Rebuttal to the Skeptical Science "Crux of a Core"

Oh Dr. Hall, the warmistas are going to be very angry that you are using their own information against them! Good show!

Seems that if they do not like your comments on Real Climate a new impossible capcha is presented.

This is an interesting discussion. The graph presented, in my view, looks a bit noisy, but I’d like to see more and how they’d line up. It would be nice if there were a consistent message about ice-cores and their representation of the globe or not. Let me see if I get this right……..in terms of historic CO2 levels, yes ….very valid and speaks to the entire globe……in terms of temps, no way! Its just local! 😐 :-0 😐 :-0 😐
Dr. Hall, thanks for the money quote and a nice summary statement. “It shows us that climate change always happens. The 20th-century warming was hardly unprecedented, and doesn’t call for unusual explanations.” This can’t get repeated often enough.

The new tactics are really quite pathetic. They are not doing themselves any favours. Childish really.

If the data supports the AGW alarmist orthodoxy it’s teleconnected data that is a global measurement, if not it’s obviously a local anomaly.

@Mike
You’re looking at the finger!

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
Dr. Hall said: “I am a scientist, not a nanotech engineer.” Let’s see.
Here on WUWT you were only identified as J. Scott Hall, not Dr. Hall. Did you complain? ……
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Are you intentionally being obtuse? Try applying a concept called “context”.
“…..and he calls me “Mr. Hall” to make me sound less qualified than other sources such as “Dr. Alley….”
It seems, all Dr. Hall is asking for is to be afforded the same respect and treatment given to others. Is that really too much to ask? Do you think it likely he didn’t complain about WUWT because he was afforded fair treatment?

@ Mike
WOW , don’t ever participate in archery ! If you miss the target with as bigger margin as you missed the point with your post then no one would want to be in the same square mile !! LOL !! did you not read the article properly ?? No wonder people fall for AGW, are there many more who scan, misread, and then accept ??

@Ged Darkstorm
Hall has zero background in climate science. The difference between an applied scientist in industry and an engineer is nil. Further, Honeycutt intended no degradation in identifying Hall as an engineer. And two points simply do not cover the global.

The article would appear to speak for itself when the only rebuttal is a rather poorly researched ad hominem, re: @Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am

Jack Greer said:
“a more revealing time scale”
Correction: “a more revealing time scale with smoothing representation x-noise.”

Right on Severian!
We have see it claimed so many times before: MWP is European weather when it shows it is not as hot today as it was then. If the numbers can be ‘stepped on’, it is climate because is it supports escatology. Dr becomes Mr in order to emphasize that the priestly class of self-appointed alarmist oracles are demanding real money to stop the metaphorical eclipse that is eating the metaphorical sun.
*Yawn*……..
Is anyone interested in the actual science? You know, the kind with numbers and relationships, where effects have causes? Where non-effects don’t need a cause? Must be a slow news week if we have to stoop to mentioning RC and science in the same breath.
Mr, Dr? Scientist, schmientist? These are manifestations of the World of Names. It is polite and correct to refer to people by their legitimate titles as part of our social convention. It is one of the foundations of civil discourse. If you can’t at a minimum research someone’s title(s) correctly, what does that indicate about the quality of rest of your work?

Well, I am confused as to the purpose of this post titled “Rebuttal to the Skeptical Science ‘Crux of a Core,’” I thought the rebuttal was to Honeycutt’s point.
You wrote “The only substantive point in [Honeycutt’s] post is that GISP2 (or any specific ice core) is a local as opposed to global temperature record. Is it misrepresentation to use it as a proxy for global climate? ”
That’s all Honeycutt is addressing. I don’t know if your answer to your question is Yes or No.
Or are you saying that Honeycutt has the purpose of your original post wrong?

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
So blinded by your faith that you are reading words that are simply not there.

Skepticalscience is a fundamentalist propaganda site. I have had my fair share of online discussions where fundamentalist warmists fling links to Skepticalscience, presented as the ultimate “truth”. Afterall, they have been following the home-cooked recipe for “how to argue against skeptics”.
When the posts at Skepticalscience are examined more closely, most of them present only a carefully selected review of the scientific basis, and then goes on to misrepresent even this selection in a warmist direction.
Of course when these facts are brought to the table, the warmists have a way of disappearing from the discussion..
I have found only one redeeming example of somewhat balanced reporting from Skepticalscience, and this was actually acknowledging Lindzen’s estimate for forcing, making the span 0,5 to 1,0 degrees for a doubling of CO2. (then of course going on to make 3-4 degrees the most probable from a consensus sort of view).
It says a lot about their credibility that one is surprised to find that they don’t totally misrepresent the facts in ALL their posts, as they have in the case of the main post here, and in many others.

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 11:13 am
@Ged Darkstorm
Hall has zero background in climate science. The difference between…..
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Meaning he’s not adept at making stuff up.
Coincidentally, I agree, one can’t infer much from 2 points on the globe. However, as pointed out up the thread, this is exactly what many alarmists do. The problem, Mike, is when you attack messengers such as Dr. Hall, any valid thoughts you may have to this particular issue is muted by your violation of societal mores.

Mike said:
You are entitled to your views but one or two ice cores do not provide enough information to reconstruct global climate.
OK… What else do you have that goes back that far, and do they disagree with the ice cores??????

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
You are entitled to your views but one or two ice cores do not provide enough information to reconstruct global climate.
But one tree does?

If Greenland ice core shows business as usual, it is not valid, because it is just one core. If Greenland temp. station shows warm year because of positive AMO, it is a sure sign of the end of the world.
Mere GISP2 and CET record efficiently demolish the whole AGW scam.

Thanks for the graphic, Smokey. I always knew us engineers had a particularly interesting view of the world.

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
“You are entitled to your views but one or two ice cores do not provide enough information to reconstruct global climate.”
Ok, how about one tree? Remember YAD061, the magical enchanted Larch of Yamal? We do.

The heart of Mr. Hall’s post seems to be tossing an insult at Skeptical Science, and mentioning that Mr. Hall has a doctorate. Just like Richard Alley, except Alley is world-class paleoclimatologist who helped drill and analyze the Greenland ice core.
Greenland and other northern-hemisphere reconstructions sometimes show opposite phases to Antarctica. Climatologists understand that neither by itself is a proxy for global climate. Hall’s graph hides this substantive point, but Honeycutt’s Skeptical Science post stated it clearly.
So, what’s the take away?
•GISP2 is clearly a local record of temperature for the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, not a proxy for global temperature.
•It requires looking at multiple lines of evidence to piece together a complete picture of the Holocene.
•The Holocene shows a very slow, gradual cooling trend over the past 6,000 years but the mechanisms behind the cooling are well understood.
•The cooling during the past 6,000 years globally is on the scale of 1-2C and we have abruptly altered the trend and are now pushing the planet toward warming.

A couple of points of disagreement from someone who regularly uses the published ice core data:
1. Prior to approx 20,000 years ago there was an element of anti-correlation between Antarctic and Greenland temperatures as measured from ice cores. This has been confirmed through the analysis of temperatures and currents in oceanic bottom waters. So when the Greenland and Antarctic temperature graphs are overlaid, one on the other, the position of the temperature peaks actually should be displaced by around 800 to 1500 years. There is plenty of published research on this in the various Geophysical and Quaternary Geology/Climate Journals. Please note that the relative timing is usually determined via dating of the ice using a synchronous tracer, typically variations in the atmospheric methane content of each core.
2. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Younger Dryas is not represented in Antarctic Ice Cores. The cooling event one sees in the Vostok core dates from around 15,000 years ago. It is called the “Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR)” and can also be found in climate records from New Zealand, Tasmania and Chile. This event predates the Younger Dryas by at least 1000 years. It is another manifestation of anticorrelation or at least “phase shift” between events at the two ends of the world.
The causes/ forcing mechanisms for the offset in climate trends recovered from the Northern and Southern Hemisphere ice-cores are sill being debated.
Other than this I see no problem with the concept that temperature trends identified from ice cores can be used to identify temperature trends that are at least Hemispheric in extent. The simultaneous trends identified at a host of Greenland ice core sites have been replicated from 100’s of Northern Hemisphere sea floor cores (sea surface and ocean floor temp), from dozens of pollen records, from records of Loess deposition and from numerous speleothem records. These temperature fluctuations have also been tied in with changes in sea level (measured for instance at coral reefs) that appear to relate to melt-recharge and ice-flow cycles on the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets.
I agree with Dr Hall that temperature trends identified in Greenland ice are more than just local. This applies not just over the last ice-age cycle shown in the graph above, but also through the Holocene warm period that we now live in. Numerous Hemispheric scale temperature trends identified in Greenland for the last 10,000 year period are as large or larger than the modern trend coming out of the Little Ice Age.
This last point is significant. In the modern period the supposed AGW trend is mainly a Northern Hemisphere event. It is not present in the Southern Ocean sea surface temperature record and is barely discernable in the South Pacific (refer to numerous postings by Bob Tisdale). SO a change in the average Northern Hemispere temperature can result in a change in the global average without the event being truely global. There is no doubt that such circumstances have applied frequently in the past (i.e. throughout the Quaternary period and probably longer still).

