.
He also calculated that four times as many lives have been SAVED as a result of the rise in temperatures in recent decades.
Doc Goklany will tell you the same story.
I hope this has been helpful.
(I guess that means you were “wrong”, Smokes, and Wombat was “right”. Eh? Nudge-Nudge.)
Wombat:
There is sufficiently strong scientific evidence to attribute the deaths to anthropogenic climate change.
Wombat, since ipcc Climate Science does not follow the Scientific Method, it’s evidence is not “scientific”.
There have been at least seven investigations into the UEA emails. None of those have found any wrongdoing, except that they didn’t respond to the FOI requests.
So a fairer statement would be: “Nearly everyone outside climate science or inside it see absolutely nothing wrong. A few vocal extremists remain hardened against this view.”
No , a fairer statement would be that “they didn’t respond to the FOI requests because, likewise, they were not following the Scientific Method.”
Lucky for you though, Wombat, that your mirror can’t talk back to you. Yet.
Judith Curry has a reaction to the interview
http://judithcurry.com/2010/10/29/uncertainty-and-the-ipcc-ar5/#comments
curryja | October 29, 2010 at 4:21 pm | Reply
The Trenberth interview is a classic example of what is wrong with the IPCC. People have been wondering who my closing message was intended for in the heresy post (“So how have things been going for you lately?”). I didn’t want to name names, but since they have come forward to beautifully to show that the shoe fits, Trenberth is one and Mann, Ehrlich and Rahmsdorf are others.
Further, the letter published by Mann, Ehrlich and Rahmsdorf in Nature is a perfect example of the “merchants of doubt meme” that I referred to in the heresy post. They state “Nature should have pointed out to its readers that Greenberg has served as a round-table speaker and written a report for the Marshall Institute.” Attempting to smear someone who says something you don’t like by inferring that they are in the pay of big oil or brainwashed by right-wing think tanks is the merchants of doubt meme.
L Nettles says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:02 am
Wow just wow!
From the comments to the IEEE interview
“A lot of measurements are actually driven by facts. One of the key facts is Earth was not fit for human dwelling until a lot of carbon has been captured in the fossils.
—–
Ridiculous statement by Trenberth!! My God, man, don’t you know that the earth was populated for millions of years by PLANTS (ferns, conifers etc.) before mammals showed their hairy, vole-like faces??
There is no relationship between the carbon cycle and the evolution of man other than timing. Behold the anti-humanity crux of the warmist argument….man is always guilty, and there’s too many of ’em anyway….what do these folks long for, a planet filled with mammoths and saber-tooth tigers?
I couldn’t read much past massage data.
Perhaps that’s what psientists do, not scientists!
I will go back & read it all tomorrow, after I’ve calmed down,
DaveE.
I can not believe that some are still defending the E-Mail, general falsification of data and destruction of climate data…
They spout the white wash and ignore the faults… I wonder if when I get a speeding ticket the judge will allow me the latitude to determine what evidence and witnesses are relevant before trial?
These guys are so isolated they think they are above any investigation except by their close circle of peer review pals…
Wombat,
This is easy. You made the statement that ACC has been the cause of numerous deaths:
I call BS on deaths due to ACC. I’m a skeptic; I challenge you to produce medical evidence — not UN propaganda — which verifies that human-caused climate change has killed anyone. Keep in mind too that there is zero evidence showing that human activity causes global climate change.
I’ve been wrong before, I’m pretty sure of that. So simply provide us with a citation showing “Anthropogenic Climate Change” as the official cause of just one death. Just one will do, and I’ll concede that UN/Oxfam isn’t spreading its unsupportable scare story for propaganda purposes. Those same UN folks spread climate alarmism to get tax money, you know. They have a self-serving motive for making up stories like this.
“I’ll have to leave working out their names as an exercise for yourself.”
Skeptics have nothing to prove; you cited this claim. But when it comes to verifying it you backpedaled, demanding that skeptics must prove a negative. If your only basis of support is an appeal to a biased authority like the UN, it is simply an unverified conjecture; an opinion.
Where are the bodies?? Just provide one [1] official death certificate stating that ACC was the cause, and you win the argument. Death certificates are in the public record. Should be easy to verify, even for a wombat. ☺
I work in drug development, and I can tell you that if you “massage” data in a clinical trial you’re in a world of hurt (assuming you are found out, which is much more likely than not). The regulatory authorities have extensive rights to examine your raw data and audit your clinical records. There are both civil and criminal penalties for falsifying data. Which is not to say that someone might not try to do this from time to time anyway- there’s a lot of money at stake in this field. However, there is a strong tendency for such things to be revealed at a relatively early time, and severe punishment generally ensues. The slop that passes for climate science could never pass FDA review.
“Prove all odd numbers are prime.”
Mathematician: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is… the hypothesis is false.
Trenberth: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is clearly erroneous data that should be removed, 11 is prime, 13 is prime…
The IPCC “fix” failed. The only thing missing is the truth which has been homogenised beyond all recognition.
@John whitman
‘
My guess is that was nothing quite so fixed. As individuals they had been transformed from relative nonentities to global superstars in their field in a very short time. They were true celebrities.
Some, undoubtedly found the spotlight and the adulation appealing. Their every utterance was seized upon as undoubted truth and their influence could be seen on national and international policies all over the globe.
Collectively they had shared the intellectual intoxication of being in a small tight-knit gang who were the first to know the ‘truth’…the first to decode the runes of climate data and to show that there was a problem. And they all won the f….g Nobel Prize to prove it. Not only were they celebrities they were now prophets…keen to show just how clever they had been. Sharing their data around and graciously condescending to answer some silly questions from the great unwashed.
But wait! The unwashed have done something unexpected! They have looked in detail at the Great Work and found it wanting. Maybe they are just as clever as we are. The gravy train might hit the buffers. We have to stop them.
And since they know in their heart of hearts that the ‘science’ was in fact a bit of a kludge (wilfully or just by happenstance), they can only be stopped by the siege mentality. Use every ‘trick’ that can be found to delay them. And maybe something useful will turn up to save us.
But the sad thing for them is that it was Climategate…and things will never be the same again. The Castle walls are crumbling…the gallant occupants are trying to shore it up by all means they can muster.
But fall it will. The only question is when.
Wombat,
Congrats. You’re probably the highest quality troll I’ve seen here in a bit. Well worded responses using oblique arguments to support adjustment of data, obscure references to vague results from Oxfam studies that require research just to see what you are referring to and have to be debunked on their own merit before tackling the argument you are supporting with it, representation of investigations into the Climategate emails as if they were thorough efforts of any sort to determine the quality of the science. I’m impressed.
The adjustments you speak of invariably result in downward adjustments of temps in the beginning of the temperature record, they keep getting adjusted down and as a consequence the linear trend for the record as a whole increases. Are you seriously taking the position that there is something about the temperature record in 1890 that we just learned about in 2010 that compells 1890 temps to be reduced? Not to mention the anomalous warming trend from the late 1930’s to 1940′ that has slowly been erased, bit by bit, over the last few years. Did we find something out this decade that justifies adjusting data from 70 years ago? If so, what was it?
Oxfam’s stunt is even less credible. The world has extreme weather somewhere on the globe every year, some hot, some cold. There was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that warmists attributed to 37,000 deaths pointing at global whateveristheterm this month. That’s terrible. Now the winter before, in England and Wales ALONE, 20,000 deaths were attributed to cold according to the UK office of Statistics. No corresponding heat wave in 08/09 but 40,000 people died from the cold snap. 50,000 died in 99/2000. Over that time period, only the one extreme warm event and 4 extreme cold events each of which killed nearly as many or more than the warm even in an aread just a fraction of the size of europe as a whole. So are warm events increasing, or cold? Can you explain how CO2 cause increased cooling events? Why does Oxfam trumpet deaths from warm events while staying strangely silent about the cool ones?
As for your vaunted studies exonerating the scientists at the heart of the the email scandal, those were hardley investigations. The questions barely scratched the surface of the issues and accepted the most see through responses as being adequate. It was like watching a cop passing by a jewellery store with a smashed in window, and a guy leabing through it and scooping out the diamonds. He says “hey, did you break that window?” and the guy calmly says “Of course, that’s how we get into our stores down here on Science Boulevard” Oh says the cop, then let me help you, you might cut yourself.
And I forget if it was Wombat or someone else that complained that all engineers had to do was look up numbers of known properties of materials book, What total hogwash. Two cables rated at one ton each can pick up a two ton weight, What do you suppose happens if the two one ton cables are each attached to the one ton weight at 30 degree opposing angles. You wanna walk under neath them because all the weights and properties can be looked up in a book? You feel safe with that? If you do, get an engineer to explain why that two ton weight is going to snap one or both of those cables.
At days end you can distract, deflect and rationalize but you have no real data to backup your claims. The science comes down to this:
Boss, the data doesn’t quite fit the theory, its out a bit.
So adjust it.
Boss, I adjusted it, but there’s some new data that doesn’t fit at all.
So discard it.
Boss, if I discard it, there will be a big white gap at the end of the graph.
So put something else in there instead.
Boss, I put something else in, but it still looks kinda jagged and stuff.
Well, now its my turn, I’m the scientist, here gimme the mouse, I’ll massage this data. See look, change the scale here a bit, change a color there, these two lines we cut off just in the right spot so that new data you spliced into the graph looks like it is all part of one graph…. and oh yeah, subtract a 1/2 degree or so from the really old temps, no one pays attention to the old temps they are all focused on the new ones so they won’t even notice thats the cause of the increased warming.
Wow boss, you so smart.
Well I gotta tell you Billy, there was a time when science wasn’t this mature. They actually thought that if your data didn’t agree with the theory you shoud drop the theory. There are some relics in other sciences who haven’t got past that yet, but in climate science we already know the theory is correct, so proving is a simple matter of selecting the right data and presenting it properly.
You’re a genius boss.
Yes I am. Now do me a favour and run out to the store and buy us some blankets and heaters and canned food, there’s a wicked winter storm on its way due to that arctice wind reversal thing and we don’t want to be getting any frost burn. You know thats caused by global warming right? Burns in general, that their cause, You probabaly thought it was the winter storm, but nope, its a burn, global warming.
Right off the bat Trenberth lies about his own most famous statement: “One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral.” Um, no. The message of Trenberth’s that went viral said how it was a travesty that “we can’t account for the LACK of warming at the moment.” [Emphasis added.]
Another example of “hiding the decline” it seems.
“and when the draft goes out for expert review, it might get 1400 to 1600 comments. Every comment goes into a huge Excel spreadsheet, and every comment is explicitly addressed”
Presumably all the “experts” are pre-committed warmists, with no chance that the draft might be sent to any sceptic scientists for their comments. Asking for sceptic scientists comments on the draft is surely the only way that a true scientific assessment could be achieved if it claims to represent the wider scientific community on a subject where the science is increasingly being seen to be far from settle.
Wombat says:
October 29, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Volunteering to the IPCC … detracts from your career
I’m not surprised.
Steven Mosher says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:45 pm
The point about the bunker mentality which was the focus of our book was this.
The bunker mentality drove the scientists to misconstrue steve McIntyre as a SKEPTIC backed by OIL, rather than a watchdog driven by his love of puzzles. Further, the bunker mentality drove them to change from being people who shared data (Jones gave Mcintyre data in 2002) to people who Fought the release of data.
So you don’t think the fact that the release of the relevant data (Briffa’s Yamal subset, Mann’s hockey stick code, temperature manipulation code etc ) would have blown them and their dumb climate theory out of the water might have had something to do with them blockading FOI’s? Just that they suffered from a ‘bunker mentality’?
I think if that’s your position, you are down there in the bunker with them.
Wombat says:
October 29, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Earth to Mr Trenberth, if Engineers massage their data, people die.
Engineers look up material properties. They don’t have to measure them.
Clearly Bamwot knows as much about engineering as he does about climate science.
I wonder if Trenberth’s missing energy might be due to the unusual radiation emitted from H2O molecular aggregates (clumps) that have been shock-exited by initial formation or condensation bonding. I suspect that this unusual radiation may have a free, clear-air path from top of convection columns to outer space by not coinciding with the absorption spectra of CO2 or simple free H2O molecules in the atmosphere. Even the simplest H2O molecular aggregate is much more complicated than a single H2O molecule and thus it has many additional special vibration modes.
So far I have not found any data available to the general public that purports to represent the typical emission spectra of the components of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Robert Kral says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:06 pm
I work in drug development, and I can tell you that if you “massage” data in a clinical trial you’re in a world of hurt (assuming you are found out, which is much more likely than not). The regulatory authorities have extensive rights to examine your raw data and audit your clinical records. There are both civil and criminal penalties for falsifying data. Which is not to say that someone might not try to do this from time to time anyway- there’s a lot of money at stake in this field. However, there is a strong tendency for such things to be revealed at a relatively early time, and severe punishment generally ensues. The slop that passes for climate science could never pass FDA review.
Precisely because there is such a lot of money involved the FDA have been willing to let such fraud pass, see here for example:
Yet despite the irregularities and red flags, clinical trials at the Vivra Tucson facility which still appear in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine, were not stopped by the FDA, institutional review boards, trial sponsors, contract research organizations or the Justice Department. Nor was the facility’s clearance to conduct trials revoked.
In fact FDA inspections were actually delayed to facilitate the new drug applications the studies were for-like clearing a plane with mechanical problems for takeoff to not hold up travelers. This “safety last” policy is a expected outgrowth of the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) that allows drug companies to pay the FDA to accelerate approvals, says Davidson.
