I was working on a general report yesterday, but in checking background for it, I discovered this recent missive from Dr. Hansen. I suppose when your agency is the “odd man out”, you feel a need to explain yourself. Note the difference in November 2010 global temperature anomaly metrics:
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C
Yes, I’d try to explain that too. I’ll have another post on this, but for now, here’s GISS report verbatim as it appears here. – Anthony
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
2010 — Global Temperature and Europe’s Frigid Air
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and Ken Lo
Figure 1:
(a) January-November surface air temperature anomaly in GISS analysis, (b) November 2010 anomaly using only data from meteorological stations and Antarctic research stations, with the radius of influence of a station limited to 250 km to better reveal maximum anomalies. (View large PDF)Figure 1(a) shows January-November 2010 surface temperature anomalies (relative to 1951-80) in the preliminary Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis. This is the warmest January-November in the GISS analysis, which covers 131 years. However, it is only a few hundredths of a degree warmer than 2005, so it is possible that the final GISS results for the full year will find 2010 and 2005 to have the same temperature within the margin of error.
As described in an in-press paper at Reviews of Geophysics (see summary PDF) that defines the GISS analysis method, we estimate a two-standard-deviation uncertainty (95 percent confidence interval) of 0.05°C for comparison of global temperatures in nearby recent years. The magnitude of this uncertainty and the small temperature differences among different years is one reason that alternative analyses yield different rankings for the warmest years. However, results for overall global temperature change of the past century are in good agreement among the alternative analyses (by NASA/GISS, NOAA National Climate Data Center, and the joint analysis of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit).
Figure 1(b) shows November 2010 surface temperature anomalies based only on surface air measurements at meteorological stations and Antarctic research stations. In producing this map the radius of influence of a given station is limited to 250 km to allow extreme temperature anomalies to be apparent. Northern Europe had negative anomalies of more than 4°C, while the Hudson Bay region of Canada had monthly mean anomalies greater than +10°C.
The extreme warmth in Northeast Canada is undoubtedly related to the fact that Hudson Bay was practically ice free. In the past, including the GISS base period 1951-1980, Hudson Bay was largely ice-covered in November. The contrast of temperatures at coastal stations in years with and without sea ice cover on the neighboring water body is useful for illustrating the dramatic effect of sea ice on surface air temperature. Sea ice insulates the atmosphere from ocean water warmth, allowing surface air to achieve temperatures much lower than that of the ocean. It is for this reason that some of the largest positive temperature anomalies on the planet occur in the Arctic Ocean as sea ice area has decreased in recent years.
The cold anomaly in Northern Europe in November has continued and strengthened in the first half of December. Combined with the unusual cold winter of 2009-2010 in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, this regional cold spell has caused widespread commentary that global warming has ended. That is hardly the case. On the contrary, globally November 2010 is the warmest November in the GISS record.
Figure 2(a) illustrates that there is a good chance that 2010 as a whole will be the warmest year in the GISS analysis. Even if the December global temperature anomaly is unusually cool, 2010 will at least be in a statistical tie with 2005 for the warmest year.
Figure 2: Global surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980 mean for (a) annual and 5-year running means, and (b) 60-month and 132-month running means. In (a) the 2010 point is a preliminary 11-month anomaly. Green vertical bars are two-standard-deviation error estimates, as discussed in our Reviews of Geophysics paper. (View large PDF)
Figure 2(b) shows the 60-month (5-year) and 132-month (11-year) running-mean surface air temperature in the GISS analysis. Contrary to frequent assertions that global warming slowed in the past decade, as discussed in our paper in press, global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades. The warmth of 2010 is especially noteworthy, given the strong La Nina that developed in the second half of 2010. The La Nina, caused by unusually strong easterly equatorial winds, produces the cool anomalies in the tropical Pacific Ocean as cold upwelling deep water along the Peruvian coast is blown westward along the equator.
Figure 3: Temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980 for the European region defined by 36°N-70°N and 10°W-30°E. (View large PDF)
Back to the cold air in Europe: is it possible that reduced Arctic sea ice is affecting weather patterns? Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean. The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw. Several ideas about possible effects of the loss of Arctic sea ice on weather patterns are discussed in papers referenced by Overland, Wang and Walsh.
However, we note in our Reviews of Geophysics paper in press that the few years just prior to 2009-2010, with low Arctic sea ice, did not produce cold winters in Europe. The cold winter of 2009-2010 was associated with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period of record. Figure 3, from our paper in press, shows that 7 of the last 10 European winters were warmer than the 1951-1980 average winter, and 10 of the past 10 summers were warmer than climatology. The average warming of European winters is at least as large as the average warming of summers, but it is less noticeable because of the much greater variability in winter.
Finally, we point out in Figure 3 the anomalous summer warmth in 2003 and 2010, summers that were associated with extreme events centered in France and Moscow. If the warming trend that is obvious in that figure continues, as is expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase, such extremes will become common within a few decades.
A copy of this webpage text is also available as a PDF document.
Reference
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, and K. Lo, 2010: Global surface temperature change. Rev. Geophys., in press, doi:10.1029/2010RG000345.
Contacts
Please address media inquiries regarding the GISS surface temperature analysis to Ms. Leslie McCarthy by e-mail at Leslie.M.McCarthy@nasa.gov or by phone at 212-678-5507.
Scientific inquiries about the analysis may be directed to Dr. James E. Hansen.
DMI shows the Arctic normal for November. Hansen should stop making up numbers.
One must say, that strategically placed thermometer at Labrador was a smart move.
I feel much better knowing that there is good agreement between GISSS and Had-CRUT, expecially since Vicky Pope has already assured us that this will be the warmest year, ever (even though a frigid December is not even half-over).
“UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C”
You know that they have a different reference period??
Most of the warming during last 350 years in the area of NE Atlantic, as expressed in the CETs, happened in the winter months ( if UHI is eliminated?), when the Gulf Stream effect is predominant.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET3.htm
This would imply either warming of the equatorial Atlantic or change in the Gulf Stream thermal efficiency. There are three major 50 year long warming periods 1680-1730, 1810-1860 and 1960-2010. There also 3 major cooling periods (2 x 50 and 1 x 40 years).
This would suggest that the winter CET’s variations are more part of natural cycles, then anthropogenic. If so then implication is that the CET’s winter temperatures are on the threshold of several decades of cooling, the last and current winter may be precursor of what is to come.
In this case any anthropogenic CO2 generated warming would be more than welcome, in order to ameliorate even lower temperatures and so reduce demand for heating fossil fuels. What is valid for the CET area it is applicable to the most of NW Europe, one of most dense populated regions of the globe.
Conclusion must be that the AGW may not be a disaster, but actually a beneficial at the periods when natural cycles turn downwards.
A rather long few paragraphs amplifying what we already know . ( Ahem)
A: WARMEST YEAR EVER, ‘cept maybe for the other warmest year .
B: Cold temperatures, as seen in Europe and the US, and crushing snowfalls are weather. While warm temperatures, such as those in Moscow during the summer, are climate.
That is what it says.
If conditions at Baffin and Hudson are comparable, and have downstream weather effects, why do the effects seem to be opposite ?
If I remember correctly, GISS deletes SST data for places that ice up in winter. This enables them to use nearby land temperatures that are more variable and give more positive anomalies. However for air temperatures, measuring over ice is good because you get a huge temperature uplift when the ice has melted.
All methods seem to result in higher temperatures. Must be a coincidence…
I wonder how long it will be before the epithet “Wrong way” becomes applied.
Hansen has no shame.
The reason Hudson Bay is slow to freeze is the blocking pattern, which transports above average air up that way, even as cold air is transported to Florida. But of course Hansen suggests the tail wags the dog, and Hudson Bay’s lack-of-ice is causing the blocking pattern.
Then he uses a map which makes Greenland look bigger than South America.
And so on and so forth.
No shame whatsoever.
Doesn’t that all suggest that more open water in the Arctic Ocean actually vents heat to space faster rather than encouraging global warming from reduced albedo and more insolation into the Arctic waters ?
That is what I have been suggesting for some time.
So the quieter sun somehow causes an expanded polar vortex, the associated high pressure cells intensify and migrate towards the mid latitudes with more intense and extensive lower pressure at the pole with faster ingress of warmth and faster upward energy transfer for global cooling.
Meanwhile the more equatorward polar jets reduce solar input to the oceans via higher global cloudiness and albedo.
So while the sun remains quiet we have faster energy out and less energy coming in. Perversely a warmer upper atmosphere is needed to intensify the high pressure cells (see Joanna Haigh’s data) and allow faster energy exit via the poles and slower energy input to the oceans. The opposite of the cooler upper atmosphere that was observed when the sun was more active.
The question then must be whether it is right for AGW proponents to say that these developments are a result of AGW rather than natural solar influences on the polar vortices.
Since much the same must have happened in past cooling spells (the jets behaved like this then too) and since CO2 continues to rise I would say that what we are seeing is a natural solar induced event.
If AGW had been the driving force then the current situation would have been developing gradually over the past 40 years. But it did not. In fact the opposite occurred with the jets pushed more poleward and the AO more positive.
Until the sun began to behave differently.
Now one can surmise that nonetheless there is a background warming effect from CO2 but if so would not the system response be exactly the same? Namely a miniscule change in pressure distribution to negate it completely.
With regard to demands for data I would just say that it will be obtained soon enough. Past data of relevance has quite simply never been acquired.
As regards evidence of a more general nature the recent changes are exactly as anticipated by my earlier suggestions. We now have a fast developing scenario that fits perfectly.
The current setup may come and go over time as solar and ocean cycles change and interact but on a 1000 year cycle (500 year half cycle) the pattern will in my opinion be maintained.
Note that the establishment views in relation to sun and climate never expected any of this and none of it was predicted or projected in model runs but all that we see is just an intensification of changes that I have been drawing attention to for over three years now.