Smokey says:
March 1, 2011 at 12:26 pm
@Mike:
There’s a difference between a climate scientist and an engineer.
============================================
LOL, very nice, smoke!

J Storrs Hall —
> The graphs as presented are without any x-axis (time) shifting from the original data.
Thanks for that clarification.

Now, getting back to Catastrophic Climate Stagnation, …

I hope someone will correct me if I get this wrong.
The general public has been led to believe the Ice cores are a very granular look at temperature and CO2 changes over an extended period of time in Greenland and Antarctica. Part of the reason they think this is because the charts connect the sample points in a linear way.
When one looks at the amount of snow necessary to create an inch of glacial ice and the amount of ice core necessary to produce sufficient gas to sample, the picture radically changes.
The ice core samples are actually a very general look at temperature and atmospheric change over years to establish a single point on the graph and do not reflect seasonal changes like a warmer Greenland and Antarctica within the same year or season. Nor do they reflect simultaneous atmospheric change which isn’t even feasible due to atmospheric mixing and the difference in land mass in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
The charts are misleading, they should be bar charts which should also reflect the missing samples?

Smokey’s NSF overlay shows nicely that Arctic and Antarctic do fit well together, each affirms the other therefore both are basically trustworthy. So much for Honeycutt’s assertions.
Anyway, Honeycutt, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records? though I trust the temperature records, based on isotopes, far more than the depleted records of the craftily absconding CO2 that are spliced into that highly-suspect Ice Hockey Stick flaunted by your article.
I bet you didn’t check with Dr Storrs Hall to see if he had any comments, before doing that article. But hey, why don’t you add my Primer (click my name) to your list of places that use his graph? I’ve done one of the best renditions I reckon. Oh, and read my Primer in the process… my, my, you’d have enough articles there to last you for a year. Might actually goad us into crowdsourcing answers to the whole of Skeptical Science. That would be a good idea. Yes, do.

Lucy Skywalker says:
March 1, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Anyway, Honeycutt, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records? though I trust the temperature records, based on isotopes, far more than the depleted records of the craftily absconding CO2 that are spliced into that highly-suspect Ice Hockey Stick flaunted by your article.
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No doubt. Isn’t it interesting that we’re told about the last 800,000 years CO2 was never over 310 ppm, globally……..based on ice core samplings. But, the same cores are only local in terms of temps……. and there are people out there that believe this stuff!!!

This is good. We need more rebuttals of Skeptical Science

bubbagyro says “My guess is that Nanorex does not even have a Bunsen burner on site. Modeling for persuasive presentations is handy for separation science, however. Separating a VC investor from his money, that is.”
So bubba – how many bunsen burners do you think Gavin Schmidt has? And as far as separating people from their money at least investors make the choice to invest, the climate change fanatics are taking from the people without regard to full disclosure.

stupidboy says:
March 1, 2011 at 10:37 am
@Mike
You’re looking at the finger!”
For some the finger is more interesting than the moon. For others, it’s all they are capable to ponder.

I’d just like to say that nobody really uses bunsen burners anymore.

SØREN BUNDGAARD,
Thanks for the video. It seems as if, in that spot on Greenland anyway, that there was a Roman Cool period, according to the ice core.

J StorrsHall says
‘The main reason we can have any confidence in questioning the current CO2-phobia orthodoxy in climate science is that it is reasonably cast as the hobby-horse of rebel paradigm shifters who took over the reins by political means rather than a fair scientific fight on the basis of evidence and experiment.’
This is an interesting hypothesis…..cast a bit longer as a small cabal of otherwise underemployed and career limited physicists at NASA, switching their focus to modelling the globe and prediction of futures….with a very expensive and very employment demanding computerised crystal ball. But they were still scientists and though limited in the fields of real world climatology – such as sediment and ice-core studies where the scientist actually spends hours in the field and lab, they really felt they could really find a place of scientific overview…using their incredible NASA-developed skills as modellers. And of course there was a genuine heartfelt desire, as many scientists feel, to bring the benefits of science to all of humanity, and certainly to protect from impending ecological disasters. It could be seen as a laudable quest….and when confronted with the real scientific uncertainties where choices of some variables (like converting a radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere measured in watts, to a change in temperature at the surface measured in degrees C ) thought it best to embrace the newly invented precautionary priciple and go with the scarier values for that constant. And also lend consideration to some theoretically large positive feedbacks.
So this was the rebel core….and within very few years, they had formed committees, lobbied governments and taken the issue to the very heart of the United Nations. They were supported by legions of political activists – from Greenpeace to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (in the UK, of course). Within fifteen years, their models were endorsed by every science academy across the globe. And finally, the political world responded with such far reaching plans and methods that a new global currency, accounting system, regulatory force and surveillance, trading, brokering and banking….even creating a new form of bank for the new paper currency – itself entirely built on a concept relating to something as common as charcoal.
Such alchemy was probably not their initial aim, I am sure. How could they have foreseen how many supporters they would have and such willingness to save the planet from a disaster that, well, okay, it does come out in the centre of a probability curve, and it really could happen, according to our best models, but well, there are also some very basic but potentially possible within the 95% probability boundary conditions or factors, gain factors and feedbacks closer to unity, where the future would not be that scary…but surely better to act.
That’s probably where these paradigm shifters are at today. Maybe a bit surprised at the support – but according to some appearances, one rebel at least, rages that all of this support is not enough and to hell with the uncertainties….the danger is real and changing the system like this is worthwhile. So what if people have to curtail their freedom – don’t we do that all the time with fire regulations and crash insurance?
I am just not sure what paradigm these guys were attempting to shift.
It could have been simply to redeem the fortunes of predictive modelling. I was active in the period 1980-1990 when these GCMs were developed. I was concerned with pollution control – the science and its regulation, and from an environmentalist standpoint. So I was often called to scrutinise predictive models – usually they predicted that nothing much would happen when you discharged this or that toxin.
And they had all gone spectacularly wrong. I actually held up the world’s top marine disperal model (also coupled to the atmosphere) that predicted zero consequences for dumping toxic and nuclear material in the ocean….on the floor of a UN Convention, and we, a small group of paradigm shifters, tore it to pieces. They saw the whole of their dumping programme outlawed, their research labs closed and their funding dry up right across the globe. Similar failures occurred with sulphur dioxide emissions, acid rain damage, mercury dispersion and a host of heavy metals. Their ancestors’ models of CFCs in the atmosphere initially predicted no impact at all, and even when they had to correct them after such an horrendous error – they could not model the rate of change or make useful predictions (most recently, it would appear a substantial part of the ozone hole is a natural consequence of increased solar UV radiation).
Even the modelling of nuclear reactor accidents – which I developed some expertise at running, as well as analysing the parameters, had been shown to be useless after Chernobyl in 1986…prior to that, all accident consequence models assumed the reactor core could (perhaps would) not melt down.
The scary climate story certainly redeemed modelling (well it is only now beginning to crack – this new paradigm). Billions have been directed to thousands of labs and research groups, PhD students and professorships. Perhaps that was the rather risky, – considering their history, goal of the shifters in the first place.
I can’t see any other rebels or movers in the carpet-bagging department. The people I knew in Greenpeace – real warriors for the planet, however naive at times, willing to place their life on the line….they have mostly retired and been replaced by a professional lobbyist. Along with lawyers and PR people and a whole secretariat. They now work hard just to maintain the company and its offices. The new paradigm is just great for that, and they haven’t bothered to check the science. In fact, nowadays, they are quite close to the UN, helping to shape its agenda and so they follow the UN Panel’s advice. Now that is more of a paradigm reversal that most people will ever know!
So the revolution in computerised planetary awareness IS the paradigm shift….I hadn’t wanted to elevate it to such heights, but there it is! What started out as a mere spark of concern in the heart of a NASA modeller, became a revolutionary movement that captured world statesmen, of the standing even of an American Vice-President and nearly ‘most powerful man in the world’ and UK Prime Ministers. It is true, it is a phenomenally successful movement – with millions of school-kids all over the world, and teenagers, allotment keepers, top bankers and even glamorous film stars….all in favour of the new global currency and of course, very grateful to the upper echelons of science (and modelling, for those in-the-know), their protective institutions and of course, the UN.
Wow – we could be living through the biggest paradigm reversal event since, well, records began. Could that incredible edifice crumble? And how quickly? Now that the secret is out – and the parameters of the model that were perfectly legitimate and we really knew were there, and if you read the fine print of the UN Working Group reports and ignore the hype in the Summary for Policy Makers, which we, the rebels, did not write by the way…..these apparently lower probability parameters are now actually, as borne out by the recent lack of heat accumulation in the atmosphere and the oceans and evidence that the fiercely positive feedbacks we theorised are actually not fierce at all…..
Is that simple truth, if admitted (could it ever be admitted?), able to bring down the revolutionary committees and panel and planning departments? Actually that part of the revolution is seldom discussed – the way the bureaucracy has latched on to the carbon part of the paradigm shift…and then the commodity brokers and the bankers. Then come all the industrial biomass burners, wind turbine makers, solar voltaic engineers and businesses across the planet. What one UK Green MP recently called the ‘Carbon Army’ (she was a woman too, but I guess she likes men in uniform).
It is going to be a very interesting time from a social anthropologist’s perspective ( I dabbled in that to get some broader view on the shenanigans of scientists and their variance alliances with industrial strategy). Already the revolutionaries are using religious language to consolidate and defend themselves from…..others who want to shift the paradigm back again. They think if so great a paradigm in the first place that these retro-shifters are placed on a par with flat-earthers!
I am not going to go into ‘climategate’ and what it says about the mindset of the shifters – that would be personal and cloud the overall picture….unless, I mean, could they have been really shifty from the start – but that would then question their real motives and integrity, and I am happier not to do that.
That ‘greatness’ is actually part of the pardigm shift – that it is a great shift, has to be a great shift, in order to save the world itself. The shifters of a simple equation and box model have perhaps unwittingly (unless they belonged to some secret cult with almost clairvoyant powers!) sparked a truly massive paradigm shift in a sense of planetary awareness and the illusion of being able to measure and control things on a global level, – as well as caring, of course…it is a special kind of caring, that kind of control.
So – the flat-earthers tend not to argue about equations and uncertain constants, rather…they are mostly in reaction to the remedies proposed for the future disaster. They especially don’t like the idea of more taxes, more bureaucrats, more bank deposits far removed from scrutiny and in particular, elected scrutiny. Some just hate turbines in beautiful places. Not many actually really care about scientific truth – the parameters like gain factors.
…I am rambling through the blessings of the blogosphere…apologies…just can’t resist responding to soulmates, when all about me have so little interest in the truth!