“It takes time to obtain a properly administered, formal informed consent with full disclosure of risks and benefits and that slows study-subject recruitment and ultimately, delays the time to obtain market approval from FDA,” says Davidson. “It is virtually certain that there have been deaths of US citizens because of the fraudulent or seriously-flawed clinical research PDUFA encourages. Nor is FDA likely to revoke expedited market approvals because that would be tantamount to admitting that they ‘goofed.'”
[Try again, without calling people “denialists.” Read the site Policy for further 411. ~dbs, mod.]
I think his measurements of outbound radiation are from satellites, so they’re pretty much all-inclusive.
I find that ad-hominem is mostly utilised by people whose position lacks logical, non-fallacious support.
Do you?
“Wombat” must be of the northern hairy nosed species. Yes, sadly, the True Believers are going extinct, no longer being supported by their shrinking habitat of post normal pseudo-science and lies. The fact they still exist is an amazing testament to their hardiness against the harsh realities of science and truth.
I cite the findings of the ASA. About 0.2% (2004 estimate) or 0.3% of all deaths. (2000 estimate).
That 100,000 or 150,000 thousand annually, since 2000.
Oh, dear, mate.
I’m not sure how far back we need to go if you don’t have a grasp on this one. I guess there’s two parts:
1) Human activity has increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses, and
2) Increased greenhouse gas concentration increases the greenhouse effect.
Which part are you having the most trouble with?
Wombat says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
October 30, 2010 at 5:52 am
John M says:
October 29, 2010 at 5:49 pm
ASA’s actual finding:
“We noted that Oxfam’s claim was reasonably restrained in that it stated deaths were occurring at the present time as a result of climate change but that it did not claim specific numbers of deaths were attributable and it did not speculate about future numbers of deaths,” added the ASA.”
1? 10? 15?
Wow, you went and looked up the report, and then you cherry picked the second last paragraph of the Assessment section.
And then you claim it as the “Actual finding”.
For the reader, the paragraph before the quoted one:
“We noted that Oxfam had supplied a WHO fact sheet which had been published in January 2010 and which stated “Globally, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s. Every year, these disasters result in over 60,000 deaths, mainly in developing countries” and confirmation from WHO that that position still, in June 2010, reflected WHO’s assessment of the situation. We noted that that statement reflected findings set out in more detail in WHO’s publication “The World Health Report 2002 Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life”, which stated “Climate change was estimated to be responsible in 2000 for approximately 2.4% of worldwide diarrhoea, 6% of malaria in some middle income countries and 7% of dengue fever in some industrialized countries. In total, the attributable mortality was 154 000 (0.3%) deaths …” and WHO’s 2009 publication “GLOBAL HEALTH RISKS – Mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks”, which stated “Climate change was estimated to be already responsible for 3% of diarrhoea, 3% of malaria and 3.8% of dengue fever deaths worldwide in 2004. Total attributable mortality was about 0.2% of deaths in 2004; of these, 85% were child deaths”. We noted that those statistics were broken down in more detail according to cause and region in WHO’s 2004 publication, “Comparative Quantification of Health Risks.” We also noted that the IPCC Report’s position was that changes in weather trends had led to increased disease.”
Also note the slant that these counter-scientific climate ideologues put in their posts approaches dishonesty.
The irony is heavy in a thread in which they are decrying the methods of a scientist as renowned as Trenberth.
Oh, dear, mate.
I’m not sure how far back we need to go if you don’t have a grasp on this one. I guess there’s two parts:
1) Human activity has increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses, and
2) Increased greenhouse gas concentration increases the greenhouse effect.
Which part are you having the most trouble with?
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 5:56 am
I find that ad-hominem is mostly utilised by people whose position lacks logical, non-fallacious support.
Yes, that would explain why you just had a post snipped I agree.
@ Phil:
““Bridge engineers almost always have to massage their designs, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded”.
Yep that’s why they don’t build bridges like this one any more! Safety factors are added into designs to allow for a margin of error, that’s ‘massaging the data’.”
Uh, no… “massaging the data” would be taking a reading from the support pillars, realizing that the instrumentation says that they’re bending, and declaring it impossible so it must be wrong.
What you’re describing would be closer to “refining the model” which is totally different.
———————
Wombat,
In the context of all of mankind’s existence and the earth’s existence before mankind’s existence, your items 1) and 2) do not appear to be important; even if substantially correct.
In addition, the play out of climate science the late 20th century and early 21st century does not support a significant and negative impact on the Earth Total System and mankind. Catastrophic AGW-by-CO2 ‘settled/consensus science’ supporter views to the contrary notwithstanding.
The current obviously advancing reformation /renaissance in climate science (replacing the problematic climate science of the last >20 yrs) is showing us a more balanced and reasonable perspective. That is something the public can appreciate.
John
Hey, how come the 13th tree data wasn’t “massaged out” but the late 20th century tree proxy data was because it disagreed with the instrument record? (how about that temperature record folks!) A hockey stick is what Mann wanted and so a hockey stick he got. I have a dream of a huge shredder where all these ” studies ” and ” experiments ” get fed into and produce little hard bricks of knowlege that I can heat my house with.
RE: Wombat: (October 30, 2010 at 5:54 am)
“I think his measurements of outbound radiation are from satellites, so they’re pretty much all-inclusive.”
Perhaps so, however, I have not seen any public information identifying the radiation that is emitted by the atmosphere alone. I do not think we can create a valid theory of upper atmosphere cooling if we do not know this. I also have not seen any public discussion of the special radiation created by the shock of H2O condensation. Perhaps this is a minimal issue, but I am bothered by the fact that this is never even mentioned.
Wombat;
1) Human activity has increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses, and
2) Increased greenhouse gas concentration increases the greenhouse effect.
Which part are you having the most trouble with?>>
The part where you fail to provide evidence to support your conclusion. The introduction of additional greenhouse gases has both a direct effect in terms of retaining energy, and multiple indirect effects usually known as positive and negative feedbacks. Any conclusion in regard to the effects on the planet as regards temperature must include the sum of the feedbacks. To date we have a temperature record of questionable accuracy which none the less shows global temperature increases of about 0.6 degrees over the course of time during which CO2 emissions were rising. There is no statistical correlation between the two, and the period of highest CO2 concentrations (the last 15 years) exhibits no significant warming. If we were to put aside those facts for a moment and still accept the position that the entire increase recorded is a direct result of CO2, we would still be left with the inevitable conclusion that both sensitivity of the climate to direct inputs from CO2 AND the sum of the feedbacks is well under the range predicted by the “settled science” and natural variability is in excess of the oberved changes, suggesting that attributing the entire change to CO2 makes little sense and the sensistivity is consequently even less. This is supported by the temperature record which shows warming of 0.5 degrees in the 90 years before CO2 increases started to become measurably higher in 1920 versus the 0.6 degrees recorded in the 90 years since, suggesting that the planet is in a long term natural warming cycle of which CO2 and associated feedbacks MIGHT account for 0.1 degrees. The notion of the planet being in a natural long term warming cycle is further supported by the historical record which suggests warming has been occurring for the last few centuries, and this is confirmed by proxy studies of many sorts. While the esteemed Mann, Briffa and Jones triumverate has attempted to construe a handfull of proxy studies to show flat temperatures over those same centuries, these lost all credibility when close examination revealed computer codes that biased the results by increasing the weight of data that matched the theory, and the Yamal tree ring series which relies on 7 tree in Siberia with 50% of the data attributed to just one of them. In the meantime the historical record stands, and at last count there were 51 peer reviewed proxy studies using multiple types of proxies distributed around the world showing that the natural warming since the Little Ice Age is in concert with the historical record.
So what part of there being no evidence don’t you understand?
I didn’t see much on the great “Fix”. Are these people paid union wages to write this stuff for the IPCC? Do they get UN retirement packages and hospitalization too? Like what we pay members of congress? Do they also get diplomatic immunity from parking and traffic tickets?
Oh wombat, you actually want to talk about the numbers in the WHO report (which somehow were what got Oxfam off the hook because they didn’t use them in the ad.
Ok, take a look at what an expert in the field has to say about the numbers.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/10/if-it-is-not-true-and-not-flase-then.html
I guess your credulity with regard to climate science extends to number games from UN organizations as well.
Wombat,
You claim the additional paragraphs from the Oxfam report posted by you show that they have been misrepresented in order to slant perception. OK. Let’s work our way through that report paragrpah you posted:
<<We noted that Oxfam had supplied a WHO fact sheet which had been published in January 2010 and which stated “Globally, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s.<>Every year, these disasters result in over 60,000 deaths, mainly in developing countries” and confirmation from WHO that that position still, in June 2010, reflected WHO’s assessment of the situation.>>
Interesting to note that developing countries are mostly equatorial, the region of the planet that has shown the LEAST amount of climate change according to the temperature record, but have experienced the MOST deaths because of it. From what? Why from those severe weather events that have been declining in frequence for the last 30 years. Is this still adding up for you Wombat?
>> We noted that that statement reflected findings set out in more detail in WHO’s publication “The World Health Report 2002 Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life”, which stated “Climate change was estimated to be responsible in 2000 for approximately 2.4% of worldwide diarrhoea, 6% of malaria in some middle income countries and 7% of dengue fever in some industrialized countries. In total, the attributable mortality was 154 000 (0.3%) deaths …” <>and WHO’s 2009 publication “GLOBAL HEALTH RISKS – Mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks”, which stated “Climate change was estimated to be already responsible for 3% of diarrhoea, 3% of malaria and 3.8% of dengue fever deaths worldwide in 2004. Total attributable mortality was about 0.2% of deaths in 2004; of these, 85% were child deaths”. We noted that those statistics were broken down in more detail according to cause and region in WHO’s 2004 publication, “Comparative Quantification of Health Risks.” We also noted that the IPCC Report’s position was that changes in weather trends had led to increased disease.”<<
Well that's pretty much the same thing as the previous section except that they threw in the heart string tug of "85% were child deaths". Yes, children are more susceptable to disease than adults, in countries with poor health care in particular, which are mostly developing countries, which are mostly equatorial, which according to the same IPCC report to which is referred to at the end, have shown the least change in temperature over the last two centuries.
Of course I for one believe that Oxfam and the developing countries have faithfully reported the facts accurately, the notion that a UN agency funded to supply aid to developing countries would never produce a report with slanted statistics to try and get their budget increased, would they? And the developing countries who get the aid, they would never slant the statistics in order to be elegible for more aid would they? Odd isn't it that the countries reporting the least impact from increased disease aren't recipients of Oxfam aid, yet they are mostly located in the parts of the world that have experienced, according to the IPCC, the most warming. Because things like Oil for Food scandals where dictatorships and beauracrats conspire to fleece the first world while lining their own pockets would never happen at the UN. Oh, wait, it did. And you'd never have the lily white UN create a world human rights body chaired by the worst human rights violators in the world so that they could exonerate themselves. Oh wait, they did. You'd never have someone like the UN accounce that they had come to an agreement to save the whales by prohibiting whaling world wide with the only countries that actually do any whaling exempted. Oh wait, they did.
You don't see any "slant" in any of that? I do. Its a slippery slope that the alarmists have set foot upon, and they are now sliding down it completely out of control, screaming "SEE! i TOLD you this road would take us to the top of the mountain, can't you see the evidence?" as they fall into the quicksand at the bottom.
I’m very proud of my fellow engineers for delivering such a delicious slapdown in the comment section of the Spectrum article. We don’t have to call them fools, just let them speak and they demonstrate their foolishness all on their own.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978648297
Stop arguing with the little fuzzy animal—we dealt with such blabbering years and thousands of postings ago.
Focus on the criminal Trenberth and his self-admissions of guilt, and his fellow-travelers and kingpins of criminal Climategate fame, and the whitewashing “inquiries” by his peer-group “investigators”.
As for Millikan:
1) He wasn’t funded by you and me
2) He did not try to use his experiment to tax anything on the planet that generated light
3) He did not advocate that people, especially in the developing world, should be forced by exploitation to live in perpetual darkness
re previous post, I really gottal learn this html stuff because I’ve wound up snipping some of my own rebuttal. Missing from the previous post:
REPORTED increase in extreme weather events since 1960. Better news coverage accounts for almost all of that, and the satellite record shows extreme weather events have been in decline for the last 30.
Why the selective use of disease profiles? Diorrhea in developing countries, malaria in middle income and dengue fever in industrialized. One would think that ALL diseases that thrive in warmer temperatures would increase in ALL countries. One would think that industrialized countries in temperate zones where the temperature record has shown the most change would be the hadest hit, and equatorial zones where developing countries are concentrated and which have had the LEAST temperature increase would have seen the LEAST increase in disease.
Wombat:
There is sufficiently strong scientific evidence to attribute the deaths to anthropogenic climate change.
There is very strong evidence that total world population has increased over the “AGW climate change” period in question. Wombat, your general claim as to the net ill-effect of “AGW climate change” is false.
Population increased for many other reasons than climate.
The issue is more direct. Every change affects things. And for at least the next two degrees of warming (assuming that much), many will die from warming. And around four times as many lives will be saved from the effects of cold.
In those terms, and from a strictly human perspective, a mild warming would be wonderful.
Moreover, Wombat et al., over the past 6 decades the standard of living in the U.S., for example, has significantly increased, an occurrence which is necessarily related to the increase in its use of fossil fuel – but which the CO2AGW climate change scientists instead claim is causing a net disease state world-wide, including right here in the U.S. [~”the world has a fever”].
Therefore, the CO2AGW climate change scientists are obviously wrong, and what they claim is the cause of an alleged disease is actually the/a cure for the real disease – being underdeveloped, a fact which India and China have also recognized.