Has anyone audited the station data to make sure they don’t have a bunch of “999”s in there?
Per GISS, the anomaly for 2010 is 0.73C using 1200-km smoothing, and .62C using 250-km smoothing. [Compare 1200-km and 250-km.]
However, that uses GISS’s default baseline period of 1951-1980. When one uses the same base period of 1979-1998 (and a 250-km smoothing radius), the GISS anomaly drops to 0.46 C. [See]
So the discrepancy has a lot to do with the base period, although large-scale smoothing (mostly in the Arctic and Africa) contributes as well.
On the other hand, if I remember correctly, lower-troposphere (LT) temps were expected (by models, naturally) to increase about 20% more than surface temps, so in that sense there is a greater discrepancy than 0.46 (surface) vs. 0.38 (LT).
Why is this failed prophet advocate of the Greens still employed?
How does he look people in the eye?
Why do I recall scenes from Inglurious Basterds whenever I see a photo of him?
Still wondering what happened to 1998…
Smital says: {December 12, 2010 at 9:24 am}
” “UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C”
You know that they have a different reference period??”
Exactly why speaking of anomalies to depict a specific temperature difference is silly.
“The warmth of 2010 is especially noteworthy, given the strong La Nina that developed in the second half of 2010.”
=============================================
Idiots! There is a 4 to 6 month lag from the effects of La Nina in the atmosphere.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
“Finally, we point out in Figure 3 the anomalous summer warmth in 2003 and 2010, summers that were associated with extreme events centered in France and Moscow. If the warming trend that is obvious in that figure continues, as is expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase, such extremes will become common within a few decades.”
================================
Idiots again!
No mention. None….of the correlation with their Figure 3 to the cycles of the AMO.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
R. Gates, I want you to notice your guru has dismissed extreme events as weather related and are outside the relentless warming he sees. He gives a bit of space to the idea that global warming could be the cause of cold but then dismisses it with “However” evidence to the contrary (wonder of wonders). So even Hansen dismisses your nonsense of chaos. According to Hansen, he sees climate to be rather easily led around by the nose by that tiny little mouse called anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
“However, we note in our Reviews of Geophysics paper in press that the few years just prior to 2009-2010, with low Arctic sea ice, did not produce cold winters in Europe. The cold winter of 2009-2010 was associated with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period of record. Figure 3, from our paper in press, shows that 7 of the last 10 European winters were warmer than the 1951-1980 average winter, and 10 of the past 10 summers were warmer than climatology. The average warming of European winters is at least as large as the average warming of summers, but it is less noticeable because of the much greater variability in winter.”
If Hansen lives long enough, he will completely miss the next ice age cycle, as he hangs on to his phone book global temperature average.
“Finally, we point out in Figure 3 the anomalous summer warmth in 2003 and 2010, summers that were associated with extreme events centered in France and Moscow. If the warming trend that is obvious in that figure continues, as is expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase, such extremes will become common within a few decades.”
If he knew what causes heatwaves he could say for sure how common they will be, even when they will happen, but there occurrence is nothing to do with trends in the slightest, trends do not make heat waves, duh !
The map for Scandinavia looks a bit different from the map on page 15 in this document: http://met.no/Klima/Klimastatistikk/Varet_i_Norge/2010/November_2010/?module=Files;action=File.getFile;ID=3737
Nearly all stations in Norway were well below the 1961-90 normal for January to November.
Finally, does it incense you, as it does me, that this taxpayer-funded behemoth with its talking head scientists spouting nonsense….that they would over-dramatize the .5 degree celsius rise over the 130 year GI** record??
A half a degree celsius! OMG time to go rescue the polar bears.
Any graph on a scale which only shows a half a degree celsius with the respective rise from the recovery of the LIA, is going to look like a hockey stick blade.
The scale of Hansen’s graph is purposefully misleading….and represents a type of blatant….well….um….misrepresentation. Fraud, really.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Steven, the same thing, in my opinion, can be applied to your idea. You hang on to the idea of the tiny little mouse called the “variable” Sun (and all you can come up with is the word “somehow”) as much as Hansen hangs on to his tiny little anthropogenic CO2 mouse. Yet you both ignore the elephant still romping about in the room, refusing to be scared by the Sun or CO2. The elephant is our own highly variable planet.
Hansen et al: “The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw”
He’s saying that a warm anomaly causes a cold anomaly. My understanding of weather is that weather anomalies are driven by factors like warmth and cold not the difference between some current temperature somewhere and some past average based on an arbitrary or politically convenient interval. The main thing he is missing is that NAO and ENSO drive those American and European anomalies and NAO and ENSO have their own causes that are mostly independent.
Jim Hansen has it largely correct. We’ve had the Arctic “freezer door” open for going on the second winter now (spanning both an El Nino and La Nina and their associated atmospheric pressure anomalies). The cold air pouring forth from the Arctic to southern latitudes is reflected in record cold in those southern latitudes and record highs in the Arctic regions. Now, IF the entire N. Hemisphere were cooling, from the equator to the pole, and Arctic Sea Ice was exanding back to even the 30 year normal line, that would be an entirely different matter. But that is absolutely not the case. What we have is unusual pressure anomalies that are simultaneous associated with (globally speaking) record high or near record high temps. Yes, this absolutely does not prove that the 40% increase in CO2 over the past few hundred years is to blame, but it does fit in with the general AGW hypothesis, and certainly does not dispprove it.
What does “warmer than climatology” mean ?
from hansons article..
Could somebody point me to details of instruments used to measure surface Ts to xx hundreths of a degree accuracy.
Or is someone going to tell me that this is an artifact of statistics?
It is not about different normal period. GISTEMP went AWOL.
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/2010temperatureanomalies.png
Global SST, responsible for 70% of the global record, cooled since April by 0.2 deg C
http://i54.tinypic.com/2j0e6p4.jpg
To make up this drop, surface station record would have to jump up by 0.7 deg C or something.
Eric, read on. Hansen refutes the idea of warm causing cold. His only nod towards extreme being climate warming related, is heat extremes. He dismisses cold extremes in his next paragraph with “However…”
The following is a joke I found on the web and a bit offtopic but I think it describes Dr. Hansen’s work quite a bit actually:
Scientific Phrases – What They Say and What They Mean
“It has long been known” – I didn’t look up the original reference.
“A definite trend is evident” – These data are practically meaningless.
“While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to the questions” – An unsuccessful experiment but I still hope to get it published.
“Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” – The other results didn’t make any sense.
“Typical results are shown” – 1 This is the prettiest graph. 2 The best results are shown.
“These results will be in a subsequent report” – I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
“In my experience” – Once.
“In case after case” – Twice.
“In a series of cases” – Thrice.
“It is believed that” – I think.
“It is generally believed that” – A couple of others think so, too.
“Correct within an order of magnitude” – Wrong.
“According to statistical analysis” – Rumor has it.
“A statistically-oriented projection of the significance of these findings” – A wild guess.
“A careful analysis of obtainable data” – Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass iced tea.
“It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding of this phenomenon occurs” – 1 I don’t understand it. 2 I need more grant money. 3 I can get at least one more paper out of this.
“After additional study by my colleagues” – They dont understand it either.
“Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and to Cindy Adams for valuable discussions” – Mr. Blotz did the work and Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.
“A highly significant area for exploratory study” – A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
“Handled with extreme care during the experiments” – Not dropped on the floor.
“Presumably at longer times” – I didn’t take the time to find out.
“This paper will omit a review of the more recent literature in favor of” – I don’t know if anything has been written on this since my dissertation.
“Various authorities agree” – I overheard this in the hall.
“It was observed that” – One of my students noticed that “No discussion would be complete without reference to the contributions of” – I need another footnote on this page.
“This research has left many questions unanswered.” – I didnt find anything of significance.
“This finding has not yet been incorporated into general theory” – Perhaps my next graduate student will make sense of it.
“It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field” – I quit.
/Carl
Smital says: December 12, 2010 at 9:24 am (and Harold too)
“UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C” <== Basis of much of Anthony's comment …
You know that they have a different reference period??
==============
Nice post, Anthony. {rolling eyes smilie}
OK looking back the graph, correction on what I said. Actually it is a .08 celsius rise over the 130 year period. .06 celsius rise from “normal”.
But the first portion of the period was from .02 below “normal”.
Whatever “normal” is. So a .06 rise from “normal”.
Big deal!
Even so, NASA GI*Z and its talking head leader is a complete embarrassment to science, and to the USA.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Pamela Gray says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:04 am
” The elephant is our own highly variable planet.”
____
Pamela, saying something is “highly variable” does not affix a causation. Yes, both weather and climate are highly variable, but the scientific thing to do is to describe the long-term, medium-term, and short-term causes of those variations. On the long-term side we have the carbon cycle of rock weathering, lasting over millions of years, and spanning across ice ages. Also on the long-term we have the position of our solar system in the galaxy, especially with respect to the galactic plane and regions of dust. On the medium-term, spanning hundreds of thousands of years we have the Milankovtich cycles. On the shorter-term side we have the solar cycles and ocean cycles such as ENSO, PDO, etc. The most interesting thing with the current CO2 levels, is that this is normally a medium-term climate variable, and yet because of human activity, has spiked up 40% in a very short-term (geologically speaking) period.
In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.
Still no temp in Bolivia. Or anywhere in sub saharan Africa. Classy science really. Someone hand out the Nobels.
Wrong R. Gates. Bone up on reading comprehension. You put words in Hansen’s mouth to say that the Arctic Oscillation is related to AGW. The cold is weather related, the heat is global warming related according to an accurate reading of Hansen’s missives.
R. Gates says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:15 am
Yes, this absolutely does not prove that the 40% increase in CO2 over the past few hundred years is to blame, but it does fit in with the general AGW hypothesis, and certainly does not dispprove it.
==================================
HUH???