There is actually very little doubt that the ice-core record is a good climate proxy. There are differences in detail between Antarctic and Greenland ice-cores, particularly that the latter show Heinrich events and Dansgaard-Oeschger events quite strongly. These are North Atlantic events that show up only weakly in Antarctica. There is also a phase shift between Antarctia and Greenland, often known as “the bipolar seesaw”.
However the main climatic events, glaciations and interglacials and major stadials and interstadials show up in all the ice-cores at the same times and in the same proportions. The previous interglacial (MIS 5e) is always warmer than the present and followed by two cooler interstadials (MIS 5a and 5c), the next older interglacial (MIS 7) is always slightly colder than the present and multiple peaked and so on and so on. These are all features that can be checked by other data (ocean bottom drill cores, speleothems, loess profiles, cave sediments, pollen, fossils, ancient beaches, river terraces etc).
And yes, all these proxies agree that most of this interglacial was significantly warmer than the present. The warm peak was reached quite early and the temperature has on the whole been declining since then (this seems to be a general feature of interglacials). But the decline has not been even. There has been warmer rallies (like the MWP) two quite sharp cold dips 9600 and 8200 years ago, and a downward step change about 4200 years ago.
That the early and middle Holocene was markedly warmer than the present is nothing new. This has been known and universally accepted for a century ever since palynology was invented. It is as a matter of fact quite obvious if you are familiar with the fossil record and biogeography.

Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am

You are entitled to your views but one or two ice cores do not provide enough information to reconstruct global climate.

Oh really? Those cores went through a hell of a lot more ice than Mann’s tree bores.
Laughable.

Mike you are cherry picking and splitting hairs:
Here: “J. Storrs (“Josh”) Hall, Ph.D., is President of the Foresight Institute and an independent scientist and author. Dr. Hall is a prolific writer on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology. He is actively sought out to speak about and be interviewed on diverse future technology-related topics, appearing for example in the movie “The Singularity is Near”. He has over 30 years research experience in academia and industry.”
Thus, he has a Ph.D and thus is a doctor in that sense. Two, when you continue to read the bio, you see he has a multitude of professional interests and applications he has explored.
What is, precisely, a climate scientist? A professional from some field of science who studies climate, but to invoke some sort of special exaltation to “climate scientists” does not seem appropriate. Did you read the peer reviewed papers showing how poorly the GCM’s performed hindcasts and projections? Several papers in peer review show the flaws.

Peter Taylor, when you say “…and when confronted with the real scientific uncertainties where choices of some variables (like converting a radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere measured in watts, to a change in temperature at the surface measured in degrees C ) thought it best to embrace the newly invented precautionary priciple and go with the scarier values for that constant. And also lend consideration to some theoretically large positive feedbacks.”
You are buying into the subjective probability philosophy enamored by many at skepticalscience. The probability of a (say) 5c sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is 100% or zero, take your pick. The scientific uncertainties you talk about are not measured as probabilities unless you count models with no local weather component that contain arbitrary randomization leading to invented probabilities. Science does not produce probabilistic estimates unless there are real world measurements to back up the probabilities, and in this case there are only inapplicable paleo measurements (from a much drier world, not the current world) and inapplicable modern measurements (i.e. weather, impossible to separate the results of any forcing like volcano cooling or CO2 warming)
The actual reason they like and use subjective probabilities is that it sounds like science and allows them to invoke the precautionary principle. But as I said, the actual probability of thermageddon based on a projection of the paleo record and models is 100% and some of the posters at skepticalscience have the guts to say so. The rest embrace subjective probability because it is better not to sound absolutist. Alternatively, the actual probability of thermageddon is zero based on the thermostat theory proposed here at various times and a much longer trail of paleo evidence. Again take your pick, but don’t fall into the fake probability trap.

As one who has spent a huge amount of time collating and translating paleoclimate data into useful form …
… I fully endorse Dr. Hall’s methodology and results here.
I have almost the same chart (at higher resolution).
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/9484/lasticeageglant.png
If someone wants, I can give you any timeframe back to 635 Mya.

Climate scientists, so-called, are not scientists. They have not created one reasonably well-confirmed physical hypothesis about the effects of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.
It is true that they deploy the 19th century hypotheses about CO2 in the atmosphere. But they have added nothing to that. They have not one reasonably well-confirmed hypothesis about the “forcings” that they toy with endlessly in their computer models.

I think most people do not understand there is a phenomenon called “polar amplification'” whereby the polar regions change by twice as much as global temperatures. This shows up in every paleoclimate estimate I have ever looked at so it has to be considered as a factual point. Greenland will change by twice as much as the global temperatures (if one is talking about sea level).
Secondly, the altitude and proximity to the ocean is also important.
If one is on top of a 3 km or 4 km high glacier, the proxy data needs to take this into account (3 kms high proxies change by another 50% versus equatorial sea level) and almost none of the pro-AGW papers have made these adjustments.
If one is in the centre of the continents or if the data is sourced from an area in the centre of the continents, the proxies will change by less than the global temperature.
As one uses proxy data that goes further back in time, one has to detrend the proxies because they are subject to periodic incursions of water from earlier periods and the the change seems to be approximately linear over time. If you don’t adjust for this, one finds the proxies indicate the Earth was a snowball until about 100 Mya which it obviously wasn’t.
Overall, the do18 proxies need to be adjusted for latitude, altitude, time and proximity to the ocean. If you have not done this (and it is not a large change required), then your estimates will be off by a quite a bit. Pro-AGW researchers like Richard Alley, are perfectly willing to ignore these issues whenever it suits the pro-AGW position.

dana1981 says:
March 1, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Lucy:
“If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records?”
CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. Rob Honeycutt’s criticism is not the use of ice core data as a temperature proxy, but its use as a global temperature proxy. Temperatures vary significantly around the globe, particularly near the poles. Atmospheric CO2 does not.
===
Good golly Miss Molly…
“CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. ” <– not on planet Earth that I've ever seen. The mix lag NH to SH is 12-18 months.
The ics cores are even worse in reflecting such subtle regional changes. We can spend all year snorting the "peer reviewed Ink" but doesn't it ultimately come down to the lack of accurate data and the unwillingness to properly reflect their "hunch"?

citizenschallenge says:
March 1, 2011 at 6:28 pm

CC: Why the need for this kind of constant name calling? Is this a brawl or an attempt to learn about our climate?

Is that why your comment was loaded with ad homs and snark?

@Peter taylor
Why should only Wall Street brokers snort coke and drive Lamborghinis?
What about dendrochronlogists?

@John, “Good golly Miss Molly…
“CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. ” <– not on planet Earth that I've ever seen. The mix lag NH to SH is 12-18 months."
Mean Vostok temporal resolution is on the order of decades to centuries, not months. An 18-month lag between NH and SH CO2 has nothing to do with the 1,800 year offset between the Antarctic cooling event and the Younger Dryas. Dana's point is valid.