When are the ipcc Cimate Scientists going to start dealing scientifically with these facts?
evanmjones;
And for at least the next two degrees of warming (assuming that much), many will die from warming. And around four times as many lives will be saved from the effects of cold.>>
Then add in the additional lives saved from hunger by longer growing seasons, larger crop yields, and increased amounts of arable land. Then add to that the increased wealth in north temperate climates as they can divert energy from winter heating bills dropping to other endeavours, not to mention using less fossil fuel in the process. Not to mention that gasoline engines would have an increase in efficiency as winter temps are well below peak efficiency, and so fuel economy would improve along with engine life which would put still more money in their pockets to pursue other endeavours.
Of course that would just be further proof of how unfair capitalism is, taking more advantage of warming temperatures than the developing world can, since the poor bessoten dicatorships that govern them are mostly in the warmer parts of the world which the IPCC says will see the least temperature change. The only solution to those ignorant capitalists hogging all the benefits for themselves will be to come up with some other excuse to tax the new wealth out of their pockets and into those of the dictators.
Not that I am worried it will happen since ocean heat content is in decline, has been for a while, air temps have been flat for 15 years… and where the ocean goes, the atmosphere shall follow, a small child being dragged by one hand by a parent who outweighs the child by a factor of 1400 to 1.
It should be high time that ipcc Climate Scientists start being clear about what they are saying, instead trying to manipulate people by means of verbal constructions, including unscientific statements, designed solely to manipulate, instead of being intended to inform people’s understanding. But in the face of the fact that ipcc Climate Science is no more than a massive Propaganda Operation, the latter will simply not happen.
Right, Wombat?
I think even more revealing tha the original travesty email are Tom Wigley and Kevin Trenberth’s follow up comments:
From: Tom Wigley
To: Kevin Trenberth
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:09:35 -0600
Cc: Michael Mann , Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones”
, Benjamin Santer , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer
Kevin,
I didn’t mean to offend you. But what you said was “we can’t account
for the lack of warming at the moment”. Now you say “we are no where
close to knowing where energy is going”. In my eyes these are two
different things — the second relates to our level of understanding,
and I agree that this is still lacking.
Tom.
++++++++++++++++++
Kevin Trenberth wrote:
> Hi Tom
> How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where
> close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to
> make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy
> budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the
> climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless
> as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a
> travesty!
> Kevin
@Phil.: I’m a bit puzzled by your argument. You quote from something without giving any citation. For all I know this is a hit piece from Mother Jones or Huffpost. That aside, misbehavior on one person’s part (or one organization) doesn’t prove your point. I acknowledged that some people in the drug development field will misbehave- it’s just like any other field of human endeavor. However, over time these things tend to be found and corrected, and when they are the consequences are severe. GSK just paid a $750 million settlement to deal with problems of this nature (related in this case to lack of manufacturing controls at one of their facilities).
Wombat says:
October 29, 2010 at 3:47 pm
I hold a NZ passport, how embarrassing.
Trenberth is the second most cited scientist on climate science papers that contributed to the IPCC working group one report in 2007.
You should be proud that someone originally from NZ has achieved such a height in his profession.
Well Wombat, as a leader of a religious movement how does Trenberth stack up against the Pope?
BTW, wombats are adapted to live in cold conditions, just as well, as Australia has been much colder this year than last, a prophetic choice for your screen name!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat
I didn’t know Trenberth was religious. I am only aware of him as a scientists. It wasn’t until I read this thread that I learned that he wasn’t American by birth.
The IPCC working group one report is the one that I am most familiar with.
It makes a sound and well referenced description of the science.
Certainly there are concessions to length, that have allowed some sections to be misinterpreted. And here I’m thinking of the 9.2.2 where the counterscientific climate movement have claimed that the heating at the top of the troposphere is a fingerprint of greenhouse warming.
In fact the fingerprints of greenhouse warming is the warming of the troposphere with the cooling of the stratosphere. And the exaggerated warming at the poles is the fingerprint of CO2 warming.
But overall, I certainly don’t get this claim that it is unscientific or manipulative.
Using the random number generator on random.org, I have selected a page then paragraph from chapter 9. This is it:
“Another approach for assessing the regional influence of
external forcing is to apply detection and attribution analyses
to observations in specific continental- or sub-continental
scale regions. A number of studies using a range of models
and examining various continental- or sub-continental scale
land areas find a detectable human influence on 20th-century
temperature changes, either by considering the 100-year period
from 1900 or the 50-year period from 1950. Stott (2003)
detects the warming effects of increasing greenhouse gas
concentrations in six continental-scale regions over the 1900
to 2000 period, using HadCM3 simulations. In most regions,
he finds that cooling from sulphate aerosols counteracts some
of the greenhouse warming. However, the separate detection of
a sulphate aerosol signal in regional analyses remains difficult
because of lower signal-to-noise ratios, loss of large-scale
spatial features of response such as hemispheric asymmetry that
help to distinguish different signals, and greater modelling and
forcing uncertainty at smaller scales. Zwiers and Zhang (2003)
also detect human influence using two models (CGCM1 and
CGCM2; see Table 8.1, McAvaney et al., 2001) over the 1950 to
2000 period in a series of nested regions, beginning with the full
global domain and descending to separate continental domains
for North America and Eurasia. Zhang et al. (2006) update this
study using additional models (HadCM2 and HadCM3). They
find evidence that climates in both continental domains have
been influenced by anthropogenic emissions during 1950 to
2000, and generally also in the sub-continental domains (Figure
9.11). This finding is robust to the exclusion of NAO/Arctic
Oscillation (AO) related variability, which is associated with
part of the warming in Central Asia and could itself be related
to anthropogenic forcing (Section 9.5.3). As the spatial scales
considered become smaller, the uncertainty in estimated signal
amplitudes (as demonstrated by the size of the vertical bars
in Figure 9.11) becomes larger, reducing the signal-to-noise
ratio (see also Stott and Tett, 1998). The signal-to-noise ratio,
however, also depends on the strength of the climate change
and the local level of natural variability, and therefore differs
between regions. Most of the results noted above hold even
if the estimate of internal climate variability from the control
simulation is doubled.”
Now I think that it is pretty dry, and see very little in the way of emotive language.
Can you point out in this passage
1) The verbal constructions that you are talking about
and
2) The Unscientific statements you designed solely to manipulate that you are talking about.
You’re lucky.
In Australia, six decades ago, one could afford a house and a family on one income, and it didn’t have to be above the median. Today to buy a house in the city, you need a middle-management salary or two incomes.
I don’t see the necessity of that relation at all. For that to be necessary, you would have to claim that all stone age cultures had identical standards of living, because they all used no fossil fuels. Do you claim that?
You would also have to claim that because France generates a lot of its electricity from Nuclear power plants, they must have a lower standard of living than if they switched to coal. Can you please explain the mechanism around how this would happen?
Most of the increased arable land falls in Canada or Russia. Neither country has much malnutrition.
The increased failure of crops due to the disruption of the monsoons in Africa and India, and increased flooding and increased drought is occurring in the Sahel and horn of Africa, and in parts of South East Asia and the Subcontinent. Death by starvation has increased.
Do you have a plan for getting this increased food production to those who need it, and can’t afford it?
Because it’s not working yet.
I hadn’t heard that. Do you have a citation?
The last I read were those studies that showed that in industrialised nations heat killed much more than cold. And I think of the least developed nations as nearer the tropics … Africa and South Asia, Pacific Islands … certainly there are exceptions Mongolia, probably parts of the old Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, I find this statistic surprising, and I would love to believe it.
The ASA ruling is the opposite of your claim.
The conspiracy theory. Unscientific by being unfalsifyable.
1) They’re criminals!
– response: They were cleared by investigations by a wide range of national and international bodies.
2) That’s part of the conspiracy!
– response: Do you really think that a university would risk the only thing it has to sell, its reputation, by bribing national an international organisations?
3) Yes!
– response […]
With all the deep and bitter academic conflicts that I am aware of in academia, this global conspiracy of climate scientists is more laughable than the moon hoaxers claims.
Malnutrition and diarrhoea, mostly.
Drought and flooding on the horn of Africa have not been declining.
Flooding on the subcontinent has also not been declining.
No. It looks a lot like you’re making stuff up. Do you have a citation for the decrease in drought in the Sahel and Horn of Africa over the last 30 years?
Diarrhoea is caused by flooding or drought, because the former pollutes the water supplies with sewerage and the latter forces people to use less clean water supplies.
The mechanism is very different from Malaria and Dengue fever, which are increasing because climate change has moved the range of the insect vector. (Along with most other plants and animals on the planet).
Climate is not the only thing that mosquitoes need. Still open water is another, and that limits the change in range of the vector that is not independent of development. (And neither do all parts of the world have the same malaria, and they are vastly different in their virulence.)
That’s the sort of thing that I would expect to see in the scientific literature rather than the public press. Have you looked there?
I don’t have a Phd in atmospheric physics or optics. And I don’t think that we who don’t would be a very good choice of people to create a valid theory of upper atmosphere cooling.
But I didn’t know there was a controversy. The greenhouse effect traps warmth below. So up in the stratosphere, there is less heat coming from below, the same from above, and so cooling is expected.
And also measured.
Again, this is outside the reach of most autodidacts. I would look in the scholarly literature.
I can’t believe this argument about deaths caused by AGW. In the first place, there’s been no major temperature increase to date. The horror stories are all in the future. So anyone arguing in this vein is either bonkers or supremely disingenuous.
This is one of the curious things about warmists – they will embrace any argument that, superficially, favors their viewpoint. Even if in doing so they undermine their basic position. And all the while, they seem perfectly oblivious to the difficulties they’re creating for themselves.
re:
Isn’t this why people started using statistics – so they wouldn’t have to “massage their data”? Isn’t this what R. A. Fisher nailed Mendel on? I’d love to hear what Trenberth has to say about that little contoversy. (Incidentally, in my opinion Mendel is off the hook, since his major paper was a summary work – rather than a scientific report in the modern sense – which included representative data. Plus the fact that his work was done long before the modern era of experimental design. On the other hand the CRUtape boys deserve no such free pass.)
I assume from the fact that Lomborg is advocating for a carbon-tax that this calculation doesn’t project forward?
Still, if you have a link, I’ll be happy to read a charismatic economist’s view on epidemiology.
The WHO have also done studies though.
http://conservationmedicine.org/papers/Patz_et_al_Nature%202005.pdf
YeAh, but that amount of warming, without strong positive feedbacks, would not cause the catastrophes these social scientists have been recruited to prognosticate about. THAT’S what’s controversial.
A CV containing the phrase “served as IPCC lead author on … in …” has great value to its possessor.
Good grascious Wombat, you’re a prolific little troll aren’t you! The worst of it is that in addition to being prolific, you are also articulate and clearly understand that a half truth is more difficult to dispute than an unfounded outrageous claim, yet you manager to make a few via oblique references rather than presenting facts and logic. The first electronic Wombat I encountered was a little known command line in the nearly forgotten VAX/VMS operating system that produced, for no apparent reason, a rather detailed description of a wombat. It was a benign infestation however, contrary to the current version. I haven’t the time to debunk all your half truths, but I’ll knock off a few right now:
Wombat;
The IPCC working group one report is the one that I am most familiar with.
It makes a sound and well referenced description of the science.>>
I suggest you read the summary for policy makers which, in the context of climate debate in regard to what to do (or not do) is THE most important one as it is written for decision makers at the most senior levels of government, and it is the one on which those decision makers not of a science background rely. It is full of distortions and alarmism. Further, WG1 is by no means sound science. Many of the definitions and explanations are not wrong, but neither are they explicit to the point of being accurate from a scientific perspective. Case in point, in another thread I noted that WG1 refers to forcing “at the tropopause”, that exactly what that means in undefined and may or may not mean “Top of Atmosphere” as is commonly accepted, and further, sensitivity to that forcing is calculated as a range, but WG1 does not define where the measurement of that sensitivity occurs. Another commenter took me to taks and advised that sensitivity is calculated at the surface, and this is common knowledge. I asked him to provide a pointer to that definition in WG1, and after a considerable effort on his part, he admitted that he could not find a definition to that effect, nor any definition that was clear and specific for that matter. While you choose a random number generator to turn up a quote which you then point to and say “see, nothing out of the ordinary” let’s do some real science which requires methodicaly working through the document. Having done so, I can advise that WG1 does not in my opinion meet scientific standards, and as regards climate forcing of greenhouse gases on surface temperatures, may I quote the following from AR4 WG1 2.8.2
” It should be noted that a perturbation to the surface energy budget involves sensible and latent heat fluxes besides solar and longwave irradiance; therefore, it can quantitatively be very different from the RF, which is calculated at the tropopause, and thus is not representative of the energy balance perturbation to the surface-troposphere (climate) system. While the surface forcing adds to the overall description of the total perturbation brought about by an agent, the RF and surface forcing should not be directly compared…”
Despite which they proceed to do just that, going so far as to define it as linear!
Wombat;
The ASA ruling is the opposite of your claim.>>
You can’t make something true by calling it a ruling. They expressed an opinion, and a vague one at that.