Keep throwing out that chum in the form of posts, R. The sharks are circling already.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
0.05°C error margin?
Yeah right – especially when other global records using almost the same data can be soo different!
P Walker:
“What does “warmer than climatology” mean ?”
Climatology is the average values for a given area over a chosen base period. E.g. the mean temperatures during June in NW England from the period 1950-1980 would be a ‘climatology’. Let’s say the average temperature is 12.5 C. If you recorded 13.5 C as the average for this month, this month would be ‘warmer than climatology’. Other ‘climatologies’ could be things like precipitation amounts.
P Walker says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:15 am
“What does “warmer than climatology” mean ?”
Warmer than the long term (climatological) average at that place.
Very conveniently for Hansen, that large grey area of lacking stations in Africa was colder than normal – at least according to RSS: http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2010_11_anom_v03_2.png
Pamela, his However paragraph seems to 1) refute the previous paragraph like you said, 2) say that Europe is actually warm and these two winters don’t count and 3) blames AO without further explanation.
Like you said his message is “highly anomalous stuff is man’s fault” however “highly anomalous cold might have a natural explanation” however “highly anomalous warmth is going to increase” [because of a 0.6 degree warming from CO2] My guess is if the cold gets really really bad he will “however” it to be man’s fault after all.
Pamela Gray says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:04 am
” The elephant is our own highly variable planet.”
Yes Pamela, but how does internal variability change the size extent and intensity of the polar vortex over periods such as those from the MWP to LIA to date so as to approximately match the ebb and flow of solar variability ?
I’ve given a lot of weight to internal system variability but cannot make it match observations without a solar input.
Mr. R Gates
Hansen may have his hypothesis, he may believe in it, or even have some doubts and casting an eye for a rope to climb out of the hole he dug himself into, hopefully not irretrievably. You appear to be an erudite man, such are not followers especially not of the lost causes, they are often leaders of men. Wise man will look for the first opportunity to get of the ghoul train before it hits the buffers. Have you considered that there is not much time left?
In mean time here something you should familiarise yourself with, it just might be another small nail in the coffin being readied for the ailing AGW.
Pacific Ocean opens the Gates to the mysterious PDO .
Mr. Wild
Arctic vortex size and angular velocity continuously change, that is not particularly significant. What maters is when the vortex is ripped apart, parts flying off out of the Arctic circle.
In a war over 1/100ths of a degree 0.36 stands out worse than two sore thumbs.
I understand what he meant . I meant that it sounds peculiar – why not just say the average ? The whole paper sounded a bit off , by the way . As others have noted , Africa is not included in the anomolies . Didn’t anyone notice that the fans appeared to be freezing their tails off during the World Cup ?
vukcevic says:
December 12, 2010 at 11:08 am
Mr. R Gates
Hansen may have his hypothesis, he may believe in it, or even have some doubts and casting an eye for a rope to climb out of the hole he dug himself into, hopefully not irretrievably. You appear to be an erudite man, such are not followers especially not of the lost causes, they are often leaders of men. Wise man will look for the first opportunity to get of the ghoul train before it hits the buffers. Have you considered that there is not much time left?
In mean time here something you should familiarise yourself with, it just might be another small nail in the coffin being readied for the ailing AGW.
Pacific Ocean opens the Gates to the mysterious PDO .
_______
Thanks for the link to your pages. Indeed, the PDO is one of my main areas of focus right now, and along with other ocean cycles and sunspot magetic field strength, is the primary impetus to my skepticism of the full AGW hypothesis.
The problem is most if not all IPCC computer models are wrong. It’s because they use incorrect physics to predict cloud albedo. It came from Van de Hulst and entered the climate models via Lacis and Hansen from Sagan’s ‘two-stream approximation’.
They all assume constant ‘Mie asymmetry factor’, ‘g’. But in 1908 when Gustav Mie published solutions of Maxwell’s equations for the interaction of light with a dielectric sphere, he assumed a boundary condition of a plane wave, not the case in a sol.
And the real explanation? A cloud just about to rain is darker because direct backscattering at the upper surface allows less light to enter. Reduce droplet size by pollution and there’s less shielding. Diffuse scattering is symmetrical so, assuming no absorption half the extra energy exits the cloud base, a powerful form of AGW.
That’s a game changer because the first thing you do is reduce the IPCC’s predictions of high feedback CO2-AGW by at least a factor of three to the no amplification case. Depending on the ‘cloud AGW’, net Co2-AGW could end up as zero.
This is the biggest scientific mistake in history and following the failure of experiment to prove ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling, NASA has claimed fake ‘reflection’ physics to explain the effect. I’m beginning to suspect a scam, at least since 2004.
The paper is interesting. However, I find the next last sentence, refuting the claim that the temperature trend since 1998 is nearly flat, is not corresponding to his figure 11.
It may be so that mr Hansen et al have a different meaning of the word flat.
You may look for yourselves.
You combine the questionable practice of averaging an intensive variable like temperature with the fact that he has extrapolated the readings beyond the limits of his data and you end up with… complete gibberish.
““UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C”
You know that they have a different reference period??”
You mean Hansen is including July figures with Novembers? Like when he used September’s for October in 2007?
I would not be surprised.
REPLY: Hansen is using an outdated base period. 1951-1980 to calculate anomaly, whereas other metric are using more recent periods. – Anthony
Mr. Vukcevic, is there a section on your web site that actually has some discussion about your graphs? I’m not really trying to be snarky because I have the impression that I’m missing a LOT of information from your graphs by not having some sort of insider knowledge. I’d like to know where to get that insider knowledge.
” Smital says:
December 12, 2010 at 9:24 am
“UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C”
You know that they have a different reference period??”
——————-
You realize that makes both of them worth squat, right?
Mr. Gates
Solar has an effect, but I think not the way most of scientist consider, but in the odd strong pulses of magnetic field known as magnetic storms, or as NASA would have it ‘magnetic ropes. They pump strong currents inducing magnetic field in the highly conducting magma (lithosphere in the Arctic is only some 25-30km thick), while induction can go as deep as 100km or more. These counter act the Earth’s field itself causing shift of the GMF strength from the Hudson Bay area towards Siberia where lithosphere is much thicker. This can be clearly seen by the change in the Hudson bay’s area magnetic field’s and its negative correlation to the SSN.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC9.htm
Correlation weakens to totally disappear further away. Antarctica doesn’t have any of the above.
Stratosphere is highly ionised, the bifurcation of the Arctic’s GMF causes the spreading polar vortex to split in two halves, having profound effect on the Arctic climate / temperatures.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
Over the last 10 years, Had-CRUT and GISTEMP have diverged about 0.1 degree.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/offset:0.07/plot/gistemp/from:2001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001/trend/offset:-0.065
Warmists can still claim that their favorite series shows warming and that this year will be the warmest on record.
” Matter says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:41 am
P Walker:
“What does “warmer than climatology” mean ?”
Climatology is the average values for a given area over a chosen base period. E.g. the mean temperatures during June in NW England from the period 1950-1980 would be a ‘climatology’. Let’s say the average temperature is 12.5 C. If you recorded 13.5 C as the average for this month, this month would be ‘warmer than climatology’. Other ‘climatologies’ could be things like precipitation amounts.”
Nuts. Climatology is “the study of climate” There is only one “climatology” There are no other “climatologies”
“the mean temperatures during June in NW England from the period 1950-1980 would be a” “June mean temperature in NW England from the period 1950-1980” or for short, “June mean temperature.”
“Other ‘climatologies’ could be things like precipitation amounts.” Nope. That’d be “mean precipitation for the [insert period here] in NW England…”
Its no wonder most of the papers from “climatologists” make little sense, and even less science.
The lack of intellectual honesty is stunning.
Bengt Abelsson said December 12, 2010 at 11:35 am:
The paper is interesting. However, I find the next last sentence, refuting the claim that the temperature trend since 1998 is nearly flat, is not corresponding to his figure 11.
It may be so that mr Hansen et al have a different meaning of the word flat.
You may look for yourselves.
____________________
Is the temperature trend nearly flat since 1997? … since 1999? Your comment is best characterized as “cherry picking” and “lacking robustness” … much like a Lindzen/Choi study ….
How many times have they come out with this comment…..
“as is expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase, such extremes will become common within a few decades.”……….STILL waiting for all the extremes to become
common,only one seems to be raising its head in the last 3 winters in the UK, any one guess which one?
“““UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C”
You know that they have a different reference period??”
You mean Hansen is including July figures with Novembers? Like when he used September’s for October in 2007?
I would not be surprised.
REPLY: Hansen is using an outdated base period. 1951-1980 to calculate anomaly, whereas other metric are using more recent periods. – Anthony”
I know, I was just making a stab at humour at Hansen’s expense.
@ R. Gates
The record highs in Arctic regions are only occurring where there is no instrumentation. Everywhere there is instrumentation, the temperatures are pretty much normal (see DMI).
This is a case of scientific fraud by NASA, imho.
The day we take Hansen seriously, will be the day we give humanity a death sentence.
BTW, have any of Hansen’s predictions come to pass? Is half of Manhattan under sea water yet?
Rhoda R says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Mr. Vukcevic, is there a section on your web site that actually has some discussion about your graphs? ……. I’d like to know where to get that insider knowledge.
Sorry to disappoint you. Only ‘insider knowledge’ is somewhere on my hard drive, even I often loose track of what I’ve done. Unless I have nearly finished with an idea, I don’t write much, there lays the danger, if I write something today, in few weeks time I might contradict myself.
Data I use are foundations of my graph-ing, my interpretations are of secondary importance and often inaccurate. Bit of a hobby.
R. Gates says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:32 am
“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”
I think the phrase “natural variability” does not mean what you think it means. No one has ever cited natural variability as the cause of something. When people cite natural variability with regard to some phenomenon, their point is that the cause is unknown. They are saying that their best guess about the cause is no better than the guess of natural variability.