@Smokey, “citizenschallenge says:
Smokey says: ‘Excellent article. Michael Mann’s acolytes are the ones who don’t believe in climate change prior to the mid-1800′s.’
CC: “Come on, if you believe that than you’ve never looked at, or listened to, what they are presenting.”
Of course I have.”
Of course you haven’t, I’m with citizenschallenge here. Find a quote where Mann or any scientist said there was no climate change before the mid-1800s.

Let’s see
Hide the decline removed a few years of proxy data and plotted instrumental readings instead.
This apparently makes all climate science fake
This posts jiggles dates, changes temperature scale uses data from 2 areas of the globe and manages to prove conclusively climate change is a fraud.
(no info as to the actual changes by the way!)
Truly skeptic logic!

Smokey says:
March 1, 2011 at 11:30 am
You do realize that graph you posted ends in 1855 right? The data literally ends in 1855 and the graph has just been manipulated to look like the red is the hockey stick when it isn’t. You lose all credibility when you post graphs that provide no evidence (or plausibility for comparison). Some people fall for it but I won’t. I think you should acknowledge now for the record that the graph you posted is not in support of your assertion.
You can’t post that without an attempt to compare the two. here are two attempts, neither are perfect but yours certainly is completely wrong.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/GISP.gif
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Gisp2Graphedited.png

Smokey says: You accuse skeptics of “demonizing” the purveyors of this fraud, when in fact it is charlatans like Mann and his ilk who demonize “carbon,” by which they mean harmless, beneficial CO2.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Yea, put your kid’s favorite pets into a room with 1% Carbon Dioxide & 21% oxygen and see what your kids think of that beautiful CO2 and you.
The devil is in the details.
~ ~ ~
ps. I would image you do know a lousy 1% of that life giving CO2 will kill you… right?

The message of this thread should distilled and placed on a tee shirt or coffee mug…..

Climate Change ?
always has, always will.

Smokey says: Hey, mind-reader. So you know just exactly how much I’ve read up on the charlartan Michael Mann?
I don’t need a Mann quote, all I need to see is Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick chart.
~ ~ ~
How can you know if he is a charlatan if you haven’t investigated what he actually has to say?
How do you know that the folks who feed you that “debunked Hokey Stick” aren’t the charlatans if you are unwilling to familiarize yourself with the full spectrum of information?
~ ~ ~
At least I do the skeptics the courtesy of reading what they have to offer, but than I’m into thinking about the whole thing and not just proving my point-über-alles. Learning, after all, is the best part of science.

BA:
Find a quote where Mann or any scientist said there was no climate change before the mid-1800s.
Briefly, BA, “climate change” = “CO2=CAGW”. Right?
The current meaning of the term “climate change” is obviously the result of the specific and intended word game employed by the CO2=CAGW Climate Science Propaganda Operation to change the meaning of words and concepts as needed so as to create confusion and even to try to falsely establish fact, or most importantly somehow garner the support its manipulators need to accomplish their ulterior goals = various binges of looting and controlling or even Totalitarianism, partly via the confused meanings themselves which are really the product of an attempt to achieve thought control, from which all other control can follow.
So that, BA, at least as of right now, I’m afraid you lose if we apply the current useage of “climate change” as desired and established by Climate Science itself and as dutifully repeated by a lot of hapless and willing dupes .
Therefore, according to Mann, enc., voila, there was no “climate change” prior to the mid-1800’s.
But surely, BA you can’t want these sort of people to be running anything, much less your life, your country, or the whole world, can you?

citizenschallenge
“At least I do the skeptics the courtesy of reading what they have to offer, but than I’m into thinking about the whole thing and not just proving my point-über-alles. Learning, after all, is the best part of science.”
If you truly practiced science, then you would practice the art of skepticism. After another month of worldwide below normal temps (and many more to come), the catastrophic CO2 theory will be falsified. btw “than” should be “then”… and I also read what the denialists of natural climate change have to offer,but then I am into looking at the whole thing and not proving my point-über-alles. Whatever that means.

citizenschallenge says (March 1, 2011 at 9:17 pm): “Yea, put your kid’s favorite pets into a room with 1% Carbon Dioxide & 21% oxygen and see what your kids think of that beautiful CO2 and you.”
Well, that would depend on the other 78% of the air in the room. If it’s fluorine, carbon monoxide, or any number of other substances, the pets are screwed. If it’s something relatively benign, like nitrogen, then as ferd berple pointed out above, the pets are probably fine. Unless the room is hyperbaric, because then they could suffer from nitrogen narcosis. Then there’s the temperature of the room…
Dang, this science stuff is complicated! 🙂

The essential problem with Mann is that his flawed 98/99 work was embraced and front-paged by the IPCC when it should have been ignored. Surely Briffa and others knew that. As a result a good chunk of the hockey team was forced to prevaricate and stonewall for years as they gradually rectified Mann’s conclusion. Perhaps they believe that is how science is supposed to work but from my perspective and many other people who have studied this for years, it isn’t working. How many more pictures of bore holes starting in the LIA do they expect us to swallow?

re: eadler
“Now 0.5C is the approximate average global temperature increase since that time. The actual temperature increase in Greenland over the past 95 years was actually 3 C , according to the following thermometer record:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/rs_Greenland.htm
So the actual 20th century temperature increase in Greenland is unusual with the 3C increase on top of the ice core record.”
I see your 3 degrees warming in 95 years and raise you 8 degrees in just forty. That’s just one of more than two dozen rapid warming episodes during the last glacial period known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Typically temperatures in Greenland rose by up to about 10-12 degrees in a few decades. D-O events were first detected in GISP2 but on re-examination were also found in the earlier ice core. Indications that these were indeed widespread climate fluctuations have been shown in many other paleo proxies. Note that the Antarctic ice cores show a much smaller cooling at the same time but whether the two poles really are connected in some kind of seesaw effect is still contested.
I really do recommend you look more closely at the Greenland ice core records and read up on Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Dr Alley is among many scientists who have published work on these abrupt climate changes. The papers on this are truly fascinating, especially if you read them in order of their publication date, as you will witness the gradual acceptance that these Dansgaard-Oeschger events are indeed a marker for widespread, likely hemispheric, if not global climate disruptions. What causes these events is hotly contested as well as the proposed cyclicity of 1470 years. I favour the suggestion that they are caused by atmospheric-oceanic mechanisms we do not yet fully understand.
Whatever causes them, whatever they might signify, at the very very least, one can conclude at a bare minimum, that these rapid warming events put paid to any claim that Greenland has experienced “unusual” or as often claimed unprecedented warming in the last 100 years.

@David, “Since we can’t find a quote from Mann et al. asserting there’s never been climate change in the past, I can assert they believe there’s been climate change in the past?”
Re the first, you can’t find a quote because they never said that.
Re the second, of course it’s true, they believe there has been past change and have written much about it.
“Then the hockey stick graph is definitely a fabricated lie.”
Here you jump off the board. That does not follow at all. Mann’s reconstruction and many others show climate change in the past. Newer reconstructions by different research teams show more agreement about past climate change than the older ones did. That’s one sign that they’re tending to get better as more data come available and improved methods are applied. When new data supercede the old, as Mann (2008) does Mann (1998), that does not mean the old data were a “fabricated lie.” It’s the normal progress of science.
“Or climate change can occur without a change in global mean temperature.”
Sure it could, but that would show up in contrasts among regional proxies, not (by definition) in a global composite. Climatologists including Mann have written a lot about that too. You’ve read none of it?
“Which way would you have it?”
None of your “if … then” formulations make sense to me. I don’t know why you think they do.
“In addition, can I also assert that they know climate change in the past was far larger than anything humans could do, since they made no statement that climate hadn’t happened in the past?”
You can assert anything, obviously.
“Oh how the warmists twist logic into all sorts of contortions to torture their meme out of thin air.”
That’s what your post did.

BA claims “That’s one sign that they’re tending to get better as more
data come available and improved methods are applied.”
Just one more example of why lying about Mann’s mistakes is not the right route. Until the team comes clean and explains the mistakes in a full academic paper, there is no reason to take anything they or you say seriously.