Wombat;
No. It looks a lot like you’re making stuff up. Do you have a citation for the decrease in drought in the Sahel and Horn of Africa over the last 30 years?>>
Wow, I make a comment about global decline of severe weather events and you come right back with but but but lookit what’s happening in Sahel and Horn of Africa, accuse me of making something up, and then demand a citation to support something I never said. Climate is cyclical, the historical record is replete with examples of droughts and flooding coming and going world wide. What has a specific area like Sahel and Horn of Africa got to do with it? Do they represent the entire globe? I said that severe weather events have declined globaly. If you want a cite to support what I actually said instead of what you claim I said, http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cyclone-energy.png
Wombat;
The last I read were those studies that showed that in industrialised nations heat killed much more than cold. >>
In an earlier commented I pointed out that deaths attributed to cold in the UK alone surpass on a regular basis the highest incidence of heat related deaths in all of Europe in the worst heat wave in recent memory, which has not, interestingly, been repeated.
Wombat;
The mechanism is very different from Malaria and Dengue fever, which are increasing because climate change has moved the range of the insect vector.>>
If you had ever taken a walk during the summer in Canada’s northland, you would know that is a total pot of huey. Those regions have skeeters so thick they crawl through your hair to bite your scalp. That was true this year and 100 years ago. Their range goes WAY past those aread reporting malaria and dengue, always has, and has nothing to do with it.
Wombat;
Most of the increased arable land falls in Canada or Russia. Neither country has much malnutrition. Do you have a plan for getting this increased food production to those who need it, and can’t afford it?>>
Putting aside your claim re Canada or Russia, are you kidding me? Last I checked Canada and Russia both export food. Do you suppose that they sell grain all over the world that never gets delivered? Do you suppose that the way they do it now will suddenly stop working? As for those who can’t afford it, may I point out that we have a global surplus right now, yet they can’t get/afford it. Has nothing to do with climate has everything to do with corruption and totalitarian rule in developing countries. As to your tirade about monsoons etc being disrupted and causing crop failure, I advise you to look up the rice production statistics world wide by country and you will find that production is not just higher across the board, it is a LOT higher in recent years, so where is this disruption you speak of?
Sorry I have to get back to a family obligation regarding cleaning of a garage or I would address the balance of your blatherings as well. I suggest you take your pants off and wear them on your head though, because if I was you I would be pretty embarrased right now at just how see through my bullarky is and wouldn’t want anyone to recognize me.
Probly shudnt of said that, he’ll snip it out of contect and claim ad hominem attack.
“But I didn’t know there was a controversy. The greenhouse effect traps warmth below. So up in the stratosphere, there is less heat coming from below, the same from above, and so cooling is expected.”
———–
This is a most fascinating perspective, Wombat. I will not trouble you for a more thorough explanation but I would ask you, since you have most excellent answers for all questions, what is the ideal temperature for the Earth’s atmosphere, measured at 1.5 metres above grade and averaged over all latitudes, all seasons and all times of the day?
This should not be much of a challenge, so I will venture to importune you further with regard to the region of the Earth that is Vancouver Island, Canada.
Please be as candid as you can be, in spite of my earnest wish that the ideal average temperature be several degrees higher than it currently is.
Do you think that the looming catastrophe caused by our profligate oxidation of dead diatoms and the concomitant surge of inappropriate triatomic atmospheric constituents offers an interesting economic opportunity for the owners of temperate climate real estate who would sell their chilly assets to heat-fleeing Inuit or inundation-dreading Maldiveans?
hey Wombat;
I’m back. Got time for one more before I hit the hay. Your statement somewhere previous in regard to AR4 WG1 being a scientific document. Following is verbatim from AR4 WG1 2.3.8
“A significant increase in the clear-sky longwave downward flux was found to be due to an enhanced greenhouse effect after combining the measurements with model calculations to estimate the contribution from increases in temperature and humidity.”
Let’s see. They start with something they measured, then combined it with some outputs from a model… what’s a model again? Oh yeah, its a computer program that produces results based on your assumptions and in order to be valid has to be tested against real world measurements to show accuracy… did they do that? No….
So we have some actual measurements combined with unproven assumptions to produce estimates from which they draw the conclusion that the observed change was due to a specific cause, being greenhouse effect. They may in fact be correct. But proof this isn’t, evidence it isn’t and science it isn’t.
G’night.
Sleep Tight.
But remember that the bedbugs in the tropics are the size of small dogs and they have increased their range due to global warming and they bight. You know why there’s no Boogey Man under your bed? They ate him.
(With all the nightmares running around in this guys head I figured I would add one)
It is the rate of change that is problematic to biodiversity.
In terms of human infrastructure, we’re getting a bit out of my field of knowledge. Some areas, such as the Sahel, the rainfall is sensitive to global (or Atlantic surface temperature, I think I recall). It’s pretty hard to make a call, because although the droughts are probably attributable to anthropogenic climate change, we don’t know that more warming won’t swing it back again.
The question is should we be gambling with the lives and cultures of millions of people from the cradle of humanity, without consideration of the value of those lives?
Sea level rise will become increasingly expensive as it increases. I guess optimal would be no more increase. I know that there are suburbs in my city that will be in big infrastructure trouble with 100mm more rise.
Northern Summer Sea ice loss, similarly, it would be best for no more, just in terms of extinction pressure by habitat reduction on the ecosystem up there. Saliently the pinnipeds that use the ice for breeding.
In terms of water security and flooding in the subcontinent, probably, optimal is a bit cooler than now. Snowfall is good, because is supplies meltwater to rivers reasonably constantly.
In terms of oceanic biodiversity, the increasing incidence of bleaching is complicated. It seems that there’s one family of the coral symbiote that is resistant to climate change, and there’s one that isn’t. They colonise each other’s corals, but they don’t thrive – the coral strongly prefers its symbiote for some reason.
In any case it is very serious for oceanic productivity, because one in every four inhabitants of the oceans spends at least part of their life-cycle in coral reefs.
But the more serious still is the 40% drop in phytoplankton population, at is attributed to rises in sea surface temperatures. This is a nasty positive feedback because it is a 20% reduction in global photosynthetic mass, so natural cycling of CO₂ from the atmosphere is down 20%. But also this is the bottom of the food web in the oceans. 40% less phytoplankton must result in about 40% reduction everywhere further up the web.
It’s all pretty grim really.
No, I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.
While I’m sure that you believe your anecdote is evidence, that’s not the view of epidemiologists.
Not all “skeeters” are the vector for malaria or dengue. Only mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles can transmit malaria, and only about one species in four of that genus can. And less than half of those transmit parasites of the genus Plasmodium, which causes malaria in endemic areas.
Canada, has no vector for Malaria. Your scalp must have been bitten by the wrong type of “skeeter”.
Dengue has only two known vectors. Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Aegypti is not in Canada. Albopictus is not in Canada yet to my knowledge. It can be found in the Eastern United States though.
In any case, it’s not just the presence of some bug the spreads these diseases. That parasite infects specific hosts.
No it doesn’t.
Published papers on a CV has great value to its possessor.
Volunteering for the IPCC shows the employer that the scientist is community minded, but that doesn’t get jobs. In the current publish or perish environment that a lot of academic scientists find themselves in, it doesn’t even hold on to their current job.
Climate change is causing and has caused deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea.
While Global food production is up from climate change to date, and is expected to keep climbing until somewhere between 2°C and 3°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature, this misses the point.
The increase is not in the right place, and the decrease is killing people now.
“A significant increase in the clear-sky longwave downward flux was found to be due to an enhanced greenhouse effect after combining the measurements with model calculations to estimate the contribution from increases in temperature and humidity.”
I see you’ve avoided the passage I randomly selected, and wanted to discuss your own cheery picked passage:
“A significant increase in the clear-sky longwave downward flux was found to be due to an enhanced greenhouse effect after combining the measurements with model calculations to estimate the contribution from increases in temperature and humidity.”
If that’s the best you can do, I see no evidence of this emotive language, nor of passages meant to deceive.
You seem to have a personal problem with models. It looks like the passage is discussing GCM. You claim that they are not tested against real world data is crazy.
GCMs are run over historical inputs to see if they produce historical temperature histories. The process is called hindcasting, and it is an important part of the development of a GCM.
That aside, there is no emotive or manipulative language in your passage.
If you have to resort to name calling, I think it is clear to everyone that you don’t have an argument.
Is that your argument?
The ASA ruling on whether the Oxfam poster, which referenced four WHO publications, at least one of which I have encountered in the peer reviewed literature, (NATURE, no less) doesn’t count because it isn’t a ruling, its a vague opinion.
Read the papers, if you want. People are dying from climate change. Our best estimates on numbers are about 100,000 or 150,000 per year.
I assume from your views that you don’t read a lot of science, and that’s fine too. But don’t try to feed me “people aren’t dying because ASA only gave an opinion”. It’s not true and it doesn’t follow.
Then it doesn’t matter that they’re social scientists. Your problem is with the work of working group one. Who are physical scientists, generally.
Some of them singularly good ones. List of WG1 authors.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 2:55 pm
bubbagyro says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:12 am
[…]
Focus on the criminal Trenberth and his self-admissions of guilt, and his fellow-travelers and kingpins of criminal Climategate fame, and the whitewashing “inquiries” by his peer-group “investigators”.
The conspiracy theory. Unscientific by being unfalsifyable.
I suggest you read the recent threads about the Oxburgh and Russell ‘Inquiries’ on climate audit before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.
Sticking your head in the sand is supposed to be a trait of ostriches, not wombats.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Climate change is causing and has caused deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea.
While Global food production is up from climate change to date, and is expected to keep climbing until somewhere between 2°C and 3°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature, this misses the point.
The increase is not in the right place, and the decrease is killing people now.
On any fair assessment, the malnutrition and sanitation problems of the third world people are more due to the monocropping agricultural policies imposed on their governments by the world bank and the IMF than any change in climate.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:27 pm
But the more serious still is the 40% drop in phytoplankton population, at is attributed to rises in sea surface temperatures.
Fish and plankton populations vary cyclicly, along with the positive and negative phases of the oceans. The colder oceanic regime we are moving into should see an increase in fish stocks (notwithstanding rampant overfishing with small hole nets) which will be an indicator of increasing food availability.
Sea surface temperatures are currently dropping very rapidly, as is the underlying ocean heat content, since 2003. This was when the sun’s output dropped below the long term average. According to the model I’ve constructed, Global temperature will stabilise and then fall for the next ten to twenty years at least.
I’m not familiar with WB and IMF policies and how it affects what crops can be planted. I certainly agree that is it, at this stage, only a few percent of deaths by malnutrition and diarrhoea that can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
So I have no problem to accepting that there are other more significant causes. Perhaps the ones that you say.
However, AGW is killing, and the argument that global food production is increasing, misses the point.
The paper mentions “satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends.”
But it says that this decline is over top of that: “Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.”
So yes, the populations do vary cyclicly, but the 40% decline is not part of that cycle.
Not very rapidly. HadCru
Certainly only about a tenth of how rapidly its been rising since 2006. (That statement based on the Monthly global ocean temperature anomalies from the csiro, which you can download from the NOAA webpages here..
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise. Which as you can see, has been increasing steadily throughout this, the warmest decade on record.
Wombat says:
October 31, 2010 at 3:40 am
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise. Which as you can see, has been increasing steadily throughout this, the warmest decade on record.
Look at the latest and most accurate satellite observed sst’s
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/10/bottom-falling-out-of-global-ocean-surface-temperatures/
If you look at this page on my blog, you’ll see that sea level rise has been tapering off since 2003 and ocean heat content has been falling since then too.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/sea-level-rise-levelling-off/
SST has remained high because since the sun went quiet the ocean is using the chance to belch out heat forced into it by a more than averagely active sun from ~1935 to 2003.
The cold is coming. The breaking of the drought in Eastern Australia is a clue.
This exchange started with the following:
To which you replied:
Which implied that there was nothing predetermined or odd about catastrophic outcomes being in the cards (and thus no indication of bias by the IPCC in filling in the details, as Smith implied). Therefore your reply …:
… Is a diversion. My “problem,” and Smith’s, is not with the findings of WG1, but with the personnel-selection and agenda-setting of the IPCC higher-ups, who set a group in motion in parallel with WG1 to flesh out the full horror of WG1’s catastrophic findings before the findings had been found.
Actually, I personally don’t think it was all THAT dodgy of them. They’d have been familiar with the literature and realized in a general way what WG1 was going to conclude. What I was objecting to was your implication that it was and had been uncontroversial for a century that the greenhouse effect would cause catastrophes. That was the sole point of my comment.
The “dodginess” in the IPCC’s presuming what WG1 would find is not something that can be inferred from that act alone, which could be defended on its own as mere common sense foresight. It’s mostly because it fits an overall pattern of bias and finagling that Smith is suspicious of it.
(Incidentally, Arrhenius’s original finding was strongly objected to by subsequent scientists and greatly toned down by Arrhenius himself in a follow-up paper. Probably Wikipedia soft-pedals these points.)
Those who think that humans have devolved into a pathetic and fragle lifeform that can only continue to exist if the omnipotent and omniesient “UN” and Big Brother manage the climate of this planet within +/- xC (and everything else as well) are speaking only for themselves; and the “UN” & Big Brother, of course. Last I looked, the former was a totally incompetent managery of political backbiters and the latter didn’t exist. The real argument is not between real scientists over bits of real data, it is not between real scientists and the educated masses over reasonable conclusions, it is between the Chicken Littles of the World, the Opportunists of the World, the Anarchists of the World, AND THE WORLD. (I have no idea when or how these idiots got so many politicians on their side, but Tuesday is another day;-)
At a minimum it shows that he’s not a nobody, unlike 75% of the people in the field. His IPCC affiliation reflects credit on his employer, and makes it desirable to employ him. More than that–much more–it shows that he’s “connected,” “a team player,” and thus a potential “rain-maker” (grant getter). Publish-or-perish is for the little people. I doubt that any erstwhile IPCC bigshot will have trouble finding a cozy niche in his field.