Jack Greer:
My point is: Hansen says it´s not flat. His figure 11 says different.
Maybe his “flat” is not my “flat”. Have you seen it yourself?
As Warren Buffet said, “it’s only when the tide goes out that you get to see who’s been swimming naked”. In this case it’s only when the temperatures are actually falling that you get to see who’s been fiddling the figures :p.
REPLY: Hansen is using an outdated base period. 1951-1980 to calculate anomaly, whereas other metric are using more recent periods. – Anthony”
________
What constitutes an “outdated” base period, Anthony? What’s your definition? Don’t you think the Satellite measurement base periods might be different for reasons other than outdatedness?
REPLY: There’s a WMO standard for normals and their periods. Used by NOAA for years, of using the last 30 years as a base period, rather than one 30 years ago, and updating every ten years.
From NOAA’s FAQ’s http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/faqs/climfaq23.html
and
So in essence, using 1951 to 1980 GISS is thirty years behind the “climate normal” times. If I wrote a peer review paper today and used old base periods it would get tossed on that basis alone. But hey, if you are the GISS king of climate science, any old base period goes for your work. – Anthony
Is all this “Hottest” year business just for bragging rights (rites?) or does it actually mean something?
Take a look at the ENSO reference page, Reference for El Niño and La Niña weather pattern effects, and see if this paragraph still makes sense.
“Back to the cold air in Europe: is it possible that reduced Arctic sea ice is affecting weather patterns? Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean. The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw. Several ideas about possible effects of the loss of Arctic sea ice on weather patterns are discussed in papers referenced by Overland, Wang” and Walsh.
It’s not like Hansen isn’t aware of the ENSO state.
“Figure 2(b) shows the 60-month (5-year) and 132-month (11-year) running-mean surface air temperature in the GISS analysis. Contrary to frequent assertions that global warming slowed in the past decade, as discussed in our paper in press, global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades. The warmth of 2010 is especially noteworthy, given the strong La Nina that developed in the second half of 2010. The La Nina, caused by unusually strong easterly equatorial winds, produces the cool anomalies in the tropical Pacific Ocean as cold upwelling deep water along the Peruvian coast is blown westward along the equator.”
Perhaps an explanation regarding warmer temperature anomalies caused strong easterly equatorial winds is in order.
I wonder if the land reporting stations in the Hudson and Baffin heat source area are reporting greater than average precipitation anomalies?
R. Gates
“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”
Thanks. This seems to be a particularly hard point for some to get.
“Sea ice insulates the atmosphere from ocean water warmth, allowing surface air to achieve temperatures much lower than that of the ocean.”
They seem to playing this as another way that ice loss is a positive feedback (along with the change in albedo). However, it occurs to me that the positive feedback would the short-term. If the ice insulates the ocean, it allows it to maintain a higher temperature. Reducing ice cover results in heat flow to the air, just as GISS points out. However, the long-term result is a loss of energy from the ocean into the air and subsequently, into space (the poles being a great place to radiate heat away from the Earth).
So in the long-run, the radiative effect of the loss of sea ice should cause ocean temps decline – a negative feedback. Put another way, ice loss is a positive feedback on air temp, but a negative feedback for ocean temp which has a greater effect on the climate system.
You could’a fooled me! 75% sure yet you lost your “primary impetus.”
I think he’s feeling the need to explain because the GISS temps are becoming obviously out of sync with reality (and the satellite measurements and HAdley, and …) , even to the most casual observer. His blatant manipulation of the thermometer record is becoming obvious.
Ken Roberts says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:54 pm
“Is all this “Hottest” year business just for bragging rights (rites?) or does it actually mean something?”
Ken – this is all about getting publicity so as to assure increases in their bloated, taxpayer-funded research budgets (at the expense of us, the taxpayers). It has little to do with science…
Hansen writes, “Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean.”
Maybe if they included the Sea Surface Temperature data for the Hudson Bay and Baffin Bay their analysis wouldn’t be so high. For those who are not aware, GISS deletes SST data in areas where there is seasonal ice, so that they can extend the (warmer) land surface data out over the oceans. Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/05/giss-deletes-arctic-and-southern-ocean.html
Also, any additional sea ice melt this year would be attributable to the fact that the year started with an El Nino.
If Dr. James “Thumbs On The Temperature Scale” Hansen keeps weaving only select data sets together, revising historical records that show cooling (eg: Orland CA) , and “homogenizing” the result, I am sure he can convert any yearly temperature decrease into an increase. This man’s ingenuity at distortion is without bound. I hope Darrell Issa’s first witness at Congressional hearings into this global warming baloney will be Dr. Hansen. Hansen has a lot of explaining to do.
Hansen writes, “The warmth of 2010 is especially noteworthy, given the strong La Nina that developed in the second half of 2010.”
But what he fails to tell you is what happens to the leftover warm water from the El Nino during the transition to La Nina. It gets returned to the West Pacific by a slow-moving Rossby wave and spun up into the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension (KOE) in the northwest North Pacific where it continues to release heat during the La Nina.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/12/enso-related-variations-in-kuroshio.html
Figure 1: (a) January-November surface air temperature anomaly in GISS analysis, (b) November 2010 anomaly using only data from meteorological stations and Antarctic research stations,
You remember Eureka Weather Station ? It is the only station for the Canadian Artic. Eureka is an anomaly in the artic . It´s a hot spot. Listen to Dr Tim Ball .December 10, 2010
http://itsrainmakingtime.com/2010/timball2/ min 34.00
All the interview is worth listening to.
What seems equally hard to “get” is the fact that it’s useless to propose mitigation strategies for a class of regularities that are not well understood. When people say, “natural variation” in this context, this is what they mean. So the point you’ve made here is incorrect.
“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”
Thanks. This seems to be a particularly hard point for some to get.”
Steven Mosher,
I’d say that “natural variability” is more of an honest answer than “AGW .” Don’t you?
Andrew
Just look at COLA there is massive cooling occurring on ALL continents just check each map
http://wxmaps.org/pix/clim.html
Ken Roberts says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:54 pm
“Is all this “Hottest” year business just for bragging rights (rites?) or does it actually mean something?”
If it were the ‘hottest year ever’ by a degree or two it would mean something.
In reality it will just be by a few hundreds of agree.
More like a ‘photo finish’ in a horse race and declaring one horse the winner by a nose hair.
Yet Warmist climate scientists have a 95+ confidence that the recent warming cylcle was mostly caused by man-made greenhouse gases.
Evidence? Correlation, speculation and computer models, we can’t think of anything else. Think “natural variability.” :O)
The 3 station sets (NCDC, GISS, CRU) have been generally higher than the satellites for a while. For the GISS to be much higher than the other two is impressive. CRU had an October of less than 0.6C and NCDC was lower than that.
Here I compare the two satellite to the other two station sets. GISS might only be propaganda now for all its accuracy.
John Kehr
I will believe that the world is warming because of co2 if I see evidence that it is happening,I can’t see any at the moment.If the world is warming ,because of co2,then the UK being part of the world must warm also.The average temperature of the world might be warming or it might not,I don’t believe your adjusted temperatures,but if the UK does not warm then there is no global warming.The co2 hypothesis predicts that we should have global warming not just average warming of the Earth.It is important that the UK and North Western Europe are cooling despite what maybe happening elsewhere.
steven mosher
Even you must admit you don’t fully understand how natural variation is currently and will work in the future due to uncertainties. So when someone says natural variation it is by definition what the Earth does (over 100 weather/climate interactions) and we don’t fully know how the Earth does it.
Yet Gates is 75% confident of AGW theory and 25% driven to be sceptical!
Anthony said: So in essence, using 1951 to 1980 GISS is thirty years behind the “climate normal” times. If I wrote a peer review paper today and used old base periods it would get tossed on that basis alone. But hey, if you are the GISS king of climate science, any old base period goes for your work. – Anthony
_________
Oh come on, Anthony, stop it. It depends on the objectives of your research. The choice of base period for GISS has to do with when their stream of ongoing research started. This makes ongoing reports w/i that stream easily compared and logically followed. The HadCRUT base period is 1961-1990, for instance. The raw data from each stream of research can be compared using any base period, which has been done with high confirming correlation.
The argument you’re making may be applied to any long-term research in an attempt to undermine it, which is a chief and blind objective of yours. I suppose you recommended Spencer’s older data be thrown out when they implemented the new AMSU-A equipment ….
REPLY: Oh Jack, stop it. If it were anybody but GISS, using an old base period they’d be villified. “I just happened to start my research in the late 70’s so that’s the basis for keeping my base period.” Yeah that’s some scientific argument. You are playing favorites here when we have a standard for normals and base period calculations clearly defined. And you seem NOT to understand the differences here with this idiotic statement:
“ I suppose you recommended Spencer’s older data be thrown out when they implemented the new AMSU-A equipment ….” Wow.
Changing the base period for anomaly calculation is NOT “throwing out data”. Actually, I have made recommendations to Spencer to improve UAH, and they did it. here’s the readme file released with the new data set.
…
And looky, Version 5.3 is here: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.3
What have you done in climate science to improve the data or METADATA other than whine, jab, and complain? And tell me Jack, how can you trust a man like Jim Hansen who is the gatekeeper of the data, who gets himself arrested pushing a cause where he’s using his publicly funded work on that data as the basis for elevating and injecting himself into protests? Hansen has destroyed any scientific objectivity with his transition from scientist to advocate.
No wonder he’s getting sued.
– Anthony
Something puzzles me. I have often read that the greenhouse effect is more pronounced in the Arctic so the Arctic temperatures are relatively much higher than the rest of the globe. At this point, I do not wish to get into the reasons for this, but I would like to point out that the anomaly for November was 74. However at this time of year it is totally dark way up there. From my understanding, the sun has to shine in order for there to be any greenhouse effect. In June, July and August, they had 24 hours of sun per day (at least at the pole, although less at lower latitudes). Yet the anomaly for these three months was much lower at 55, 51, and 55 respectively. Am I missing something?
steven mosher says:
December 12, 2010 at 1:11 pm
R. Gates
“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”
Thanks. This seems to be a particularly hard point for some to get.