Maren says:
March 2, 2011 at 3:44 am

I really do recommend you look more closely at the Greenland ice core records and read up on Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Dr Alley is among many scientists who have published work on these abrupt climate changes. The papers on this are truly fascinating, especially if you read them in order of their publication date, as you will witness the gradual acceptance that these Dansgaard-Oeschger events are indeed a marker for widespread, likely hemispheric, if not global climate disruptions. What causes these events is hotly contested as well as the proposed cyclicity of 1470 years. I favour the suggestion that they are caused by atmospheric-oceanic mechanisms we do not yet fully understand.
Whatever causes them, whatever they might signify, at the very very least, one can conclude at a bare minimum, that these rapid warming events put paid to any claim that Greenland has experienced “unusual” or as often claimed unprecedented warming in the last 100 years.
The last D O event ocurred 11,000 years ago. This kind of event is unusual in human history as is the climate change we are experiencing today. There is no indication that I have read that the current warming is a D O event. Certainly the expert, Dr Alley doesn’t believe this. Here is what he says about your argument that the current change in climate is nothing unusual.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
Thirdly, demonstration that there have been large climate changes in the past without humans in no way demonstrates that humans are not now responsible. Many people have died naturally but murder still exists; it is up to the police to learn whether a given mortality was natural or not, and up to climate science to learn what is causing ongoing changes (and we have good confidence that most of what is happening to climatic global average surface temperature is being caused by humanity now). Similarly, demonstration that life, and humans, survived warmer temperatures in the past in no way shows that warmer temperatures in the future are good for us. If you don’t care about humans and other things with us here, making a big change in climate might be an interesting experiment. Evolution does respond to climate change and produce novel results. I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that. An opinion, surely, and not purely scientific, but that’s my bias.

BA:
I’ve never met a scientist who wants to run my life, my country, or the whole world. Movie villains do that.
And:
When new data supercede the old, as Mann (2008) does Mann (1998), that does not mean the old data were a ‘fabricated lie.’ It’s the normal progress of science.
So, BA, you think you’ve proven via your mere denialistic postulate that only movie villians want to control people and/or the world? BA, please get serious. Even if you have no knowledge or memory of Hitler’s Nazi Socialism or the previous “Soviet Union’s” enlsaving Communism, both also having designs on ruling the World, have you not at least noticed what’s going on right now in North Africa and the Mideast? Not to mention Communism’s impressive “equality” of enslavement and abject poverty persistently existent, apparent, and well documented in North Korea?
Then you also think you’ve proven that Mann’s bizarre Hockeystick concoction was not “fabricated” in some important sense, just because it was possible, before having been proven to be so, that it was not fabricated, which to you entirely magically or wishfully proves that Mann’t Hockeystick “science” was even a wonderous achievement without which science couldn’t have progressed?
Attn., BA! The Hockeystick “science” and the CO2=CAGW Climate Science “climate change” Propaganda Operation which it serves, specifically avoid using the scientific method and its principles, and instead offer up only a littany of illogical, nonrational, and nonscientific-“fact” tactics avoiding reality – just like you did to serve your severe denial – but in its/their case in order to manipulate people so that they can be controlled and parasatized, instead of either helping them or at least furthering science’s and people’s understanding.
BA, wake up! They want to control and either loot or enslave you, too. And so far you seem to be a great fit for that! On the other hand, Climate Science, enc., does need people like you for it to “work”. So it appears you’ve got a choice to make, that is, unless you simply desperately need to be controlled, or that’s just your nature such that you couldn’t make it anyway without essentially being enslaved or told what to do for your whole life, and you instinctively know it as a congenital groupist, groupthink included.
But if you want to join up with Climate Science, enc., could you at least leave the rest of us safely out of your personal Utopia? After all, it does seem to already exist elsewhere!

Analysis of quoted Dr. Alley section, provided by eadler on March 2, 2011 at 6:59 am:

Thirdly, demonstration that there have been large climate changes in the past without humans in no way demonstrates that humans are not now responsible.

There is a forest. Trees have been falling down due to natural reasons for millenia in this forest, and for no other reasons. One more falls over. That trees have been falling over due to natural reasons for millenia does not demonstrate that this last one did not fall down due to human intervention. But it does yield the requirement of conclusive evidence that this last one fell over due to actions of humans, instead of the natural reasons that have been the only reasons that trees have been falling in this forest for millenia, before it can properly be said that humans caused that last tree to fall.

Many people have died naturally but murder still exists; it is up to the police to learn whether a given mortality was natural or not, and up to climate science to learn what is causing ongoing changes (and we have good confidence that most of what is happening to climatic global average surface temperature is being caused by humanity now).

Television and movies aside, it is doctors who determine whether a death was natural or not. Usually a physician treating a person makes that determination, sometimes a forensic pathologist does so in conjunction with an autopsy. Saying “it is up to the police” is rather silly, people die all the time without any sort of police investigation. Is Dr. Alley implying the police are shirking their duty? Moreover the general presumption is that a death is natural unless there is evidence that may indicate otherwise thus further investigation is warranted.
They have “good confidence” that what is happening to the “climatic global average surface temperature” is mostly humanity’s fault? Can you imagine how that would play out in a criminal court with the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard? Besides, what is currently happening is cooling. How is humanity responsible for the cooling?
Generally speaking, this indicates the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset among (C)AGW proponents.

Similarly, demonstration that life, and humans, survived warmer temperatures in the past in no way shows that warmer temperatures in the future are good for us.

We have an entire planet with many areas having different normal temperature ranges. Why can’t we determine if life will improve if one area becomes as warm as another is currently?

If you don’t care about humans and other things with us here, making a big change in climate might be an interesting experiment.

Thus we note the proposals to combat “global warming” by various geo-engineering ideas designed to cool the planet.
Note also the assumption that not only do humans have the ability to make a big change in global climate, we are currently doing so.

Evolution does respond to climate change and produce novel results.

Thus we face the mandate of evolution, adapt or die. I think we humans can adapt to climate change quite well, especially if things get warmer.

I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that. An opinion, surely, and not purely scientific, but that’s my bias.

The majority of the six-plus billion people on this planet live in poverty, that which is caused and/or exacerbated by a lack of affordable energy, and will be greatly benefited by sources of cheap energy. What is best for humanity is cheap energy, available where it is needed. Predominantly that will involve an easily-transportable energy source, which contains carbon, either a solid form like coal or similar (coke, petroleum coke, charcoal), or a hydrocarbon that is liquid at normal ambient conditions without compression (diesel, gasoline, etc). This will be converted to beneficial forms of energy, like heat and electricity.
With the change from energy poverty to energy wealth, will come the growth of real wealth. A significant increase in real wealth will be necessary to afford adaption to climate change.
And adaptation is required. Peer-Reviewed Climate Science says that even with drastic reductions in CO2 emissions to levels before the Industrial Revolution, it’ll still take “at least” a millenia to reverse the climate change effect that has already taken hold (reference). Other Peer-Reviewed Climate Science predicts the same even if we shut down civilization and stop all our CO2 emissions immediately (reference).
Thus what is clearly best for humanity, is lots of cheap energy now, which of necessity will come overwhelmingly from carbon-based energy sources for about another century or so, and then dealing with whatever consequences shall come after we are able to afford whatever adaptation is required.

Smokey says:

In Mann ’08 he used the Tiljander proxy, which he had been informed, prior to publication, that it was corrupted from road work which had turned the sediments upside down.
Mann used the Tiljander proxy anyway, knowing it was false data. He used it because it gave him the hockey stick shape he wanted. Now Mann is backing and filling, trying to explain that the Tiljander proxy didn’t matter. If so, why did he use it anyway, when he knew it was corrupted?
Michael Mann is a serial liar, and it astonishes me that you are blind to that verifiable fact.

It is interesting that someone calling someone else a serial liar would himself make such factually-challenged claims. In fact, in the supplemental materials to the very article that you are talking about see http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf ), Mann noted the potential issues that had been raised about the Tiljander proxies (and some other data) and showed what the reconstruction would look like if these data were left out of them:

Potential data quality problems. In addition to checking whether or not potential problems specific to tree-ring data have any significant impact on our reconstructions in earlier centuries (see Fig. S7), we also examined whether or not potential problems noted for several records (see Dataset S1 for details) might compromise the reconstructions. These records include the four Tijander et al. (12) series used (see Fig. S9) for which the original authors note that human effects over the past few centuries unrelated to climate might impact records (the original paper states ‘‘Natural variability in the sediment record was disrupted by increased human impact in the catchment area at A.D. 1720.’’ and later, ‘‘In the case of Lake Korttajarvi it is a demanding task to calibrate the physical varve data we have collected against meteorological data, because human impacts have distorted the natural signal to varying extents’’). These issues are particularly significant because there are few proxy records, particularly in the temperature-screened dataset (see Fig. S9), available back through the 9th century. The Tijander et al. series constitute 4 of the 15 available Northern Hemisphere records before that
point.
In addition there are three other records in our database with potential data quality problems, as noted in the database notes: Benson et al. (13) (Mono Lake): ‘‘Data after 1940 no good— water exported to CA;’’ Isdale (14) (fluorescence): ‘‘anthropogenic influence after 1870;’’ and McCulloch (15) (Ba/Ca): ‘‘anthropogenic influence after 1870’’. We therefore performed additional analyses as in Fig. S7, but instead compared the reconstructions both with and without the
above seven potentially problematic series, as shown in Fig. S8.

So, Mann did exactly the right thing in this situation: He did not start arbitrarily eliminating proxies that passed their automated criteria for determining if they correlate with temperature, but in the case where there were serious data quality issues he did re-run his procedures leaving those proxies out to see how much difference it makes to the results and presented this to the scientific community.
It leaves one wondering about the motivations and veracity of those who have made a big deal out of this more than those of Michael Mann!