They can and do thanks to foreign aid.
PS: Or so I’ve heard.
Wombat says:
October 30, 2010 at 9:27 pm
“This is a most fascinating perspective, Wombat. I will not trouble you for a more thorough explanation but I would ask you, since you have most excellent answers for all questions, what is the ideal temperature for the Earth’s atmosphere, measured at 1.5 metres above grade and averaged over all latitudes, all seasons and all times of the day?”
It is the rate of change that is problematic to biodiversity.
In terms of human infrastructure, we’re getting a bit out of my field of knowledge. Some areas, such as the Sahel, the rainfall is sensitive to global (or Atlantic surface temperature, I think I recall). It’s pretty hard to make a call, because although the droughts are probably attributable to anthropogenic climate change, we don’t know that more warming won’t swing it back again.
The question is should we be gambling with the lives and cultures of millions of people from the cradle of humanity, without consideration of the value of those lives?
——————
NO, Wombat! The question I asked is the first paragraph, above, in quotes.
Good lord wombat, you’re worse than I thought. It occurs to me we may have mistaken your nomiker for the wrong animal. Are you perhaps a bat, subspecies wom? I think perhaps another subspecies would be more appropriate, may I suggest ding? (Accuse me of ad hominem attack and I feel compelled to demonstrate that when I go that direction the cutting edge of my whit is considerably more sophisticated than the words you attempted to construe as an ad hominem attack by me). But enough of that, on to the science:
Wombat;
No, I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.>>
For starters, there are no starving nations in the “Sahel”. The Sahel is the transition region between the Sahara desert and the African savannah. It is a stripe about 1000 km wide stretching across Africa, running through several countries, but isn’t wide enough for any country to exist “inside” of it. Further, being the transition zone between desert and grassland, it is by definition an area whose crop production capacity is so low than only the desert itself is lower. This stripe across Africa has existed for millenia, sometimes farther north and sometimes farther south demonstrating that it is natural and the changes in latitude are driven by cyclical climate changes that are natural and any recent changes are well within that natural variability. The countries the Sahel cuts through are amongst the most corrupt in the world with tribal warfare a constant disruption, and these factors are the primary drivers of food supply problems. As for the countries in Asia you claim to be starving because of climate change, perhaps you could be more specific.
Wombat;
I assume from your views that you don’t read a lot of science, and that’s fine too. But don’t try to feed me “people aren’t dying because ASA only gave an opinion”. It’s not true and it doesn’t follow.>>
I see. My views differ from yours, therefor you conclude that I’m scientificaly illiterate. Accuse me of being deficient in regard to spelling skills, and you’ll find plenty of evidence. For what its worth, I’m not a scientist. I’m one of those gawdawful slimy disgusting salesmen. I sell technology. My customers include researchers public and private at PhD levels in all major fields of science, military contractors doing R&D on everything from materials to command and control systems, and aerospace companies building anything from fighter jet sub assemblies to simulators for training astronaughts. I need to be sufficiently conversant in the nature of their science to understand their problems and determine if my products can be off assistance to them. So no, I don’t read much science. I’ve lived it every business day for 30 years.
Wombat;
Read the papers, if you want. People are dying from climate change. Our best estimates on numbers are about 100,000 or 150,000 per year.>>
Read ’em. Climate change is natural, it is changing, it has always changed in the past, and it will change in the future. When it changes, it affects people. Attributing any given percentage of deaths globaly amongst a population of billions to climaye change is nearly impossible, to further refine the study to determine what subset of those have died due to the human induced portion of the climate change is absurd.
Wombat;
If that’s the best you can do, I see no evidence of this emotive language, nor of passages meant to deceive.
You seem to have a personal problem with models. It looks like the passage is discussing GCM. You claim that they are not tested against real world data is crazy.
GCMs are run over historical inputs to see if they produce historical temperature histories>>
Models are presented as data, and conclusions drawn from them. Models are not data, and presenting them as such is deceptive. Models are in fact tested via hindcasting, and have considerable difficulty reproducing the MWP and the LIA. They also cannot reproduce natural variability shown in either the historical temperature record or the satellit record, and their forecasting of everything from severe weather events to sea level rises since they started publishing their forecasts some 20 years ago have been so far off as to be laughable.
Wombat;
I see you’ve avoided the passage I randomly selected, and wanted to discuss your own cheery picked passage>>
Good lord, you picked one passage at random, represent it as being indicative of the document as a whole, and then accuse me of cheery picking? I chose that passage and a second one in a later comment as examples. While i was cheerful while picking them, that hardly means they are cherry picked. They are representative of the vague and misleading manner in which science is presented in WG1.
Wombat;
epidemiologists would disagree>>
You said that mosquitos were expanding their range and I pointed out that their range is pretty much the whole planet. You jump into a discussion about epidemiologists and specific species of mosquito. Say what you mean up front. There were a couple of threads a few months back about the specifics of malaria and mosquitos. Several very experienced epidemiologists jumped into the fray and the read would be worth your time.
Outa time, gotta run.
OK if I call you ding for short?
RE: Wombat says: (October 29, 2010 at 4:37 pm)
“That greenhouse gasses cause the greenhouse effect has not been controversial for over 100 years.”
I believe that dates back to the time before the layered structure of the atmosphere was known. As far as I know, nobody has been able to use the greenhouse gas theory to predict exactly where those layers should be. As it is, I believe it is only one facet of the many factors that govern our environment and it cannot be used in isolation to make meaningful estimates.
I see only one course of action. 2012. Lay the groundwork this Tuesday. It is a one-two punch. Win seats now. Then take this victory into 2012 and win back reasoned sanity!
End climate change funding. End grandiose green technology (and I mean by that the kind that is inefficient, as in wind and solar, at larger scales). Instead channel funds thus: Fund job-building, large scale, cheap energy production without the dirty smokestacks. Which means, rebuild US cheap energy so that manufacturing can be had here at home. And then: think smarter, not harder, when it comes to workers’ compensation packages, so that we can compete with dirty energy, enforced cheap/slave labor manufacturing countries.
There are lots of other ways to lead us back to reasoned sanity but I will only focus on climate related funding. The rest of the long list is off topic.
Bottom line: Every “climate change is caused by humans so we must reduce CO2” advocate should be made to understand that economic recovery will go better if they back out of the conversation. Go back to the Ivory Tower (and I have been there so I know of what I speak) and talk amongst yourselves. And let the rest of the country get back to building your cars, appliances, and pencils needed for your endeavors.
Wingbat;
Volunteering for the IPCC shows the employer that the scientist is community minded, but that doesn’t get jobs.>>
The high profile writers of the IPCC reports are much sought after as professors and consultants as a direct consequence of their notoriety and connections. They are also much sought after as key note speakers, and many of them require substantial fees for appearing.
Fruitbat;
I’m suggesting that the starving nations in the Sahel and in Asia who have suffered a reduction in food production because of climate change are not helped by the increase in arable land in Canada, because they can’t afford Canadian food.>>
Should Canada and the rest of the world adopt the draconian mitigation strategies suggested to constrain CO2, the cost of producing food will skyrocket as will the cost of transporting it. The number of people who would be exposed to starvation as a consequence would be orders of magnitude larger than the current problems you cite, which as other commentors have pointed out, have different root causes than climate change in any event.
Dingbat;
The question is should we be gambling with the lives and cultures of millions of people from the cradle of humanity, without consideration of the value of those lives?>>
Are you suggesting that lives and cultures from “the cradle of humanity” have different values than the rest of the planet? Is someone born on the edge of the Sahara desert blessed with a value to their life that is greater than mine? Perhaps we should call them all about the same and then consider the condequences of various actions. Mitigation scenario 1 of the IPCC call for reduction of CO2 emissions of 80% if I recall correctly. Do you suppose that this can be accomplished with no impact to cost and transportation of food? Figure say, a 30% drop in total production, which I for one thing is probably pretty conservative. Let’s see, 30% less food, population of earth is about 6 billion = 1.8 BILLION people without food. Which people? The poor ones. Even if there was food being grown right in your prescious Sahel, it would be bought by the wealthy, delivered under force of arms by the despotic regimes that control the area, and the poor of Sahel would starve anyway. Wring your hands about things you think might happen, but give yourself a smack inthe head and consider the consequences of the proposed fix.
Wongbat;
In terms of the underlying ocean heat content, the continuous rise is on pretty solid ground, because thermal expansion is the main source of sea level rise.>>
And yet, oddly, ocean heat content has been falling, not rising. Or are you proposing that thermal expansion results from both heating and cooling?
Grimbat;
It’s all pretty grim really.>>
Yes it is. Entirely. That a society with near 100% literacy, instant access to almost the entire collected knowledge and history of humanity, and freedoms unprecedented in history to debate, discuss and understand science have been so mesmerized by alarmist propoganda founded upon shoddy science resulting in cures for the disease that does not exist but kills the patient, is grim indeed. Odd that as far as we have come, the throwing of virgins into volcanoes to prevent them from errupting has simply evolved into throwing the economy into the volcanoe instead, and for no more benefit.
Oh BTW, I’m sure you’re preparing another comment about ad hominem attacks for calling you a dingbat. Sorry, but those are insults. Suggesting that on the basis of my opinions you’ve concluded that I don’t know much about science… that’s an ad hominem attack. Or in your case a bat attack. Sub species fruit.
How many folks here have read Edwards’ “The Vast Machine”?
It’s refreshing to see engineers responding in the comments section at IEEE. They abide take nonsense very easily.
Phil. says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:50 pm
When building a bridge, the safety factor is generally 3, meaning all structural components are able to withthstand 3 times the maximum expected load. Are you saying that they’ve adjusted the temperatures by a factlor of 3.0, then?
Where do we call the truth cops? Sounds like (if you’re correct) Trenberth has distorted global warming out of all proportion.
Shame on him!
The interesting thing is that the data from satellite-based instruments is “massaged” and some is discarded via the expert judgement of scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer.
Derecho64:
You can ask Dr Spencer to show you exactly how he arrived at his conclusions, step by step, and he will respond. Then you can test his results. That is how the scientific method works.
Try that with Michael Mann. It’s been twelve years since MBH98, and his taxpayer-funded hokey stick methodology still can’t be pried out of him.
For that matter, ask Kevin Trenberth to give you his raw and adjusted data, his methodologies, and his code and other metadata.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for either one of them to share their secrets, because neither one of them follows the scientific method. Is that not a travesty?
I’m way, way, late and tardy about this, but if my memory serves me, Trenberth (no hurricane expert) opined that the busy 2005 hurricane season, including Katrina, was a habringer of things to come. Those statements lead to the resignation of Dr. Christopher Landsea (a genuine hurricane expert) from the UN IPCC. Trenberth’s no powerhouse. He needs to get a new job and not at taxpayer expense.
RE: Derecho64: (October 31, 2010 at 7:16 pm )
“The interesting thing is that the data from satellite-based instruments is “massaged” and some is discarded via the expert judgement of scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer.”
I wonder if this might include discarding data that was “obviously” not from surface thermal sources, and therefore beyond the scope of the greenhouse effect, such as that which could be associated with the thermal shocks of H2O condensation bond formation….
Really, Smokey? Spencer can show me all of his code, algorithms, and expert judgment that are used to take the raw data and transform them into the plots he shows at his website?
Why hasn’t he published the above and made them publicly available? Do you have a website, or, better yet, access to the repository of his code, and are willing to share?
Is Spencer taxpayer-funded? Is MBH98 the last word on paleoclimate reconstructions? Does Trenberth really hide his stuff?
Spector, perhaps the “thermal shocks of H2O condensation” are nearly balanced by the “thermal shocks of H2O evaporation”, so the net effect is practically zero.
Derecho64,
Dr Spencer answers polite, on-point emails, as others here have reported. As for your other questions, I am not a mind reader so I can’t tell you about his publishing plans.
Regarding your other fishing questions, I have no other website, I don’t have a code repository, and I am not the expert on how Dr Spencer is funded.
The IPCC does not abide by the scientific method, and as for Trenberth, I suggest you do a search here on the Climategate emails link, keyword “Trenberth,” and decide his ethics – or lack thereof – for yourself. While you are at it, I suggest you study Judd’s comment above.
Smokey, why should I have to bother Dr. Spencer with emails, or, if that doesn’t work, FOIA requests? Do you know where he publishes all his code that takes the raw data feed and massages it? I want to make plots identical to the ones he shows – I’d like to audit his work. That’s the least we can expect from someone likely taxpayer-funded!
Have you read Edwards’ “The Vast Machine”, Smokey?
RE: Derecho64 says: (October 31, 2010 at 8:12 pm)
“Spector, perhaps the “thermal shocks of H2O condensation” are nearly balanced by the “thermal shocks of H2O evaporation”, so the net effect is practically zero.”
It may be that the thermal shock of evaporation also produces a unique spices of radiation, but the energies escaping to outer space would be additive not subtractive. Most likely, however, I think that evaporation or molecular de-bonding absorbs kinetic energy from the high-speed collision required to knock loose an H2O molecule from any given clump of H2O molecules.
Most people would consider him something of a powerhouse.
Using google scholar, he has an h-index of 54.
Based on his calculations, Hirsch suggests that, for physicists, a value for h of about 12 might be a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the National Academy of Sciences. (Rating Researchers )
So 54 is reasonably kick-arse. Certainly its well ahead of the curve for a gentleman with 38 years since his Sc.D. (from MIT.)