CAUTION * DELIBERATE STRAWMAN ALERT* CAUTION
R. Gates and Steve Mosher,
If all the claims and failures of AGW “science” were collated, what do you think the result would be?
No matter what happens, no matter what part of the “theory” fails, there’s always an escape clause, a sort of plausible deniability. That is what many people have become weary of. And please, don’t invoke the “that’s how science works” meme.
It’s been 5 years since Hansen claimed OHC was the “smoking gun” for AGW. Now it is 2010 and the above essay doesn’t even mention it. Why is that? We’ve been told for 20+ years the NH would decrease in snow extent, snow pack would continue plummeting, hurricanes would increase, etc. etc. etc. I don’t have the time to go through and dig up all the quotes from the “experts” saved on my computers over the years, but maybe someone else would care to perform such a service.
We were told for the last 20 years, one of the main tenets of AGW was the hot spot in the tropical troposphere which culminated in Santer 08 “refuting” Douglas et al only to discover Santer’s “research” paper was nothing but a fraud. You may not like that word; too bad. Santer refused to release the data etc. and did so only under threat of possible legal repercussions IIRC. Nonetheless, the data “analysis” was stopped at 1999 because extending it out to 2008 did support his claim. Yet, the “peer review” process, which is supposedly in place to prevent such deception, somehow missed it. How convenient.
And now we have Andrew Dessler claiming to have refuted Roy Spencer’s latest work, even citing Spencer 10 in his paper. Upon closer scrutiny however, Dessler does nothing of the sort. Now what, is Spencer required to go through the same obstructions all over again for the next 18 months to refute the Dessler sham?
Then there’s Steig. And Mann. And Jones. And……
Siberia can have some variable weather at this time of year. It looks like they were quite warm for the first two weeks of November but then in the last week of the month and continuing so far in December, temps are way below normal; some -50Cs in places.
Northeast Canada has been above normal for a few years now but they have variability as well. A few years is long time for that though.
Put those things together along with the ridiculous 1200 km smoothing and deleting the ice-covered SST data and it was a warm November apparently. Wait and see what happens in December when the current Siberian temps are smoothed across the Arctic.
Note that the current daily temps from the Satellites has the northern hemisphere below normal right now, even cooler than the La Nina tropics – not +0.9C like GISS has.
ftp://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/tltday_5.3
Please note that Hudson Bay is often open to shipping until early December. James Bay which is shallower fresher is almost always open until the end of November. See this pdf for the historical data: http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/1/hudsonnavigation.shtml
According to the Port of Churchill they can almost always ship grain until the end of November. I looked at the ice conditions in Hudson Bay the other day, most of the bay was open except for the western shore the bears had good hunting ice on Dec. 2, 2010.
For those who worry about the different base periods, Nick Stokes (comment #63703, http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/giss-nov-anomaly-0-74c/#comments) over at the Blackboard has a graph that corrects that:
http://myweb.westnet.com.au/ncgstokes/blog/ind5_12.jpg
As one can see, GISS goes steeply up lately, whereas the rest go down.
GISS should not be used in a scientific discussion. It is just politics, and the worst side of it, too.
steven mosher says:
December 12, 2010 at 1:11 pm
R. Gates
‘“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”Thanks. This seems to be a particularly hard point for some to get. ‘
Apparently, a harder point to get is that we sometimes do not have a clue what the “reasons behind the natural variability” are. When we do not, we have a duty to say so. It is a duty of humility or scepticism that binds all scientists. “The beginning of knowledge is recognizing our ignorance,” Socrates. And it is worth stressing that no one has ever cited natural variability as a cause of something; rather, it is cited as showing that the causes are so poorly known that natural variability provides just as good an explanation.
Hansen/GISS say “, we estimate a two-standard-deviation uncertainty (95 percent confidence interval) of 0.05°C for comparison of global temperatures in nearby recent years.”
I wonder what they consider to be the confidence interval for the comparison of global temperatures FOR THE SAME MONTH, but measured by different organizations?
GISS: 0.74°C – UAH: 0.38°C = 0.36°C
I also note that the NASA article shows 250km smoothing. Doesn’t the main NASA time series use 1200km smoothing/smearing/homogenization in some areas?
Werner Brozek says:
December 12, 2010 at 2:32 pm
From my understanding, the sun has to shine in order for there to be any greenhouse effect…
_____
Incorrect. GH gases work 24 hours a day, taking no time off for sleeping at night. The LW radiation bouncing around from GH molecule to GH molecule originally came from the sun of course, but it doesn’t require the sun to be shining for the effect to occur. One perfect example of this is winter nights when there is some cloud cover. The water vapor (King of the GH gases) in the clouds will usually keep the temps higher than if there was clear skies and no cloud cover. Now, just because we can’t see the CO2 molecule in the same way we can often see water vapor, doen’t mean it isn’t working away at night doing it’s GH thing.
Werner Brozek says:
December 12, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Something puzzles me. I have often read that the greenhouse effect is more pronounced in the Arctic so the Arctic temperatures are relatively much higher than the rest of the globe. At this point, I do not wish to get into the reasons for this, but I would like to point out that the anomaly for November was 74. However at this time of year it is totally dark way up there. From my understanding, the sun has to shine in order for there to be any greenhouse effect. In June, July and August, they had 24 hours of sun per day (at least at the pole, although less at lower latitudes). Yet the anomaly for these three months was much lower at 55, 51, and 55 respectively. Am I missing something?
It is in darkness that the atmosphere actually performs most like a “greenhouse”, keeping surface temperatures higher than they would be absent the planet’s atmosphere. Which is one of many reasons why “the greenhouse effect” is such a terrible analogy for what is occurring. In bright sunlight a greenhouse must often be vented to keep it from getting too hot, but in sunlight the atmosphere of the planet actually functions to keep the surface cooler than it would be in its absence. One need only look at the Moon or similar bodies, down to satellites in orbit, which without atmospheres are much colder than the Earth on their dark sides, but also much hotter on their sunlit sides. The atmosphere functions much more like a flywheel than a “greenhouse” although even a flywheel isn’t an entirely apt analogy. But then, nothing is ever entirely analogous to another thing but the thing itself.
Perhaps we could convince Anthony to hold a contest to pick a replacement phrase to replace this flawed and ultimately deceptive coinage. The alarmist crowd have always been masters at manipulating the language of the argument to their advantage, and though recent events suggest they are in retreat, the war will never be ended as long as we continue to have to argue the truth in terms that are implicitly biased to favor their interpretations.
BTW, folks, please remember that the GISS “anomaly” is not really a comparison of the temperatures from a thermometer now to that thermometer in the past.
They use a ‘Grid / Box anomaly” that is constructed by comparing a set of thermometers NOW to a completely different set of thermometers THEN.
So is my new Mercedes hotter than my old ’67 VW? And does that mean cars are getting hotter?….
This is a splice artifact being dressed up as an anomaly. Splicing new thermometers onto old thermometers (often in different places) and calling the hockey stick a “trend”.
Natural variability is simply the climate null hypothesis, against which any alternate hypothesis must be tested.
The primary alternate hypothesis states that an increase in CO2 will result in runaway global warming and climate catastrophe [CO2=CAGW].
But if a doubling of CO2 results in ≈1°C rise in temperature, then there is no justification for spending immense sums on such an insignificant ΔT. During the Holocene temperatures rapidly increased and decreased by more than 3° on numerous occasions. Such events are completely normal and natural – and CO2 is observed to follow temperature rises and declines. Effect cannot precede cause, creating a major problem for the CAGW alternate hypothesis.
To keep the grant money flowing, the alternate hypothesis must be CAGW. But the current climate is completely indistinguishable from the null; CAGW isn’t happening, despite increasingly desperate attempts to assign the blame for every weather hiccup or two-headed frog discovered to a beneficial trace gas.
Climate grant hogs have deliberately replaced the scientific method with a nebulous and largely fictional “consensus.” The result may be more grant money. But without the scientific method, it isn’t science, it is advocacy.
Having just started studying this so-called global warning, I found the anomaly maps and graphs very disconcerting. It appears they are working solely in anomalies. Somebody please tell me that they DO NOT take the anomaly for every grid then calculate an average global anomaly. It appears from the maps that they do exactly that. Please tell me that they really calculate a temperature for each grid, calculate a global average temperature, and then determine the anomaly.
Anthony:
The period is chosen because it has the least interannual variability – it’s a common and appropriate method for establishing a baseline. The Met office also applies this theorem (using a different 30-year period).
NOAA do not use the last 30 years, as suggested by your selected quotes from them. They use the 20th century average (they are 10 years ‘behind’).
The satellite records use more recent baselines because they do not have data further back than December 1978.
The choice of baseline only matters when you are comparing anomalies derived from different records with different baselines. This should have been made clear at the top of your post. Defending your omission by criticising baseline choices is a red herring.
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C
…is misleading.
When adjusted for the different baselines, as pointed out above, the result is:
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.46°C
The rhetorical value of these disinformative values at the top of your post is obvious. If you are interested in shedding light, it is necessary to account for this oversight in the top post.
Got to laugh everytime I hear s omething from Hansen.
Just keep in mind that most of this “warming” they are speaking of is primarily in the minimum temperatures during nights and not in maximum’s that occur in the afternoons. There are few things on this Earth, but maybe to decrease insects, that mind it being a fraction or maybe one degree warmer in the nighttime. Add in the UHI and that seems to sum up GISS’s global average “blood-red we are all going to die” temperatures to me. Their mouths are where the real hot air resides. Too bad some call them objective scientists.