Smokey,
No…What I am believing is my own eyes…what my eyes, your eyes, or anybody else’s eyes can read by clicking on the link that I provided to the supplemental materials at the PNAS website. What you are believing is a version of reality carefully constructed by those who agree with you.
As for the whole “censored” thing, as I understand it, this is just work relating to Mann’s 1999 paper here: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/webhome/aprilc/data/my%20stuff/MBH1999.pdf :

It is furthermore found that only one of these series — PC #1 of the ITRDB data — exhibits a signicant correlation with the time history of the dominant temperature pattern of the 1902-1980 calibration period. Positive calibration/variance
scores for the NH series cannot be obtained if this indica tor is removed from the network of 12 (in contrast with post-AD 1400 reconstructions for which a variety of indica tors are available which correlate against the instrumental record). Though, as discussed earlier, ITRDB PC#1 rep resents a vital region for resolving hemispheric temperature trends, the assumption that this relationship holds up over time nonetheless demands circumspection. Clearly, a more widespread network of quality millennial proxy climate indicators will be required for more condent inferences.

Usually, the best strategy for censoring something that you don’t want others to find out about does not involve talking about it in GRL (although a colleague of mine tells his students that he would advise the government to hide their top nuclear secrets in our laboratory manuals since it appears that these never actually get read by the students).
Again, the fact that so much has been made of this says a lot more about the crowd that you trust than about Michael Mann.

Richard Alley:
Many people have died naturally but murder still exists; it is up to the police to learn whether a given mortality was natural or not,[GLo’ P] and up to climate science to learn what is causing ongoing changes (and we have good confidence that most of what is happening to climatic global average surface temperature is being caused by humanity now).
GLo’P = Great Leap of Pea, right into another world where “I say it, therefore, it is true”, far from the previous one where “murder” is always caused by humans, by definition, and as “unnatural” in that sense; but where hardly anyone denies that murder has existed for a long time, even “naturally”..
If Alley thinks that overtly “begging the question” jump even makes a valid analogy which proves his case, let’s be charitable and conceed that he must have grown up surrounded by Mexican Jumping Beans.

JPeden says:
March 2, 2011 at 1:31 pm
eadler says:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
Richard Alley,
“I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that.”
Wonderful, Richard! But ipcc Climate Science, enc., did in fact exclude countries containing ~5 billion of the Earth’s 6.5+ billion people from having to follow its own alleged cure to its own alleged disease as comprised by the restrictive Kyoto Protocols. Therefore, eadlers and Alley’s of the world, it appears that ipcc Climate Science does not even believe its own CO2=CAGW “science”.
Rpeden,
Your rant regarding the IPCC is incorrect. The IPCC has recommended mitigation activities, but no countries are specifically excluded or included. You are talking about the Kyoto Protocol, which is a political agreement. Scientists had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion of countries from any obligations under the protocol.
Even more, where the rubber meets the road, India and China have judged that the ipcc’s alleged cause of its alleged disease, fossil fuel burning in turn producing CO2, is instead the cure to their very real disease disaster, underdevelopment, by producing what they need for their people to progress and be cured of their current disease, electricity power.
This is clearly a trade off between tackling long term and short term problems. Short term wins out because the public doesn’t have the vision to see the long term. If the public doesn’t have the understanding and the foresight to buy into solving the long term problem, the politicians won’t do it.
In fact, the Chinese recognize the importance of clean energy technology, while they are building coal plants. They are in the forefront in the development of solar, wind and thorium nuclear reactors. The US is way behind the curve on all of these.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
From citizenschallenge on March 2, 2011 at 10:40 am:
Oh so this is all about politics and not about science !
Yes! (C)AGW is all about politics, not about science!
You are finally getting it! There is hope for you yet!
☺
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now it’ll be a really great day when you figure out which side has the science and which is a well oiled propaganda machine.
😉

I’ve followed Dr Alley’s work for some time now. In the early days, before AGW attracted really enormous amounts of money, his rational was very scientific but in the last 10-15 years he has begun his shift to the dark side. What I find interesting is that he gets to the logic where “past climate change has been greater and more volatile than present without CO²” and then immediately shift to another logic which says “but that doesn’t mean mankind is not causing this latest warming”. It’s the same mantra that eminates from all the trolls here. If climate has change rapidly in the past, more rapidly than now and during periods of higher CO² then how in hell’s name can you attribute the recent warming (before 2000, 10 years ago) to man? This is plain stupid or fraudulent. You choose which.

Joel Shore, read Montford’s book, Hockey Stick Illusion, because it explains what is wrong with Mann’s early work, and what is wrong with science (coverup of errors, etc). If you have issues with specifics, that’s fine, but I would like to hear how you address the general problems noted in the book.
Citizens Challenge, you say “But it’s on the other side of that political line you folks seem to have drawn and refuse to look beyond.” Please try to understand why so many of us have wasted so much time on such a nonissue. It is not from political bias as you would dearly like to believe, but because we believe in science. We believe that science (e.g. statistics) is not a kudgel to provide propaganda points like the hockey stick. If such mistakes happen they should be quickly corrected, not defended in circles for years. Start with Mann’s data normalization: normalizing over the instrument interval rather than the whole record, followed by PCA, selects samples with the highest variance over the instrument interval (i.e. flattens the stick part of the hockey stick). Not hard at all to understand, not political, just an error. Not caught but rather celebrated in the IPCC report.
Years upon years of stonewalling and obfuscation follow. Yet you waltz in lately and say we are just being political. Well, you are wrong about that.

eadler:
peden,
Your rant regarding the IPCC is incorrect. The IPCC has recommended mitigation activities, but no countries are specifically excluded or included. You are talking about the Kyoto Protocol, which is a political agreement. Scientists had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion of countries from any obligations under the protocol.
Briefly, that’s a distinction without a difference. You probably don’t believe the alleged “science” yourself, as judged by your acts. If not, would that also be “political”? Does Al Gore act like he really believes the alleged CO2=CAGW “science”? Are y’all still in love with windmills? And the Stone Age?
Then you diss the Chinese and Indians as though they don’t really know what they’re doing, when their logic makes perfect sense given the facts, as repeatedly and continually demonstrated going forward and even as we speak.
eadler, if what you display here is truely your brain acting freely, in particular without recompense, your thinking has come to the end of its line, and you have proven that at best you have nothing to offer in terms of solutions to real problems concerning the wellbeing of Humanity.

Smokey says:

I read your PNAS link. It is dated 2010.

Where is it dated thus? It is the supplement connected to their paper. The URL has within it “2008/09/02/” which I assume is the date associated with that paper.
Smokey, have you noticed that in this whole debate, I link to the primary sources, i.e., the original papers by Mann, and all you ever link to is secondary sources who, to put it charitably, are not completely without their own biases.

J. Shore,
smokey gave you a bad spanking and so did eric (sceptic) and all you did was talk about dates and sources. Do you honestly believe your sources are without any bias?
You didnt answer about stonewalling or manns hiding censored data either. I dont think your a real scientist, you just play one on the intertubes.

eadler says:
March 2, 2011 at 6:59 am
The last D O event ocurred 11,000 years ago. This kind of event is unusual in human history as is the climate change we are experiencing today. There is no indication that I have read that the current warming is a D O event. Certainly the expert, Dr Alley doesn’t believe this.
Since other commenters have already criticised Dr Alley’s personal reasoning as expressed in the quote you provided, I’ll stick to the argument you make here.
Firstly, the ice core data suggests only that the last clearly discernible D-O event occurred during the current interglacial, 10 500 years ago.
A considerable number of researchers propose that such events have not ceased during the Holocene, but instead registered a much smaller temperature change in Greenland. Stefan Rahmstorff is one of them, he believes not only that D-O events are strongly cyclical – occuring every 1470 years – but that they continued during the last interglacial as well as the current one. (I mention him in particular as he can not be considered a skeptic on AGW.)
Secondly, notwithstanding steadily dropping temperatures since the end of the Holocene climatic optimum 5k years ago, the current interglacial does indeed seem stable on millenial timescales. On centennial and decadal timescales, however, there is significant evidence of climate disruptions in numerous proxies from many locations on the planet, although none of them seem to have been as drastic in their warming as the D-O events during the last glaciation. The Roman and the Medieval Warm period as well as the Little Ice Age are probably the best known of those fluctuations.
Thirdly, global average temperature is nothing more or less than an artificial product. By necessity we are limited to constructing historical global temperatures by combining numerous proxies. As seen in the literature, the debate is still ongoing which of the climate fluctuations suggested by the various proxies are sufficiently widespread to pronounce them global in nature. The state of knowledge in climate science today does not allow one to absolutely pronounce on historical global temperatures, which btw is rightly reflected in the papers themselves where scientists “suggest”, “propose”, ”assume”, and assign likelyhoods – not certainties – to their conclusions that are a far cry from pronouncements of unquestionable truths.
Lastly, returning to Greenland itself. According to the most recently completed Greenland Ice core project, NGRIP, it was 1 to 2 degrees warmer there during the MWP than today.
Thus, I would point out to you that the most recent warming in Greenland, and in the entire Northern Hemisphere, is unprecedented only if you limit your temperature review to less than a thousand years ago. Given that Greenland started warming more than 140 years ago, I suggest that at least part of the 3°C warming you mentioned has natural causes.
P.S. While Dr Alley is one of the most prominent scientists in the field, he is by no means the only expert and others are more cautious in their statements. The curator of NGRIP, Dr Jørgen Peder Steffensen, says the following at the end of the video another commenter linked to earlier in the thread:
“The problem is, that we – and I agree completely that we have had a global temperature increase in the 20th century. Yes. But an increase from what? Probably an increase from the lowest point we’ve had for the last 10 000 years. And this means that it will be very hard indeed to prove whether the increase of temperature in the 20th century was manmade or it’s a natural variation. That will be very hard because we made ourselves an extremely poor experiment – We started to observe metereology at the coldest spot in the last 10 000 years.” [This coldest point was reached 140 years ago]
http://climateclips.com/archives/132