The IPCC doesn’t do science.
They report on what science has discovered to interested non-scientist parties.
The scientific method is something applied to research, not journalism.
What do you mean by “greenhouse gas theory”?
From that description I would have thought that you meant the study of the optical properties of gasses.
The atmosphere doesn’t have layers because of the optical properties of the constituent gasses.
Have you tried?
How far out were your estimates?
If you personally can’t estimate the effect of greenhouse gasses, should we assume that there is no cost to greenhouse emissions, or should be consider a reasonably risk-analysis, and try to avoid the greatest expected cost?
Facts: Nitrogen constitutes 78% of the atmosphere, oxygen 21% and trace gases just 1%. Water vapor is the most significant trace gas and the most significant green house gas (GHG). According to IPCC technical reports carbon dioxide is the least significant trace gas both by volume and by Global Warming Potential (GWP).
Question: What are the chances an infinitesimal (.04%) trace gas (CO2), essential to photosynthesis and therefore life on this planet, is responsible for runaway Global Warming?
Answer: Infinitesimal
Discussion: The IPCC now agrees. See the IPCC Technical Report section entitled Global Warming Potential (GWP). And the GWP for CO2? Just 1, (one), unity, the lowest of all green house gases (GHG). What’s more, trace gases which include GHG constitute less than 1% of the atmosphere. Of that 1%, water vapor, the most powerful GHG, makes ups 40% of the total. Carbon dioxide is 1/10th of that amount, an insignificant .04%. If carbon dioxide levels were cut in half to 200PPM, all plant growth would stop according to agricultural scientists. It’s no accident that commercial green house owner/operators invest heavily in CO2 generators to increase production, revenues and profits. Prof. Michael Mann’s Bristle cone tree proxy data (Hockey stick) proves nothing has done more to GREEN (verb) the planet over the past few decades than moderate sun-driven warming (see solar inertial motion) together with elevated levels of CO2, regardless of the source. None of these facts have been reported in the national media. Why?
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/meltdown_of_the_climate_consensus_G0kWdclUvwhVr6DYH6A4uJ
Something like that:
Kevin Trenberth (CGD) says that although it’s controversial, he thinks that global warming is in fact creating conditions that are favorable for hurricanes to be more severe. “Global climate change, and global warming in particular, create a different background environment in which the hurricanes are working,” he says. “The sea surface temperatures are a little warmer, the whole environment is a bit wetter, there’s more humidity, and that’s the main fuel for hurricanes.” (http://www.ucar.edu/communications/staffnotes/0410/hurricane.html)
I think that that view is still mainstream. For example:However, future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6–34%. Tropical cyclones and climate change Knutson et al, Nature Geoscience 3, 157 – 163 (2010)
Trenberth’s energy budget shows 80W/m² raised from the surface to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. Which (I assume) is condensation in the atmosphere minus evapotranspiration near the surface.
Derecho64 says:
“Smokey, why should I have to bother Dr. Spencer with emails, or, if that doesn’t work, FOIA requests? Do you know where he publishes all his code that takes the raw data feed and massages it? Have you read Edwards’ “The Vast Machine”, Smokey?”
How long do I have to keep answering your endless questions?
Here’s a question for you: can you show any empirical, testable measurements showing the temperature change per X amount of CO2 emitted?
Take your time…
Not unless they’re high profile because of their published work.
That wouldn’t affect the starving people in the Sahel and Asia, because they can’t afford Canadian food as it is.
But a lower incidence of disastrous weather would save more of their lives.
Big call.
What is your evidence “orders of magnitude” claim?
The point is certainly controversial, but the scientific evidence is leaning reasonably strongly to the conclusion that these “other commentors” are wrong about that.
For some examples:
Rainfall anomalies
of opposite sign across the Sahel and in the
equatorial Indian Ocean (Fig. 4C) support the
hypothesis that the oceanic warming around Africa
may indeed have weakened the land-ocean
temperature contrast and consequently the monsoon,
causing deep convection to migrate over
the ocean and engendering widespread drought
over land, from the Atlantic coast of West Africa
to the highlands of Ethiopia. Oceanic Forcing of Sahel Rainfall on Interannual to Interdecadal Time Scales SCIENCE VOL 302 7 NOVEMBER 2003
We have described a global climate model (CM2) that generates a simulation of the 20th century rainfall record in the Sahel generally consistent with observations. The model suggests that there has been an anthropogenic drying trend in this region, due partly to increased aerosol loading and partly to increased greenhouse gases, and that the observed 20th century record is a superposition of this drying trend and large internal variability. Simulation of Sahel drought in the 20th and 21st centuries Held et al, PNAS (2005)
We show that anthropogenic forcing has
had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation
within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be
explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing. We
estimate that anthropogenic forcing contributed significantly to
observed increases in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere
mid-latitudes, drying in the Northern Hemisphere subtropics and
tropics, and moistening in the Southern Hemisphere subtropics
and deep tropics. The observed changes, which are larger than
estimated from model simulations, may have already had significant
effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human health in
regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the
Sahel. Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends Zang et al. NATURE (2007).
A review of the literature leads to the conclusion that dry conditions in the late twentieth century were most probably driven by changes in ocean surface temperatures, and in particular a warming of the southern hemisphere oceans and the Indian Ocean, which led to changes in atmospheric circulation.Drought in the African Sahel: Long term perspectives and future prospects Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 61 October 2004.
The error on that one is still pretty high, but a central estimate is about 3°C per doubling.
It has been constrained to 1.5–6.2°C by considering the past 7 centuries.
(http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/fall2006/HegerletalNature06.pdf)
It has been robustly over 1.5°C over the past 420 million years.(https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/climate_sensitivity.pdf)
Empirical testable measurements of 20th Century warming, of Volcanic cooling, of the Last Glacial Maximum, and of modern climatology and the Maunder Minimum also put constraints on the climate sensitivity. (http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf)
It has also been measured using the earth’s radiation budget data:
(http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3611.1)
And also by just measuring as best you can the change in temperature and the heat flux of the earth’s surface. (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442%282002%29015%3C3117%3AAOBEOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2).
There is a much more comprehensive overview in chapter 9 of the the IPCC WG1 report. (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf)
WG1 doesn’t produce findings.
It reports on what has already been found.
The IPCC is not a research body.
I take your point. But significant papers are also good even for the likes of Trenberth. Taking a year or two out of your research career is still a public service more than a self service.
Neither do I, but I don’t think that anyone capable of being an IPCC bigshot would have trouble finding such a niche whether or not they throw a whole lot of time at a community task.
2010 Sahel famine
Nope.
Well, I’ll answer in terms of biodiversity, there is not a optimal temperature, there is a suboptimal rate of change of temperature.
Its warming too fast for the biosphere to adapt or migrate.
Having said that keeping the temperature change below any nasty tipping points is also important. The nearest of these is probably the loss of the Northern Summer Sea Ice, which is probably about 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, ±0.5°C. (That is 0.2°C to 1.2°C above current levels … which should be a concern for those of us who understand that the the climate’s response to an increase in CO₂ takes something in the range 25-50 years to reach 60% of the final level.)
Of the Sahel then. Is semantics all you have to offer?
The tribal warfare is not independent of peoples displaced into their non-traditional lands by climate change making their traditional lands incapable of supporting them.
But certainly there are food supply problems in addition to the failed crops problems.
Well the Patz paper has 52,000 deaths from Malnutrition in 2000 in region D of South East Asia, which was the countries Bangladesh, Bhutan (Democratic People’s Republic of), Korea, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal. At least one of those.
No, your views differ from the scientific one, therefore you are probably scientifically illiterate.
Your propensity to call people who offer a mainstream scientific view “trolls” or other adhominems, also shows your unfamiliarity with the basic scientific idea of “evidence”.
So you think that the increase in CO2 that has coincided with human release of CO2, and has the isotopic fingerprint of fossil fuel CO2, has nothing to do with the human release of CO2?
Or have you simply not heard of the greenhouse effect?
So do proxy based temperature reconstructions. Perhaps, as the IPCC seems to say that the science has shown, they weren’t co-incident across the globe?
Look at this graph from Meehl et al, JOURNAL OF CLIMATE (2004).
See how the Modelled variation is about the same as the measured variation?
Do you want to change your position on that at all then?
Good.
Their forecasting of global mean surface temperatures over the last 10 years has been bang on the nose.
And their hindcasting has been disturbingly good. (see:Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L18704, 5 PP., 2008
If you think it is representative, you should be able to find examples in the randomly selected section.
The context was as a vector for Malaria and Dengue.
No problem.
OK if I call you quack for accuracy?
You don’t have to ask Mann for his recent data. You just have to go here for the data and here for supplementary data and code.
What data of Trenberth’s are you having trouble finding? The problem with Mann’s seems to be that your google-fu is weak.
It doesn’t really matter how thin it is amongst the nitrogen. What matters is how much there is of it.
It turns out that there is about 3,100,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. Which is about 6kg over every square metre of the planet.
A 6kg, 1 m² blanket could have some effect, don’t you think?
Alas, no.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 12:32 am
It turns out that there is about 3,100,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. Which is about 6kg over every square metre of the planet.
Which turns out to be an average of around 0.0006kg/m^3, up from a pre-industrial 0.0004kg/m^3
It makes plants grow more vigorously, but it doesn’t make much difference to temperature, because the claimed water vapour feedback isn’t happening.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 12:21 am
What data of Trenberth’s are you having trouble finding?
It’s more that we have a problem getting you to respond to what he said in a realistic way:
“we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! ”
-Kevin Trenberth- Oct 2009
Which part of this do you not understand?
Wombat says:
October 31, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Its warming too fast for the biosphere to adapt or migrate.
1) According to Phil ‘Hide the decline’ Jones, there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995
2) At the latitude of the UK, average temperature fall by 1C for each 200 miles north you travel. I think even a tortoise should make 150 miles in 100 years.
RE:Wombat : (October 31, 2010 at 9:42 pm )
“Spector, perhaps the “thermal shocks of H2O condensation” are nearly balanced by the “thermal shocks of H2O evaporation”, so the net effect is practically zero.”
In these cases I am referring to the potential radiation that may me emitted by newly formed or newly extended clumps of H2O molecules while they are still in a highly excited state and still retain much of the initial heat of condensation. Most of the time, this condensation energy is probably shared as heat with surrounding atmosphere, but I think some of that energy may be released as special, unique wavelength photons that can pass through a considerable depth of clear air without being reabsorbed.
I would like to see a spectrum plot of how that 80W/m² ends up as radiation from the upper atmosphere escaping the earth.
Which is true, but it doesn’t matter how much Nitrogen is mixed with it. If a photon of the correct wavelength hits a CO2 atom it is absorbed. It doesn’t matter how much Nitrogen the photon passes through to hit it.
So, pressure broadening aside, the important aspect is 6kg of CO₂ above every square metre of the planet.
It’s not impossible to understand that this can cause 1.7W/m² of radiative forcing.
And it is. There is no suggestion outside extremist anti-scientific web forums that our physics of optics is broken.
It is indeed. There is 15% more water vapour in the atmosphere on average that there was 50 years ago.
And this is completely expected. Warmer air holds more water vapour before condensation starts, and also it evaporates water vapour more quickly.
And the climate sensitivity of about 3°C per doubling that is measured in a wide range of ways shows that water vapour feedback is happening.
Well, if you’re now saying that Trenberth’s data is available, that’s all good.
Close.
This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.
It’s a subtle difference, but what you said implies that there hasn’t been any warming over that period, whereas what Jones said was that the warming over that period was there, but not significant at the 95% level.
Since 1994 there was significant warming.
Most species of tree migrate even more slowly that tortoises.
I’ve never heard of such radiation. Is it measured in the Lab?
Wombat admits he doesn’t even know what we here have known here for years: that the devious Kevin Trenberth isn’t American. Wombat’s astonishing ignorance of such a basic fact shows that the guy probably lives in his mother’s basement; has no real life, and that his incessant thread-jacking fulfills his idea of existence.
Mr Wombat needs to get up to speed on this subject, and lighten up on the cutting & pasting of his debunked climate alarmist nonsense. It’s clear that he is new to this subject, and that he gets his misinformation from catastrophe-promoting echo chamber blogs. Unfortunately for Wombat, the planet is in no danger, as can be verified by its current Goldilocks temperature range: not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Maybe marsupialboi can falsify that statement, eh?
Wombat’s belief that the sensitivity number is what the IPCC claims is based on faith, not science. The IPCC’s numbers are bogus, selected only for their alarming conclusions.
For example, Miskolczi gives a zero sensitivity to CO2. Idso gives 0.1. Spencer gives 0.125. Schwartz gives 0.3, Chylek gives 0.38, Lindzen gives under 1.0… but the IPCC gives up to 6° C ?? WUWT?
Wombat’s cherry-picking of the scariest possible number is typical of the alarmist crowd. The IPCC’s job is to alarm the public in order to generate grant income; that’s what scamsters do, and Wombat is one of their enablers and apologists.
If I am wrong, Wombat can easily show that there is an agreed number for climate sensitivity. Or, he can continue to post his incessant – and factually wrong – cut ‘n’ pasted nonsense copied from RealClimate, climate progress, etc.
Wombat’s arguments have all been thoroughly deconstructed here in the past; it’s all in the WUWT archives. His tactic is to jump from one talking point to another, while never actually debating any of them in detail, and to clutter up the thread with previously falsified conjectures. It is the old alarmist tactic of always moving the goal posts, never sticking with one issue. That’s what climate alarmists do. It’s all they have, so they go with it.