Looks like the AO is heading for even greater negative territory if recent predictions bring fruit. In this case, frozen fruit.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index_mrf.shtml
Add to that our La Nina and you get gobs and gobs of cold coming from all directions compared to no more greenhouse warmth than you can get sitting in a pool filled with ice next to a 40 watt nightlight (and I am being generous). It appears natural weather pattern variation is kicking butt against anthropogenic global warming. If Hansen wants to continue betting on some future warming, it’s a fool’s bet.
I wonder if Hansen can explain this:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/does-rain-call-giss-liars/
Those are some mighty interesting graphs.
Theo Goodwin says:
December 12, 2010 at 4:43 pm
steven mosher says:
December 12, 2010 at 1:11 pm
R. Gates
‘“In short, claiming “natural variability” as a cause in no explanation at all as science is all about finding the reasons behind that variability.”Thanks. This seems to be a particularly hard point for some to get. ‘
Apparently, a harder point to get is that we sometimes do not have a clue what the “reasons behind the natural variability” are. When we do not, we have a duty to say so.
######
you still dont get it. Natural variation is not an explanation. It’s the admission of ignorance. Science has some clues as to why the temperatures goes up and down. to test that you can only do 1 thing. Write equations. And then test those equations. In the begining they will be simplistic and inaccurate. One strives to make them more accurate. They are never perfect. Ever.
To reduce the earth’s climate to a single figure – a global annual average temperature – is fatuous in the extreme. Hansen at al are clutching at straws.
I think that people who do not understand base periods in anomaly calculations should be careful what they are saying. There is nothing wrong or sinsister about the GISS selection of the base period. People who think there is are welcomed to re run GISS with a DIFFERENT base period. In fact, GISS allows you to do this. I did an exhaustive study of the base period. Selecting different base periods and calculating the rates of warming. Answer. It doesnt matter, except in this small way: You want to maximize the number of stations that pass the quality test. The quality test is this: a station must have 15 years of data (CRU) in the base period to qualify as a station.
In any case, if you take all the stations and search for the period where you get the maximum number of stations reporting you will see two things>
1. if you do this on a global basis you will pick the 30 year period of 1953-1982.
2. if you want to maximize stations in the southern hemisphere you will select
1961-1990.
Very simply, both 1951-1980 and 1961-1990 are defensible choices. If anybody wants to suggest a different period, go ahead. Suggest a period and suggest a HYPOTHESIS to test.
“changing the period to 19xy-19zy will change the global trends in the following way”
If you select any other periods you will get a SPARSER selection of data and a noiser signal, and the answer wont change. You’ll just be less confident in it.
It is singularly annoying for people to focus on the NON problems when there are real problems that need attention.
Paul Coppin: “Climatology is “the study of climate” There is only one “climatology” There are no other “climatologies””
“Climatology” is common parlance among researchers in the sense of the ‘average meteorological (or oceanography etc) values in a place for a period of time’. Example uses in these papers:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL043680.shtml
http://etd.library.miami.edu/theses/available/etd-04192008-124713/
http://etd.library.miami.edu/theses/available/etd-04192008-124713/
http://journals.ametsoc.org/perlserv/?doi=10.1175/JAS-3323.1&request=get-abstract
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004GL019961.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/amm/docs/2004/shaik1_hres.pdf
http://www.cima.fcen.uba.ar/~carolina/ictp1877/sinclair_1996.pdf
ftp://ftp.etl.noaa.gov/user/cfairall/wcrp_wgsf/pubs/cronin_EOS_205_02.pdf
http://journals.ametsoc.org/perlserv/?doi=10.1175/JAS-3323.1&request=get-abstract
ftp://ftp.etl.noaa.gov/user/cfairall/wcrp_wgsf/pubs/cronin_EOS_205_02.pdf
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0967064596000355
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JPO2720.1
http://crosbi.znanstvenici.hr/datoteka/456407.Palmer_etal_JClim_1992.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035984.shtml
And another example; the link to this page is titled, by the University of Reading’s Department of Meteorology as ‘Maidenhead Climatology’:
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~brugge/maidenhead_climate.html
If you search in the top right bar for ‘climatology’ you will see many more example uses.
‘Warmer than climatology’ is a simpler way of saying ‘warmer than the average temperatures in this region for this time period’.
old engineer; did you follow Anna V’s comments on anomalies, running through the thread linked below?
New peer reviewed paper shows just how bad the climate models really are
i.e. We have been bamboozled with anomalies, and worse, with global average anomalies. – Anna V (December 6, 2010 at 10:03 pm)
E.M.Smith says:
December 12, 2010 at 5:27 pm
This is a splice artifact being dressed up as an anomaly.
So it’s a create an incline splicing instead of a hide the decline splicing?
“Pamela Gray says:
December 12, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Looks like the AO is heading for even greater negative territory if recent predictions bring fruit. In this case, frozen fruit.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index_mrf.shtml”
Thanks for pointing that out Pamela.
One of my propositions is that the AO is susceptible to both oceanic effects from below and solar effects from above.
Currently we have the sun recovering a little from the recent minimum so I was unsure whether the AO would become less negative as a result or whether the effect on AO of the slightly more active sun would be offset by the developing La Nina causing the tropical air masses to contract.
It appears that the latter is the case, at least so far.
Stephen Wilde says:
December 12, 2010 at 9:35 am
“Doesn’t that all suggest that more open water in the Arctic Ocean actually vents heat to space faster rather than encouraging global warming from reduced albedo and more insolation into the Arctic waters ?”
You continue to be among the best commenters here IMO.
Absolutely correct that ice-free water loses heat much faster than ice-covered water. Transport of latent heat of vaporization is halted. Ice cover insulates the water below from wind and wave mixing with the air, stops convective cooling, largely stops conductive cooling, and blocks radiative cooling.
The albedo change is insignificant above the arctic circle for two reasons. First of all the reflectivity of water increases as the angle of incidence decreases. With such a low angle of incidence in the arctic open water is nearly as reflective as sea ice. Secondly the insolation is tiny to begin with due to the low angle of incidence – you can’t heat something unless you have energy to heat it with.
So it absolutely correct to say that the more ice-free the artic is the better it performs as a radiator. This amounts to a negative feedback. As the tropics warm and the heat is transported to the pole it melts ice and makes a less resistive path for that heat to be radiated into the frigid black cold of outer space.
The south pole is a different story as it is covered by a continent so there’s no way for the warm air and water circulating down from the tropics to reach the sweet spot for radiative transfer to space. It isn’t such a good radiator to begin with and doesn’t get better when there is more heat to remove.
So I agree with the climate boffins that Arctic sea ice extent is good evidence of warming but I strongly disagree on the nature of the feedback it represents. It is clearly a negative feedback whereas the climate boffins, in their desperate search for the missing amplification, contend it is a positive feedback that turns very desirable modest warming at higher northern latitudes predominantly during the night and winter months into a nighmarish scenario of rapid sea level rise.
Steven Mosher: I have seen you allude to people missing the “real” issues several times on WUWT.
Could you not just spell out what you think are the problems we should be focusing on?
“Hansen is using an outdated base period”
Whether or not there is a standard base period (as per the WMO) makes absolutely no difference to the discussion at hand. There is no “correct” base period – all that matters is that a common base period is used to compare temperature datasets. The statement, “UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C,” shows a lack of this essential understanding, and claims of an “outdated base period” represent a clear diversionary tactic with no relevance to the matter at hand.
Surface temperature datasets and satellite temperature datasets measure different things, and there have always been (and always will be) specific months where they diverge more than other months. However, the overall agreement between all temperature datasets for the longterm trend is very robust. Quibbling over whether this month or that is higher or lower is a complete strawman. The longterm trend is strongly positive, no matter how you look at it. If the GISS temperature record didn’t exist, our understanding of the planet’s temperature would be unchanged.
REPLY: “The statement, “UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C,” shows a lack of this essential understanding, and claims of an “outdated base period” represent a clear diversionary tactic with no relevance to the matter at hand. ”
Umm, sorry, no you are wrong about that. You see if they used a more recent base period, then this graph, the most widely cited one on AGW on the planet, would have a different look to it. It’s all about presentation for public consumption. GISS knows what they are doing, by keeping the 1951-1980 base period for anomaly calculation, they ensure that their graph is always offset more than every other metric, and thus appeal to the people who subscribe to the CAGW worries. An again I say: You can’t trust a man who uses his public paid position to protest, getr himself arrested, and then be the gatekeeper of data.
And then there’s this:
I assume from your tone that you are OK with post facto adjustment of data? Would wellesley.edu tolerate such a thing?
I see you have a website that says “what Climate Deniers fear most”. How professional of you to denigrate others with that distasteful term that is just another way of saying “holocaust deniers”. How sad for you Mr. Griffith that your “explanations” start with such disgust. Again would wellesley.edu tolerate such a thing?
Let’s find out. – Anthony
You know what they say about some old folks who forget to come in out of the rain.
Well, there’s this warming climate dude we all know….
As we keep saying the key metric is ocean heat content not surface temperature. I cannot find recent ARGO results. Can anyone help.
Check out Tamino’s (Open Mind) most recent post in response to this one. He plots GISS and UAH using the same base. They are highly concordant. The main difference is that UAH shows greater highs and lows in response to El Nino and La Nina respectively. Apart from that difference they are difficult to tell apart. Since NASA would like to make comparisons of its own data across the years, this seems like a reasonable reason for keeping the same base period. The main point in making comparisons between different data sources is to compare the fluctuations, and not the magnitude of the anomolies.
Rhoda R says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:06 pm
I think Mr.Vulcevic has succinctly described his theory above:
vukcevic says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:17 pm
(Though we, like birds walking on a 200,000 volts wire just ignore it and keep on singing ) 🙂
This is just another example (for the umpteenth time) that Tamino shows why Anthony shouldn’t be doing these type of analyses. Global warming skepticism or not, there is absolutely no excuse for the mathematical laziness displayed in this post. The claim that a reference period is ‘outdated’ for computing an anomaly is even more startling. Let’s start being skeptical of everyone, not just those who disagree with our pre-conceived notions.