citizenschallenge says:
March 3, 2011 at 5:09 pm
And as much as you might try to deny it, the “establishment climatology community” has given every conceivable skeptical argument way more airing than the likes of you afford the “consensus science” –
Uh huh, so that’s why, for example, the “establishment climatology community’s” superior Collective Scientific Mind has so assiduously refused to release and has otherwise obstructed the release of its own “materials and methods” science, eh, leading to the necessity of the “skeptics” = real scientists, by the definition of science as given by the scientifc method, having to go to even the FOIA process in order to try to “afford” the CO2=CAGW Climate Science “science” an actual scientific review and hearing?
Your argument above is illogical since it is simply a postulate which also contradicts the facts. Its PNS “quality” wouldn’t be fit enough even for my 7 year old grandaughter, or even on a par with “Dora the Explorer’s” thinking, which starts to address the minds kids at about the age of 4 and up.
Being charitable, since you sound more like a groupthink cloned Parrot, are you by chance eadler’s twin? [My apologies to the real Parrots.]

Smokey says:

And RockyH says about Joel: “I dont think your a real scientist, you just play one on the intertubes.”
LOL! Too true. Here’s a Joel Shore quote that gives us some insight to his cognitive dissonance:

Since, unlike you two, I use my real name here, it is easy enough to check my scientific background. Hint: google scholar is your friend.

The problems lie not with the models but with the observational data itself.

I don’t think you even quoted the whole sentence, let alone the context around it that provided the reasoning why the data was suspect in the particular case of which I was speaking. It is amusing how someone who has such high standards for the honesty of others seems to have such abysmally low standards for himself!

And regarding my prior post showing that almost 97% of CO2 is natural, Joel wrote:
“If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.”
Well, it’s nonsense to Joel, anyway. But he suffers from cognitive dissonance. Rational adults can just check the IPCC’s numbers.

Let me give you a little hint here…See that number “absorption”; it matters too. Let me try to make this simple for you: If I proposed withdrawing $100 per day from your bank account and transferring to mine, you would probably object. However, using your logic, I can make it more palatable to you by making the following modification: We can set it up so that your bank also withdraws $10000 per day from your account to themselves and then immediately transfers that $10000 back the same day. Then you could not possibly have any significant objection to my withdrawing of a paltry $100 per day from your bank account. After all, it is only 1% of the withdrawals that are occurring from your account and hence it makes hardly any difference at all to your bank balance…It is completely negligible! Heck, if you still object, we can have the bank transfer back and forth $100,000 per day from your account and then the $100 withdrawal to my account will amount to 0.1%…even more negligible!
I stand by my statement: “If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.” Please, go ahead, make it the centerpiece of your argument. The more you repeat it, the sillier you look to real scientists.

March 3, 2011 at 7:16 pm Smokey says: “Ri-i-i-i-i-ght. Observational data is wrong and computer models are right. So why hasn’t Joel made a killing in the market with his fantastic computer models?”
~ ~ ~
CC: Smokey, it’s the cherry picking of observational data that is wrong!
You should give the full scope of data a good-faith effort, not just that sliver which suits your particular purposes… or one risks falling victim to Dunning-Kruger. {http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect}
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Smokey says: “And regarding my prior post showing that almost 97% of CO2 is natural, Joel wrote:“If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.”
Well, it’s nonsense to Joel, anyway. But he suffers from cognitive dissonance. Rational adults can just check the IPCC’s numbers.”
~ ~ ~
CC: NO. Smokey, where the nonsense comes in, is that you, et al., don’t make any attempt to acknowledge that this 97% of CO2 has, over eons, reached a dynamic natural equilibrium breathing in and out of our plant’s biosphere as the seasons progress.
The deal is that over the past decades humanity has managed to supercharge that ±315ppm background CO2 level to ±390ppm. 75ppm above normal natural background absorption processes!
Check out this carbon clock {http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/;jsessionid=103278DC7A96917252F16ABB70EE31BD} ~
society is injecting ± 1000 pounds of GHGs into our atmosphere every second.
GHGs that have no natural place to go and be of constructive use… except to warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans, ok and also to help some specially adapted plants to grow better especially Kudzu, Poison Ivy and such vines, but not near enough to offset their other cascading effects.
Now that’s big, how do you deny it?

yea, like hold in more heat in our atmosphere, which then opens the way for more atmospheric moisture and more heating, which then opens the way for altering hydrological cycles, which also effects things like droughts and mega storm fronts… flooding (yes global warming produces both.), for proxy data why not look at that wonderful thermometer, our planet’s cryosphere ~ http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
======================
Smokey “citizenchallenge brings up the thoroughly debunked canard that the oceans are “acidifying.” He’s so far behind the curve that it’s embarrassing for him.”
~ ~ ~
If it’s such a thoroughly debunked canard why does Science Daily presenting so many studies showing areas concern? {Or will you remind they are all part of the conspiracy?}
All the papers cited in your WUWT link are behind a paywall – but I will keep trying to find something on them. I am curious to see what they say.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
New Ocean Acidification Study Shows Added Danger to Already Struggling Coral Reefs
ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2010) — Over the next century, recruitment of new corals could drop by 73 percent, as rising carbon dioxide levels turn the oceans more acidic, suggests a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The research findings reveal a new danger to the already threatened Caribbean and Florida reef Elkhorn corals.
~ ~ ~
Acidification of Oceans May Contribute to Global Declines of Shellfish
ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2010) — The acidification of the Earth’s oceans due to rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be contributing to a global decline of clams, scallops and other shellfish by interfering with the development of shellfish larvae, according to two Stony Brook University scientists, whose findings are published online and in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
~ ~ ~
Rising Carbon Dioxide and ‘Acidified’ Waters Found in Puget Sound, Off Seattle US
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory and School of Oceanography (UW)have discovered that the water chemistry in the Hood Canal and the Puget Sound main basin is becoming more “acidified,” or corrosive, as the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These changes could have considerable impacts on the region’s shellfish industry over the next several decades.
~ ~ ~
Leading Scientists Call for More Effort in Tackling Rising Ocean Acidity
ScienceDaily (May 19, 2010) — Ten years ago, ocean acidification was a phenomenon only known to small group of ocean scientists. The ‘Impacts of Ocean Acidification’ science policy briefing presented by the European Science Foundation on 20 May for European Maritime Day 2010 gives a comprehensive view of current research.
~ ~ ~
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Causing Ocean Acidification to Progress at Unprecedented Rate
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2010) — The changing chemistry of the world’s oceans is a growing global problem, says the summary of a congressionally requested study by the National Research Council
~ ~ ~
Ecosystems Under Threat from Ocean Acidification
ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2010) — Acidification of the oceans as a result of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide could have significant effects on marine ecosystems, according to Michael Maguire presenting at the Society for General Microbiology’s spring meeting in Edinburgh.
~ ~ ~
U.S. Pacific Coast Waters Turning More Acidic
ScienceDaily (May 23, 2008) — An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico.
~ ~ ~
And there is plenty more where this came from. What should a person make of all this data?