If I’m wrong, it is very easy to demonstrate: Wombat can argue any one point in detail that he tries to make. I encourage him to stick to one issue, instead of being fixated on his cutting and pasting. He will quickly be set straight by scientific skeptics here, who, as always, have one simple challenge for Wombat-types: prove your assertions.
Wombat says:November 1, 2010 at 4:55 am
2) At the latitude of the UK, average temperature fall by 1C for each 200 miles north you travel. I think even a tortoise should make 150 miles in 100 years.
Most species of tree migrate even more slowly that tortoises.
You don’t know what you are talking about. “Most” tree species have some type of bouyant seed dispersal mechanism which can travel many miles per year, even hundreds for some species like cottonwood. “Many” tree species depend on distribution by birds or even coyotes and other animals, which eat the seeds and relieve themselves of viable seeds.
Range distribution is solely based on suitable habitat and/or competition at the landing site.
Smokey’s idea of knowledge of global warming is if you are aware of the which researchers are expatriates of which countries. He he doesn’t rate knowledge of the science.
He needs to wake up to the idea of scientific evidence, and the scientific process, and that trying to make points in the third person without providing evidence proves nothing. If the world were not too cold, not too not, but just right, I wonder how smokey thinks of the 40% drop in photoplanktons attributed to warming is “just right”. I wonder how he thinks that the 30% drop in biodiveristy over the last 35 years is “just right”.
He posts about climate change but seems to know nothing about its measured effects on coral reefs, on tundra communities, on subantarctic communities, or the extinction pressure of changing range to a non-overlapping range.
Amazing. He must have buried his head in the sand until now.
He makes no counterargument to the papers that have shown the climate sensitivity to be about 3°C in the past, but claims that because he has heard of half a dozen sensitivity estimates that are an order of magnitude lower than 95% of the peer reviewed research, it must be different from that now.
He provides no citations nor links to these estimates. Despite that his response is to quite well referenced posts.
Mr Smokey thinks that the IPCC has made an estimate of climate sensitivity. They have reported on the estimates of the scientific community. The irony is that he statements from mainstream science, and cries “cherry picking”, while suggesting that the climate sensitivity is 0.1 or 0.3 … or, and this one is really hard to imagine the physics behind … 0.
How a negative feedback can eliminate whatever caused the feedback, but still exist is new to mathematics, but not to smokey.
He is so removed from reality, science so much his view of evil, that he claims that a presentation of a scientific position must be a cut and paste from his own personal devil … blogs about climate change.
Google finds pages with an exact phrase if you surround it with quotes. Show me which posts I have cut and paste, smokey.
I have presented coherrent arguments, with many links to papers from the peer reviewed scientific literature. Smokey calls this “never actually debating any of them in detail”. You can’t get more detailed than linking to the papers, smokey.
I have one simple challenge for smokey. Prove your assertions.
What have I cut and paste?
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 4:17 am
There is 15% more water vapour in the atmosphere on average that there was 50 years ago.
Not according to the NCEP re-analysis. What’s your source please?
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 4:55 am
Most species of tree migrate even more slowly that tortoises.
Most species of tree weren’t killed off by the last ice age or the deglaciation following it. Life is more adaptable quicker than you seem to think. A lot of species have subspecies which thrive further north or south, or at higher or lower altitudes. These repopulate areas cleared by climate changes the previous inhabitants couldn’t tolerate.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 4:20 am
Well, if you’re now saying that Trenberth’s data is available, that’s all good.
Non-sequitur alert.
I’ll repeat the question:
Trenberth said (without making any data available to the rest of us):
“we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! ”
-Kevin Trenberth- Oct 2009
Question for Wombat:
Which part of Trenberth’s statement do you not understand?
I didn’t say that there was part of Trenberth’s statement that I didn’t understand.
My point to which you are replying is unrelated. I was responding to the suggestion that Mann’s and Trenberth’s data were not readily available to the public, but that Spencer’s was.
I showed that Mann’s data and code was available online, and I was wondering which part of Trenberth’s data people thought wasn’t being made available.
So I ask again. Which of Trenberths papers are you having trouble locating the data for?
I’m not suggesting that I can find it, but I found Mann’s pretty quickly, so I wonder if I could.
Last glaciation. An ice age is when there’s significant ice sheets in both hemispheres. We’re in one now.
There’s a number of reasons why the current warming is causing a greater drop in biodiversity than the warming at the end of the last glaciation.
First and foremost is that this warming is much faster. A deglaciation is about 10°C or 12°C over about 5000 or 6000 years. Very rapid warming as far as the ice core record goes, but only about 0.02°C per decade. The current warming is conservatively (hadCru) 0.13°C per decade over the last 50 years. Six or seven times faster.
Secondly is that over-exploitation, habitat loss, and pollution have already thinned populations. The reduced access to genetic variation means reduced capacity to adapt quickly.
Thirdly is that in many areas human land use has separated wilderness areas into islands with no wildlife corridors to allow migration.
One things for sure. We are seeing a huge drop in biodiversity.
Word of mouth.
What is the value from the NCEP re-analysis, please?
I realize that; my realization was implicit in my remark in the paragraph following to the one you quoted, “They [the IPCC higher-ups] would have been familiar with the literature and realized in a general way what WG1 was going to conclude.” (So you realized that I realized that. Good point-scoring, though.)
I used the word “findings,” rather than “verdict” or “evaluation,” in order to “set up” my little bit of wordplay: ” … WG1′s catastrophic findings before the findings had been found.”
Though I concede that “findings” wasn’t the mot juste, it wasn’t far off. In common parlance, and in media-speak, it’s sometimes used synonymously with those other words when medical “meta-analyses” on the efficacy of various drugs and therapies are published. There have been several of these in the last three months, though I forget what they were about. They did get headlines. Their “verdicts” or “evaluations” were called “findings” in the media, though they only weighed up what had already been found.
Alas, they might as well be locked down in Michael Mann’s thumb drive. No one can be expected to take a full-time month out of his life getting up to speed on our “findings” (if I dare use the word).
What I hope Anthony will green-light, if it is possible, is to give editorial privileges to a select group of WUWTers to go through the archives and select by “consensus” (!) the best 10%. Then that material should be either highlighted in-place in yellow, flagged with a star, and/or copied to a boiled-down mini-WUWT that could be read in three days (full time). This place shouldn’t be just a chat-room; it should be a reference-source.
Most tortoises can travel hundreds of kilometres per year, and they don’t have to be cottonwoods.
Roger Knights says:
November 1, 2010 at 7:41 am
While I appreciate your relative candour, I still think that your objections to working group three are unjustifiable.
1°C warming has to be converted to consequences if the report is for policy-makers.
“… set a group in motion in parallel with WG1 to flesh out the full horror of WG1′s catastrophic findings before the findings had been found.” Isn’t only unjustifiable because the phrase “before the findings have been found” is wrong, but also because “flesh out the full horror” is implying a bias that doesn’t exist. Quite the opposite. Because the reports go through political review as well as scientific review, they end up tending towards the conservative.
Yep.
Foreign aid was provided in the case of the recent famine there: $133 million from the US and $28 million from the EU. (It may not have been given in a timely fashion, or delivered to its recipients–I don’t know.)
But to cite that instance and say nothing else is a diversive response to my claim that poor nations don’t pay the full market price for foodstuffs. “Food aid” subsidizes part of these payments in many cases. I suspect that additional food aid would kick in if sharply rising prices caused widespread famines.
(But I may be completely wrong. I’m nearly completely ignorant on the subject of food aid. As on nearly every subject, I rely on vague memories of material I’ve read in the media over the years.)
I note that the link you provided to Wikipedia claims that Sahel’s farmers have been cleared of the Western charge of causing the famine by poor farming practices, because global warming has now been fingered as the villain. This is what I would expect from a Connolley-controlled site.
While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Scientific sources are also a valuable resource.
Yes, foreign aid was given.
But my original point was that they are not helped by the global increase in food production because they are in the Sahel, and the extra food is in Canada or Russia.
With a few dead already, and ten million “in immediate risk of starvation”, my point still stands. Or do you think that they are about to starve, and have enough money to buy food, because of international aid, and simply have chosen not to?
The aid is not sufficient to compensate for the loss of crops in the Sahel. Nor parts of South East Asia. (Nor, generally the Horn of Africa, although they seem to be okay there this year).
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 7:41 am
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 4:17 am
There is 15% more water vapour in the atmosphere on average that there was 50 years ago.
Tallbloke says:
Not according to the NCEP re-analysis. What’s your source please?
Word of mouth.
Ah, that would explain it. You’ve been hanging around disinformation sites like realclimate.org no doubt.
What is the value from the NCEP re-analysis, please?
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
What you will find is that humidity has fallen since 1958, not risen. This is why the ‘fingerprint of global warming’ the ‘tropospheric hotspot’ exists only in models, not in the real world.
This is one of the many things which falsifies the models, and is one of the reasons Trenberth worries about ‘missing heat’.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:17 am
Most species of tree migrate even more slowly that tortoises.
You don’t know what you are talking about. “Most” tree species have some type of bouyant seed dispersal mechanism which can travel many miles per year, even hundreds for some species like cottonwood.
Most tortoises can travel hundreds of kilometres per year, and they don’t have to be cottonwoods.
Thank you for disproving your own point. So you now agree the Earth isn’t “warming faster than species can adapt or migrate”?
I have to say the cottonwood tortoise is a new species I didn’t know about though. 😉
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:43 am
While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Not on the website where you were told humidity had increased 15% however…
My browser gets nothing at that URL
Difficult to believe. The warmer temperature means more specific humidity for the same relative humidity.
And the scientific literature shows increasing humidity:
“The results presented here add to an increasing body of evidence
that atmospheric water vapour has exhibited a significant upward
trend over recent decades
10,12,29,30” – http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/ngillett/PDFS/nature06207.pdf
The citations are:
10. Dai, A. Recent climatology, variability, and trends in global surface humidity.
J. Clim. 19, 3589–3606 (2006).
12. Wentz, F. J., Ricciardulli, L.,Hilburn, K.&Mears, C.Howmuchmore rainwill global
warming bring? Science 317, 233–235 (2007).
29. Santer, B. D. et al. Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric
moisture content. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 15248–15253 (2007).
30. Trenberth, K. E., Fasullo, J. & Smith, L. Trends and variability in column-integrated
atmospheric water vapor. Clim. Dyn. 24, 741–758 (2005).
But perhaps you can help me find the data you were trying to point to?
You think the world’s not been warming?
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual_bar.png
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#figure_7
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2009/global-jan-dec-error-bar.gif
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
It all looks like warming to me.
The hotspot is not apparent because of sparse sampling of the tropical upper troposphere, and variation from the ENSO. I’m told that if you look at just El-Nino years or just La Nina years, you can find it; although I’ve not done it myself.
In any case the fingerprint of the greenhouse effect are present. The stronger warming at the poles and the cooling stratosphere. (As well as the decrease in the diurnal temperature range).
The models reproduce global mean surface temperature remarkably well. So the energy flow aspects are not falsified.
Your inablilty to measure the hotspot does not invalidate the entire sciences of optics and thermodynamics. Science isn’t all in one piece.
Worried. Most of the missing heat is not located in the deeper oceans that Trenberth had measurements for. Nothing to do with the tropical upper troposphere.
I don’t think that that is disproved by measurements of the land-speed of a tortoise.
We know that the current species have survived climate change of one sixth the current rate.
A forest doesn’t leap forward at the rate of the dispersal of cottonwood seeds. A seed in the middle of grassland doesn’t take. The forest moves forward incrementally, with groups of species replacing the grass, and only later the old forest species can move in.
And this can be remarkably fast, but we have no evidence that it can be accomplished and lots of evidence that we are observing a mass extinction.
Furthermore there needs to be somewhere to move to. The last 2 million years have seen the flow from glaciation to interglacial, in approximately the same range every 100,000 years or so. Now we’re moving the other direction. Very rapid warming from nearly the peak of an interglacial.
This is why animals are going extinct at the top of mountains and the pole end of islands and continents, this is why we are seeing the destruction of diverse and unique ecological communities as temperate predators invade, and this is why at any speed this climate change is dangerous. Nearly no species alive today has had to exist in the coming climate
While I’m bracing to concede that point, I haven’t yet. The argument that humidity has dropped seems counter-physical, and not in line with the papers I found when I was looking for the 15% figure.
But the quote, I think was from the “Science Weekly” podcast. It’s generally pretty good.
RE: Wombat: (November 1, 2010 at 5:07 am)
I’ve never heard of such radiation. [from multi-molecular H2O clumps] Is it measured in the Lab?
Except for one or two papers on ‘bimolecular’ water, I have found very little on this subject on the internet. For that matter, public data on ‘water vapor’ is usually confined to its absorption spectra. I suspect that the complex nature of H2O absorption, when compared with the simple spectrum of CO2 absorption, might be due, in part, to a transient population of fused H2O molecules that are continually being created and destroyed.
It is the very fact that the potential radiative cooling from small clumps of fused H2O molecules is never mentioned, even in passing, which makes me suspicious that we may be missing something here.
“”””” Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 8:43 am
What I hope Anthony will green-light, if it is possible, is to give editorial privileges to a select group of WUWTers to go through the archives and select by “consensus” (!) the best 10%. Then that material should be either highlighted in-place in yellow, flagged with a star, and/or copied to a boiled-down mini-WUWT that could be read in three days (full time). This place shouldn’t be just a chat-room; it should be a reference-source.
While I admire the tenacity of your groupthink, in the outside world, there’s real climate science going on.