Yeah I think that Watts should clearly point out at the beginning of the title that they have different baselines. If not I think the article should be retracted.
Well, Tamino has made a good job on explaining that you cannot compare the GISS and UAH temperature datasets unless you use the same base period:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/odd-man-out/
But one thing more:
Yes in November we have:
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C
But in SEPTEMBER:
UAH: 0.60 GISS: 0.55°C
Yes in September UAH temperatures were warmer than GISTEMP ones, and this despite that the UAH baseline temperature is higher than the GISTEMP one.
In effect, with the uniformed baseline, Tamino found that UAH temperatures were HIGHER than GISTEMP ones!
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/baseline.jpg
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/base12.jpg
Clearly 2010 is a very warm year, the hottest so far in the GISTEMP record and also , together with 1998, the hottest in the UAH record.
And remeber that the 1997-1998 event was a Super El Niño, while the 2009-2010 event was just a moderate-to-strong El Niño. The fact that 2010 and 1998 are so far equally warm indicates that the world has warmed in these years.
That is , there is an obvious warming trend.
I said:
“The fact that 2010 and 1998 are so far equally warm indicates that the world has warmed in these years.”
Equally warm in the UAH dataset, of course. Warmest ever in the GISTEMP one.
Anthony says:
Hardly. The Y axis values would be different. The anomalies would still be the same relative to each other, the plot would be the same, and the trend would still be the same.
Oh, the error bars might be wider, which would mean that the alternative choice of baseline was a poorer one.
Surely you know all this? So what guided your choice to omit?
By omitting adjustment for baselines, you make the UAH and GISS anomalies appear much more different than they actually are. If your agenda is counter-propaganda rather than illumination, then you are doing an admirable job.
REPLY: “The Y axis values would be different.”
Exactly, and November’s GISS value, the one everyone is yelling about, would be different (higher or lower) depending on the base period used . – Anthony
Thank you for your comments R. Gates and Dave Wendt.
Just a technical detail, R. Gates, you say: “The water vapor (King of the GH gases) in the clouds will usually keep the temps higher than if there was clear skies and no cloud cover. Now, just because we can’t see the CO2 molecule in the same way we can often see water vapor, ”
Actually water vapor consists of just individual gas molecules of H2O and this is just as invisible as CO2, even if the relative humidity is 99%. It is only when individual gas H2O molecules coalesce to form tiny droplets of liquid H2O that they become visible as clouds or fog.
However you raise a very interesting point in that clouds keep temperatures warm. This is true. However if there were no clouds, how much difference would 390 ppm CO2 make versus 280 ppm CO2, ie Is it significant or not worth worrying about relative to the effect of clouds at night?
Dave, you say “One need only look at the Moon or similar bodies, down to satellites in orbit, which without atmospheres are much colder than the Earth on their dark sides, but also much hotter on their sunlit sides.” Is the “hotter on their sunlit sides” because any atmosphere “conducts” heat away? It would seem to me that greenhouse gases would actually hinder the movement of heat away from a hot surface since they absorb certain wavelengths and re-radiate about half back to Earth. Does this make sense?
Mr. Watts,
The matter that you put forth is that the GISS temperature anomaly for November 2010 is “the odd man out”. Your contribution is to compare the temperature anomalies of this month from both UAH and GISS. As these numbers do not use the same base period, they clearly cannot be compared at face value. When compared using a common base period (1980-1999), the November temperatures are UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.50°C. Yes, GISS is higher for November, but not nearly as high as the incorrect comparison that you present to your readers.
Let’s go back to January 2010. When using the same base period we get UAH: 0.64 GISS: 0.46°C. Now, UAH is higher. It is clear that on a month-to-month basis, different temperature datasets show disagreements. However, what matters most to the larger discussion is obviously the long-term trend: all temperature datasets agree that the world is warming. If we look at the 5 major temperature datasets from 1979 through 2009, they produce the following decadal trends:
HadCRUT3: 0.158, GISS: 0.165, NOAA: 0.163, UAH: 0.128, RSS: 0.153°C/decade. Of this group UAH is definitely the “odd man out”, although if you include 2010 through November it brings UAH up considerably. The big picture is this: if the GISS analysis never existed, our understanding of global temperatures would be fundamentally the same.
Now to your assertion that the “most widely cited” graph on AGW “would have a different look to it” if using a different base period. Starting with the monthly data, I’ve recreated the GISS figure using the 1951-1980 base as well as the 1980-1999 base period. The trend is identical and the scale is identical, only shifted. I’m not sure how you think the choice of base period has significantly altered the discussion or understanding of global warming – it hasn’t. I am amazed that you accuse NASA of trying to deceive people by their inconsequential choice of base period, when you have just deceived your own audience by incorrectly comparing anomalies that use different base periods. Also, if we overlay the UAH data using the same base period, the overall conclusion remains the same. (If included, the UAH average for 2010 so far is off the scale.)
You have yet to correct your comparison for the November 2010 UAH and GISS data, nor have you actually addressed that it is entirely incorrect to compare them using different base periods. Instead, you have talked about how using an “outdated” base period somehow makes James Hansen even more scandalous, that the GISS dataset is fundamentally flawed (without mentioning that it is corroborated by all the other datasets), and you have tried to smear me by suggesting that by labeling somebody a “climate denier”, I am labeling them a holocaust denier. The first two points do not surprise me, but the third is insulting, absurd, and inappropriate to the conversation that we should be having.
REPLY: You are right about #3 you shouldn’t be using the word “denier” as it is in fact insulting. May I suggest you take it off your website to prove that you are on the level? – Anthony
If you raised the baseline, thereby lowering the anomaly value, the results would still be the same – the value for November would have the same relationship to every other anomaly in the GISS record and the trend wouldn’t change. Similarly, the UAH values would have the same relationship to UAH anomalies if they changed their baseline. The problem here is that you have not noted that the baselines are different, and therefore you are comparing apples to oranges. If you want to compare apples to apples:
UAH 0.38 GISS 0.46 (adjusted to match baselines)
The correct difference is 0.08C, instead of 0.36C. Omitting the baseline adjustment magnifies the difference 6-fold.
GISS explain their choice of baseline (they even point it out in the parts you cited), as does UAH. When GISS compare their anomalies with other data sets, they adjust baseline accordingly. So does UAH. So should anyone comparing them.
The public is generally not aware of the actual anomalies, and the only people that compare anomalies across data sets are the small number of climate bloggers and their followers. It would take no more than two sentences to amend the oversight in your post.
(One of the) GISS explanation for choice of baseline:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal.pdf
GISS first began publishing on the temperature record in 1981. Their baseline choice was then the most recent 30 years. All they have done since is be consistent, and you surmise a strategic intent. There is no good reason (only political ones) for them to use an alternative baseline.
Similarly, UAH have not changed their 20-year baseline choice, even though they now have 30 years of data. They, too, have published values and graphs based on the initial climatology, and they also seem to think it practical to keep the baseline consistent.
Two sentences is all it would take Anthony. Will you not shed some light in your post?
REPLY: Actually yes, but not right now, as this post was bait for a social experiment, hoping to gather lots of comments to use in the next story, and you are all doing a splendid job. Tamino went after it too, but that’s generally predictable anytime GISS is mentioned, and he and many of you have provided what I need. All this covered in the next post on this, probably sometime around the end of December. Thanks for playing! – Anthony
This article had the following paragraph along with a relatively large part of the northern arctic dark brown:
“Figure 1(b) shows November 2010 surface temperature anomalies based only on surface air measurements at meteorological stations ….. while the Hudson Bay region of Canada had monthly mean anomalies greater than +10°C.”
What I find very puzzling is how to reconcile the above statement and graph with the relatively large dark brown area with the following graph:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
I had read that the GISS is more accurate since it accounts for the arctic which is warming much faster than other parts. The way I see it, with respect to both October and November, either GISS is right and the other three are wrong or vice versa.
Regarding the October and November data, (as well as the March and April data) I believe the following graph from an earlier post, which compares relative anomalies with respect to different months from different data sets, says it all:
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/2010temperatureanomalies.png
As well, among these four data sets, GISS is the only one that does not have 1998 as the year to beat.
So I agree that GISS has some explaining to do. And if GISS later proclaims that 2010 is the warmest year on record, and if none of the other three agree, then GISS has more explaining to do in my opinion.
from mars says:
December 13, 2010 at 3:52 pm
But one thing more:
Yes in November we have:
UAH: 0.38 GISS: 0.74°C
But in SEPTEMBER:
UAH: 0.60 GISS: 0.55°C
Yes in September UAH temperatures were warmer than GISTEMP ones, and this despite that the UAH baseline temperature is higher than the GISTEMP one.
In effect, with the uniformed baseline, Tamino found that UAH temperatures were HIGHER than GISTEMP ones!
Since their change in satellites UAH have found it necessary to make ad hoc adjustment to their monthly values, the month to month changes aren’t very reliable.
NCDC, like GISS, have 2005 as their warmest year globally, and NCDC is likewise on track to be the warmest or second warmest year in their record (2005 was 0.6154C, and the monthly average for 2010 year-to-date is 0.6316C).
GISS have explained the difference in their methods WRT HadCRUt (and NCDC).
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal.pdf
Hansen writes “Finally, we point out in Figure 3 the anomalous summer warmth in 2003 and 2010, summers that were associated with extreme events centered in France and Moscow.”
For historians, ref Napoleon
The morning of 14 September 1812 was beautiful, there was “the extraordinary autumn weather that always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air…” (Leo Tolstoy ‘War and Peace’)
But that’s just weather.
barry says at 8.32 pm that different baseline periods are used.
The official explanation is like this –
“Are there differences in the values for the same time period between the 1961–1990 and 1971–2000 normals?
“Differences in monthly values during the overlap period (1971–1990) in temperature and precipitation for a given station are possible due to differences in adjustment methods between the 1961–1990 and the 1971–2000 normals. Generally, the 1971–2000 time series has been subjected to adjustments with combined spatial and statistical quality control, whereas the 1961–1990 time series was based less on spatial comparisons and more on limited quality control. See the methdology section under the products page for more information on the 1971–2000 methodology.”
My simple mind finds it hard to determine if
(a) as the number of stations on the globe change – and there have been big changes – the number in the reference set stays constant for 30 years, thus giving a single value for average
(b) as stations on the globe are dropped and added, they are also dropped and added in the reference period, so its average is time-dependent.
Can someone please help me by publishing the base values used by various authorities for various 30 year terms, so that I can clarify shifts in the absolute temperature, not just anomaly shifts?
I dislike anomaly methods. They can be used for camouflage.
#
#
jason says:
December 13, 2010 at 9:00 am
Steven Mosher: I have seen you allude to people missing the “real” issues several times on WUWT.
Could you not just spell out what you think are the problems we should be focusing on?
### sure.
First let me tell you what are the wrong issues to focus on. Every single word written on them is a word not written on the real issues.
1. Base periods. There is no issue here, this has been shown conclusively (by jeffId no less, if you doubt me)
2. Anomalies. There is no issue here
3. Extrapolation. No issue.
4. the thermometer dropout. no issue
5. thermometer accuracy: no issue
6. number of stations: no issue.
At best these issues add small measures of uncertainty to our knowledge that it is getting warmer.
Issues that need attention.
1. The metadata accuracy
2. uncertainty due to the UHI effect
3. uncertainty due to Microsite issues.
4. Uncertainty due to adjustment/homogenization.
These too, add measures of uncertainty.
And for good measure:
1. emission scenarios
2. model selection.
3. uncertainties in paleo
4. Sensitivity.
When smart people get derailed unto the wrong issues, then there is less attention on the important issues.
for people who think that base periods are evil, let me remind you that JeffId and RomanM ( yes , stats wiz of climate audit fame) have also done a global temperature index that uses NO base period, uses all available data, and a statistically superior methodology to either GISS or CRU. And yes, they show higher temps.
So i ask you, what sense does it make to beat down the methods of GISS and CRU when a superior method shows the same if not more warming? It makes no sense. It’s rhetorically short sighted and a waste of time.
Now, there is another index in the making, one that uses a method just like Jeffs and Roman’s. And it will likely confirm the JeffId results. That will hopefully center the debate where it belongs:
The data
The metadata
Adjustments to the data.
I look forward to that, Steve Mosher. It sounds like an effort to improve the science rather than rhetorically castigate personalities and institutes. While articles like ‘Thermal Hammer’ at the Air Vent contain some strange rhetoric*, the underpinning effort is honest work.
* “While winning the public “policy” battle outright, places pressure for a simple unified message, the data is the data and the math is the math.”
Hopefully upcoming indexes are constructed with no agenda other than to get closer to the truth.
vukcevic says:
December 12, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Mr. Gates
Solar has an effect, but I think not the way most of scientist consider, but in the odd strong pulses of magnetic field known as magnetic storms, or as NASA would have it ‘magnetic ropes. They pump strong currents inducing magnetic field in the highly conducting magma (lithosphere in the Arctic is only some 25-30km thick), while induction can go as deep as 100km or more
Have you noticed (perhaps I am wrong- have to see data-) that now earthquakes have a low depth?…In the good all days they happened deeper (more than 30 miles), now, any reported quake has a depth of about 10 miles or less. Is it because the solar “magnetic” power is lower?
Alden Griffith says:
December 13, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Very well said, and with remarkable restraint.
Enneagram says:
December 14, 2010 at 4:58 am
………….
No idea.
Number of base stations is not an issue.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/images/uploads/ball120610-2.jpg
Except to the tune of about 1.9°C. Just trivial, really.
Alden Griffith,
Anthony has destroyed your argument with just one revealing graph showing that James Hansen’s GISS mendaciously manipulates the temperature record. But there are more incriminating graphs:
click1
click2 [Natural climate cycles. Click in image to embiggen]
click3
click4 [Anomalies from 1979. Time to panic yet?]
click5 [Pick your base year and get the scary graph you want]
click6 [Time to panic yet?]
click7 [GISS projections vs empirical observations]
click8 [For the true believers who thought the temperature never changed before the industrial revolution]
click9 [ARGO buoys falsify global warming]
click10 [GISS shows rising temps – while all others show declining temperatures]
click11 [December global temperatures]
click12 [Where is that “hidden heat in the pipeline”?]
click13 [Yet another “Should we panic yet?” chart]
click14 [Natural climate variability]
click15 [More natural climate variability]
click16 [Should we panic yet?]
click17 [Time to panic?]
click18 [CO2 FOLLOWS temperature, past 400,000 years]
click19 [Effect of CO2 is insignificant]
click20 [The globaloney implosion]
If you continue to use the pejorative “deniers” on your sparsely trafficked blog, you will demonstrate that you are nothing but a purveyor of climate alarmist propaganda.
My advice is to use the accurate term “scientific skeptics” instead of the deliberately insulting “deniers,” “denialists,” etc. We are happy to debate the issues, but when you sink to that level we all know where you’re coming from: true belief based on cognitive dissonance.
It may surprise you, but the reason that Michael Mann, Phil Jones, the UN/IPCC and the rest of the climate alarmists refuse to follow the scientific method is because if they did it would derail their lucrative grant gravy train.
By substituting the scientific method with anti-science like “consensus,” the climate charlatanism of catastrophic AGW is exposed — and WUWT, by refusing to censor comments from the alarmist contingent, is winning the debate among the undecideds.
So drop the “denialist” insults, and join the real science debate that takes place right here every day; half a million comments on WUWT – and counting.☺
[snip – if you want to insult me have the courage to put your own name to it, otherwise I’m not going to take insults and calls of “denialist” from some anonymous coward. Be as upset as you wish – Anthony]
What do you do when you don’t have any coherent or reasoned argument to counter someone who has just comprehensively demolished a position that you hold dear?
There are a number of techniques:
1. you can introduce a complete non-sequitor to try to detract attention.
2. you can use the blunderbuss effect – fire off a huge number of irrelevant and specious arguments or bits of information that it would take forever, and the patience of Job, to rebut. This also, of course, usefully detracts attention from the issue in question. It’s a particularly useful technique if you have attention deficit disorder and find concentrating on one issue for more than a few seconds difficult.
3. you can express false outrage at some true, but not very flattering observation that your opponent has made.
Most people seem to restrict themselves to using one such technique at a time, but not our Smokey who at December 14, 2010 at 8:46 pm uses all three in response to
Alden Griffith, December 13, 2010 at 6:17 pm.
Smokey apparently doesn’t understand that whilst making one specious argument in a post can be put down to carelessness, making a multitude does begin to look like something more serious.
Hmm. Odd choice of dates there . I smell cherries.
WTF? How hot is a “climatology”. That is such a stupidly vague and meaningless term that is makes the statement unverifiable (ie unchallengeable) . This is typical PR talk. Give the impression of saying something important without actually saying anything at all.
Well it has to be hot somewhere at some time. It was cold in Patagonia , so what?
If we continue to fudge our data as we have been able to do uptil now the whole planet will be covered with fudge within a few decades.
So remember children, if i’ts cold where you live that’s just regional . What is really important is the warming in the Artic where there are no thermometers nor people and we can make up whatever we want.
P. Solar said… “What is really important is the warming in the Artic where there are no thermometers nor people and we can make up whatever we want.”
That would be an accurate statement for ground station data. But not accurate for satellite based data. RSS and UAH data are satellite data and closely match (for the intents of this conversation) the ground based data.
GISS may explain what they are doing, but the following makes me unwilling to accept their explanation.
At the following site, (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/20/giss-arctic-trends-disagree-with-satellite-data/) this sentence appears: “However, GISS Arctic temperatures have been rising much faster than other data sources. The graph below shows the difference between GISS and RSS (GISS minus RSS) Arctic temperatures.”
Anthony Watts wrote: (December 13, 2010 at 9:04 am)
This is the behavior of a schoolyard bully.
When someone posts a critical comment here anonymously, they get ridiculed. But when someone uses their “real” name, they get threatened with real-world retaliation.
I’m surprised anyone uses their real name here with such a hostile proprietor.
REPLY: And yet, here you are. Heh, be as upset as you wish. You know nothing about real-world retaliation until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes. And the question remains, would the university tolerate such behavior if they knew of it? It is a legitimate question. Why has the answer not been given rather than complaints about “hostile proprietors”?
Tell you what, if you want to come into the light, and explain to everyone here just how right you are, I’ll offer you a guest post. All you have to do is use your name and your University/organization/government affiliation in the author line. The only thing off limits would be libel and ad hom, plus anything in the wordpress.com terms of use, since they are the blog host. – Anthony
Anthony Watts wrote: (December 16, 2010 at 1:21 pm)
You’re right; I personally have never experienced real-world retaliation or even the threat of it. Whatever your experiences with it, do you feel it justifies doing the same to others?
I’m sure Alden Griffith can take care of himself. I was just shocked at your tone. This blog seems to benefit from fostering discussion and debate, and Alden’s posts sound very respectful to me. Threatening to “tattle” on people you disagree with will only discourage their contributions.
“Let’s find out” is not a question; it is a threat (at the very least, a taunt).
Is this offer open to anyone who uses their real name or just me?
Correction to above: the 1-yr step in average was 1.5°C, not 1.9.
Hadcru and NCDC are in and it’s obvious that Hadcru is the “odd man out” this november and this year, not GISS: http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/1617/gissncdchadcruthadcrut3.jpg