Scientific sources are also a valuable resource. “””””
Sounds like a form of censorship to me. I know that I for one, would not want to be handed the tools or opportunity with which to sort the writings of others and rule on their “merit”.
Certainly I sometimes see totally nutty stuff here at WUWT (from reader/posters). Sometimes it is simply ignorance (which is NOT a disease; and is eminently correctable); and sometimes it is total idiocy; well maybe they do it for the comedy effect.
Consider the America’s Got Talent; and similar T&V talent shows. I bet that if Dietrich Fischer Dieskau got up on those shows, and sang from some Schubert or Mahler Lieder; he would get Gonged off the stage; specially by that Brit ignoramus; who thinks he’s a great arbiter of talent. Some people wouldn’t recognize real talent if it ran them down in the street.
Same thing with science forae; encouraging the concensus approach is not the way forward.
Wombat says: November 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
And the scientific literature shows increasing humidity:
“The results presented here add to an increasing body of evidence
that atmospheric water vapour has exhibited a significant upward
trend over recent decades
10,12,29,30″ – http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/ngillett/PDFS/nature06207.pdf
That paper uses surface observations only. Increasing specific humidity at the upper tropopause falls as increased precipitation. See the dropping temperature of the troposphere.
Wombat says: November 1, 2010 at 9:42 am
A forest doesn’t leap forward at the rate of the dispersal of cottonwood seeds. A seed in the middle of grassland doesn’t take. The forest moves forward incrementally, with groups of species replacing the grass, and only later the old forest species can move in.
Last time I checked cottonwood is in a group of species called Salix. And that group can move north with increasing temps. And they are collectively one of the fastest growing tree species around. And they sequester a dispropotionate amount of CO2. And you could forest the entire tundra under CAGW if you add in birches. There is a thread here a while back that indicated birches used to grow in Canada. You just can’t stomach man’s influence on the environment. Admit your reasoning is based upon your religious belief paradigm that man is ruining everything.
And provide the evidence for mass extinctions.
Wombat says:
November 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
My browser gets nothing at that URL
What you will find is that humidity has fallen since 1958, not risen.
Difficult to believe. The warmer temperature means more specific humidity for the same relative humidity.
NOAA have been shuffling things around. I might go to the trouble of finding the data for you if you show any signs of debating reasonably.
Let me show something about specific humidity since 1948 (my mistake earlier) at the tropopause which might surprise you Wombat. It correlates with solar activity a lot better than with co2.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png?w=614
[Note: the first link now has this message: “PSD web servers will be unavailable Wednesday 11/3 from 1600-2100 approx. (GMT-6) for UPS repair.” ~dbs, mod.]
It depends who you are.
Science by its nature doesn’t encourage consensus. Highest honours are to those that overturn a paradigm, and because of the personal investment in the work, one regularly finds heavily clashing egos. Which, I agree, is good. But suggestions of a global conspiracy are laughable.
On the other hand, an autodidact would do well to consider the scientific consensus. If they find that their belief is different from 97% of the experts in the field, then an useful line of thought would be “What is it that I’ve missed”. A hilarious line of thought is “Look the experts have all missed this”. More crazy still is “experts such as Trenberth must be being dishonest”.
Do you have a citation?
Wrong meaning of group.
What I mean is when a forest claims new land, or reclaims after a burn-off, you get a different species profile initially.
It is pretty serious. But the greenhouse effect is caused by basic optics. And the increase in it is caused by a well measured and attributed increase in atmospheric CO2.
OMG. You don’t know that there’s a mass extinction underway.
I’m not really sure where to point you first. Are we now living in the Anthropocene? might be a good science based primer.
But it really hasn’t been a secret.
Wombat says:
“The hotspot is not apparent because of…” blah, blah, & etc. Every one of the 20+ GCMs predicted the same hot spot “fingerprint” of AGW. The problem is, it doesn’t exist. [“not apparent”, heh]
Wombat still believes in the same non-existent hotspot – the “AGW Fingerprint” that was trumpeted ad nauseum by the alarmist crowd – until it failed to materialize, once again falsifying the climate scare.
Wombat also believes that the current [entirely natural] temperature rise is too much for species to take. Of course, that is silly. As Phil Jones’ chart makes clear, the current natural rise in temperature is entirely routine.
And the tortoise analogy has a hole big enough to walk an elephant through. Tortoises may be able to move a few hundred kilometers a year. But it’s never in a straight line, and they generally end up about where they started – unlike tree lines, which quickly respond to changing temperatures, as they did during the MWP and the LIA [which the deceitful Michael Mann insisted had hardly happened at all, as he claimed with the straight shaft of his Hokey Stick].
Wombat is one of those jamokes who believes he’s always right, even when he’s flatly contradicted, chapter and verse. It’s Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance on display; just because the flying saucers didn’t arrive on schedule doesn’t mean there are no flying saucers. And just because the planet’s temperature is right in the middle of Holocene normal doesn’t mean runaway global warming and climate catastrophe isn’t right around the corner. My model clearly explains the situation:
CD + P1P2 = W [where C is cognitive, D is dissonance, P1 is psychological, P2 is projection, and W…] ☺
I think Wombat needs to get a job, or a life.
You don’t have a very sound grasp of logical inference.
The chart shows a temperature history, and some short parts of it that have a similar slope.
There is nothing there that shows what a natural or routine rise is, nor is there anything there that shows what an anthropogenic rise is.
And of course there is no analysis of the difference between the two, and why the observed temperature must be one and not the other.
In short, it shows exactly nothing about whether the rise is natural or routine. And yet your conclusion is that it “makes clear” (no less) that “the current natural rise in temperature is entirely routine”.
That’s not evidence based. That is faith based belief. Take your own advice and (I quote) “prove your assertions.”
In the meantime, if anyone is interested in papers that do decompose the current temperature rise to the climatic response to natural forcing, and to anthropogenic forcing, Meehl et al, is a well cited paper.
The attribution of the current warming to anthropogenic forcing in starkly clear.
Is the usual response in here to evidence based input so uninspiring, because the people here just come to groupthink and so lash out at anything that causes them cognitive dissonance, or have I just found a particularly uninspiring crowd?
[REPLY: WUWT entertains and invites comments from both sides of the climate issue, from scientists, professionals, and layman. There is no “group think”. … .bl57~mod]
He showed that the LIA was at different times at different parts of the hemisphere. He didn’t show that a particular forest didn’t experience it, quite the opposite.
And the findings have been supported by a dozen studies since, and so really aren’t controversial, out in the real world.
And “deceitful”? Please!
I don’t think there is any need to take the mick out of Wombat’s sincerely held belief in the efficacy of the AGW theory. If we can be kindly to him and get him to examine the relevant data dispassionately, he will begin to see all is not well with the Team’s marshalling of the ‘facts’. I think he’s more likely to do that if we don’t give him reason to write us off as ad hom merchants.
Now Wombat, do you agree that specific humidity at the tropopause since 1948 correlates better with solar activity than it does with the rise in co2?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png?w=614
Take your time…
[REPLY – Yes. I agree that ad hominems are amiss. In any case, Wombat gets to have his say so long as he cleaves to the limits of blog policy. Regardless of the preponderance of our constituency, under the direction of our gracious host, we run an open intellectual shop here. Unlike some places one could mention! ~ Evan]
Wombat, your first assignment is to demonstrate that what we are experiencing currently is outside the range of natural variability. If you can’t show that, then the rest of it doesn’t matter.
Due to peer pressure I’ve prevailed on my favorite mod to remove my post above. Nice guy that I am and all. Wombat has enough problems.
And Robert Kral is absolutely correct. AGW alarmism is like arguing about the cat under your bed. But when you look, there’s no cat. Show us the AGW, then we’ll have something real to discuss.
tallbloke says:
November 1, 2010 at 6:56 am
I’ll repeat the question:
Trenberth said (without making any data available to the rest of us):
“we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! ”
-Kevin Trenberth- Oct 2009
Trenberth was bemoaning the lack of data (and the absence of the necessary measurement systems), tough to make non-existent data available!
Ah. Phil., the Trenberth mind reader. Psychics are always welcome on the Best Science site.☺
But note that Mr T said “…we will never be able to tell…”.
The “absence of the necessary measurement systems” could be remedied this side of ‘never.’
Carry on.
Smokey says:
November 2, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Ah. Phil., the Trenberth mind reader. Psychics are always welcome on the Best Science site.☺
But note that Mr T said “…we will never be able to tell…”.
The “absence of the necessary measurement systems” could be remedied this side of ‘never.’
Best to engage brain before typing Smokey, remedying that deficiency would be difficult before the present! Dr T pointed out that in the absence of present data, assessment of the effect of geoengineering could not be determined even if future data became available. Reading comprehension is required not psychic abilities.
Nice try Phil, me boi. For a presumed psychic. But ‘present data’ is incompatible with the term “never.”☺
Carry on.
[REPLY – Yes. I agree that ad hominems are amiss. In any case, Wombat gets to have his say so long as he cleaves to the limits of blog policy. Regardless of the preponderance of our constituency, under the direction of our gracious host, we run an open intellectual shop here. Unlike some places one could mention! ~ Evan]
What about this comment -it seems to say otherwise:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/15/my-answer-to-taminos-question/#comment-508816
walt man says:
November 2, 2010 at 9:24 pm
What about this comment -it seems to say otherwise:
Well your dissenting view is here, as is Jonfroide’s.
Phil. says:
November 2, 2010 at 7:43 pm
tallbloke says:
November 1, 2010 at 6:56 am
I’ll repeat the question:
Trenberth said (without making any data available to the rest of us):
“we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! ”
-Kevin Trenberth- Oct 2009
Trenberth was bemoaning the lack of data (and the absence of the necessary measurement systems), tough to make non-existent data available!
Ah yes, thanks for reminding me. I’ll dig out Trenberth’s “the data doesn’t fit the theory, so the data must be wrong” quote for you.
Lol.
Just for reference, the following well known graphic seems to indicate that the current IPCC accepted state of knowledge in climate science appears to lack the ability to estimate how the upper atmosphere to cools itself.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/model_vs_actual_troposphere_temps_lg.jpg
So far, I have only seen speculation on this happens, including my own suggestion that the process of condensation in a rising column of damp might also generate unique wavelength photons that can escape to outer space. Perhaps that effect is insignificant. So far, however, I have seen many profiles of radiation from the surface, but no public presentation of data on how the atmosphere is radiating the convected ’80W/m² ‘ to outer space.
According to Dr. Roy Spencer and Robert Clemenzi, as I understand it, most of this cooling is via the emission spectra of greenhouse gases as the oxygen and nitrogen components of the atmosphere cannot, on their own, emit more heat than they receive from the sun.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/02/spencer-earths-sans-greenhouse-effect-what-would-it-be-like/
I would suspect that specific humidity would increase with increasing temperature.
The obvious issues that arise from having thought about it for a minute:
Since an increase in CO2 concentration results in an increase in temperature that begins at the time of the increase in CO2 and is 60% complete 25-50 years later, calculating an expected response in the humidity would involve some reasonably complicated filtering.
Humidity data in the troposphere is not simple to extract. In the tropics radiosconde data is sparse, and a daytime dry bias that increases with increasing height has been noted. The explanation for this is a solar radiation-induced error, which obviously is highly correlated to solar radiation.
So we need to be sure of the source of the humidity data, we need to be sure that correlations with solar irradiance aren’t spurious, and, importatly we should have an estimate of the expected error in the humidity data.
In terms of solar irradiance sunspot number is an okay proxy. It isn’t however, solar irradiance. It certianly isn’t solar irradiance at the earth’s distance.
But certainly I would expect solar activity to affect temperature, and CO2 to affect temperature on a longer time-scale. So if you use short term averages of humidity, you would probably get a higher correlation with sunspot number, and if you use longer term averages of humidity, you would get a higher correlation with CO2 concentration.
Does it?
Most of the comments here aren’t scientifically mainstream.
I wonder what the reason for a such a skewed perspective here is.
Also there seems to be a lot of villification of scientists. That can’t be symptomatic of openness to scientific evidence.
And I think that the comment I quoted was a simple objection to a scientific perspective being forwarded. No content, no opinion or analysis offered, just the suggestion that I post less, bundled with the accusation that I don’t have a life. Appart from the obvious; group think, what motivation can there be for that post?
A better reference would be one with a source, a methodology and an estimate of error.
The average temperature state predicted by modelling refers to once the steady state is reached, does it not?
And radiosconde data is thin in the upper tropical troposphere, and subject to error caused by solar radiation.
In the meantime, the planet is warming, and the patterns shows the fingerprints of the greenhouse effect, and carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect.
Which is totally unsurprising since the increase in CO2 due to human activity has been directly measured.
[snip – try again, minus the snark]
I would like to pose a question to Mr. Trenberth myself.
I would be like this.
Dear Mr. Trenberth, for many years now your diagram on global energy flows has been part of IPCC’s assessment reports. I just studied a recent version of it (March 2009) and the number given for surface radiation intrigued me so I read in your comment that it was derived from the application of the Stefan–Boltzmann law. Reading assured me that the method was legitimate but somehow I felt uneasy about it. When discussing at a forum about to distinguish the greenhouse effect on incoming radiation from that on outgoing radiation I tried to use your numbers from this diagram. When considering outgoing radiation I started with your surface radiation and nearly instinctively added thermal and latent heat to it and suddenly halted. Applying the Stefan–Boltzmann law would doubtlessly get a result that represents all energy to leave a body’s surface and leaves no room for additional thermals and latent heat. So I checked again but could not find a notion in your comments that you had taken care of that. Please comment on this subject.