@ Joel Shore:
You want people to look at this file?
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf
Page after page, all those reconstruction graphs, attacked with thick red or black crayon strokes to cover up what’s actually happening as they get closer to the present. The “instrumental record,” either CRU or HAD, and not always clearly labeled as to which. Some instances, they don’t even label the ham-handed concealment, as with Fig. S7b and S10. Yet even then, with the clarity of the electronic record and ability to zoom in clearly, you can still often see the ends of the proxy series peek out from under the thick covering, and notice how far out of line the instrumental records, with the sharp rise at the end, are in comparison to the other data. As is clear in many of the graphs, without said instrumental records they have nothing, we’ve been coming out of a cold period and still aren’t as warm as it’s previously been.
Then there’s Fig. 9, showing those 19 proxy records. Garbled mess that it is, it can still be seen that something’s off with the Tiljander series. Nearly flat for over 1200 years, with something causing them to get rather noisy at the end, except for the most non-flat looking one, xraydenseave, which has a 10^4 scaling factor according to the mushed-in note and otherwise shows nothing remarkable happening. Indeed, overwhelmingly the non-Tiljander series show that nothing remarkable is happening.
It’s been repeatedly shown here on WUWT and elsewhere how the homogenized pasteurized highly-processed “instrumental records” shouldn’t be trusted as they stand. In this document we see consistently how said records were used to cover up what the proxies were trying to say about more recent temperatures, laid right on top of the proxies wide and thick. Just looking at how they did it, one wonders “Are they trying to conceal something?” Then you can look closer at the electronic version, and see what it was.
And this is the “science” you endorse and defend? And you want people to see such obvious glaring attempts at deception?

kadaka:
What I showed that paper for was to demonstrate that Smokey apparently was not telling an accurate story about Mann’s use of the Tiljander data. (To be fair to Smokey, it may be more that others didn’t tell him the accurate story than that he actively tried to deceive us. Still, a real skeptic would not simply take a serious accusation of deception against a respected scientist without trying to verify its veracity.) Mann actually did exactly what any good scientist would do when faced with using some data that there is some dispute about: He showed what the results were like both with and without this data.
Now, you want to raise new issues with the paper, arguing about the use of the modern temperature series along with the proxy reconstruction. However, despite your attempts to impugn the modern instrumental temperature series (which noone has shown to have any significant problems despite the various hype here and other places), the fact is that it is well-verified: If you really think you can’t trust the instrumental record, you could replace with the UAH satellite record analysis by skeptics Roy Spencer and John Christy and you would get basically the same thing. Here is their data http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt and note that the trend since 1979 shows that Northern Hemisphere temperatures over land (which is what most of the figures in that paper refer to) in the lower troposphere have gone up by ~0.75 C over that time period!
The main issue with the proxy records is that the data tend not to be quite up-to-date and thus miss some of the recent temperature rise. And, if you want to see detailed comparisons between the proxy records and the instrumental data, Figure S4 (and Fig. 2 of the original paper) blows up the validation intervals so you can see in gory detail how the proxy and instrumental data compare over those times.
I am not trying to claim that these proxy-based reconstructions are the end-all and be-all. I happen to think they constitute one of the weakest arguments for AGW, given all the genuine issues and uncertainties associated with the proxies and also the fact that the whole connection these reconstructions give between the rise in CO2 and temperature is only circumstantial. I much prefer more direct attribution methods, as well as a fundamental understanding of the physics behind the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and past “empirical experiments” such as the ice age – interglacial oscillations.

From eadler on March 2, 2011 at 9:16 pm:

(…)In this investigation into the cause of death, the coroners have determined that humans are the culprit in the case of the current climate change. Based on 2 polls of active climate science researchers, 97% of them believe that the earth is warming and humans are responsible.

These must be two other polls than the one torn apart last year. As posted here on WUWT, copied from the Hockey Schtick:

The 97% “Consensus” is only 76 Self-Selected Climatologists
[graphic]
The graphic [directly above] comes via our friends at skepticalscience, assuring us that while 97% of “climate scientists think that global warming is ‘significantly’ due to human activity,” a shocking 72% of news coverage does not reflect this “consensus” and similarly 74% of the public are not convinced.
However, close examination of the source of the claimed 97% consensus reveals that it comes from a non-peer reviewed article describing an online poll in which a total of only 79 climate scientists chose to participate. Of the 79 self-selected climate scientists, 76 agreed with the notion of AGW. Thus, we find climate scientists once again using dubious statistical techniques to deceive the public that there is a 97% scientific consensus on man-made global warming; fortunately they clearly aren’t buying it.

Of the two questions from the poll that were featured, well, they deserved examination:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

#1 is easy, “pre-1800’s” covers the Little Ice Age which ended around 1850, and temperatures have risen since that rather cold period.
For #2, CO2 isn’t mentioned, technically it refers to “changing” temperatures not specifically rising. And the wording is “significant contributing factor.” Your clumsy “murder” analogy doesn’t hold. This is more akin to citing high cholesterol and stress as “significant contributing factors” to a myocardial infarction. Actually, going by the question’s wording, agreeing is just specifying the percentage of “changing mean global temperatures” that can be attributed to human activities is significant, which is a far cry from what you’re trying to say. Only 10% can be considered significant, with 90% of the “changing mean global temperatures” being due to natural reasons.
You better cite those two other studies, that actually are polls of “active climate science researchers” as you have said, that actually show “97% of them believe that the earth is warming and humans are responsible” as you have stated. Because this one certainly did not.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:March 4, 2011 at 8:44 pm”Sorry Smokey, but we’ll have to write off “citizenschallenge” as another of the deluded. I looked at his blog.”
~ ~ ~
So does this mean I get banned?
By the way, why you got a problem with those words I wrote?

Peter, if I want to test my theories or challenge the warming theories, I go to skeptical science. While there I can pick up links to papers to read and understand so I can make better challenges. There is useful information here too, but politics is allowed and gets well past the annoying point to those who disagree with it. But generally the science is not being “shouted”.
Reading above, D’Aleo regretted his use “shout”. You and Joel are welcome of course to maintain whatever caricature of this site that you want so you can stay in your comfort zone. And Joel, you are welcome to maintain your belief that it was corporate interests that got people like myself interested in this in the 1990’s or Steve McIntyre in the early 2000’s. But it is not true, it is just your wishful thinking.

Eric (skeptic) says:

And Joel, you are welcome to maintain your belief that it was corporate interests that got people like myself interested in this in the 1990′s or Steve McIntyre in the early 2000′s.

I have never made claims about how particular people have gotten interested in the subject. All that I said was that it was a complete misreading of history to think that corporate interests were generally supportive of the science of AGW.
I think that in most cases, most of the people here have a very strong “free market” ideology (i.e., on the conservative or libertarian end of the spectrum) and it is the policy solutions implied by the science that strongly disincline them to believe the science. There are, of course, a few exceptions (e.g., Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for the left-wing Nation magazine is an “AGW skeptic”) but I don’t think there are very many. (And in Cockburn’s case, he is far enough to the Left that the conspiracy theories involving intellectual authorities become in many ways indistinguishable from those on the right end of the spectrum.)

kadaka says:

Post-Climategate, one of the leading members of the team, Dr. Phil Jones of UEA-CRU, agreed in February 2010 in a BBC Q&A that there has been no statistically-significant warming from 1995 to the present.
…did any of these parties with a vested interest in promoting (C)AGW get around to noting for the public that there had been a 15 year stretch without any statistically-significant global warming?

Here is the full quote from the article that you linked to:

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

In fact, the best-fit trend over the 15 year period is not much lower than the trend has been over the period from 1975 to 2009 (0.16 C per decade). It is just that the errorbars over a 15 year period are still large enough that one cannot reject a trend of 0 with 95% confidence. Likewise, one probably could not reject a slope of ~0.24 C per decade with 95% confidence either (assuming an approximately symmetric probability distribution). This is just a statement about measuring trends over what are still relatively short time periods. The fact that it is turned into such a big deal by “skeptics” shows only how unskeptical they are to believe what they want to believe.
This is also an illustration of why in a debate between honest scientists and less-than-honest propagandists, the propagandists can often pull public opinion to their side. Real science is messy and there are all sorts of issues to worry about, like statistical significance of trends over time periods that are just not sufficient to determine the trends to high accuracy. Propagandists take advantage of this.
It also explains why there can be such a gulf between what the scientific community thinks the science shows and what those who are inclined to believe otherwise think.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) that was silly and mostly your politics and imagination running away with you.
I would just a soon try to focus on the science.

CC, nice Freudian slip there (describing CH2 because you were thinking about the real GHG: H2O)
Joel claims “Real science is messy and there are all sorts of issues to worry about, like statistical significance of trends over time periods that are just not sufficient to determine the trends to high accuracy. Propagandists take advantage of this.”
Joel, propaganda is dispensed by both sides, weather is messy and the propagandists use that fact to claim, for example, that AGW means less more snow.
The sooner you come to grips with the fact that Mann98/99 is propaganda, the sooner we will take you seriously when you talk about his later work. Read Montford’s book, show what the mistakes are in the book, what conclusions are not mistaken, what science should do about it.

Eric (skeptic) says: March 5, 2011 at 6:33 pm “CC, nice Freudian slip there (describing CH2 because you were thinking about the real GHG: H2O)”
When was I talking about CH2?
(ps. can you describe the different atmospheric properties of CO2 compared to H2O?)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As for east coast snow storms considering that
Weather is nestled within the Climate
and
it has been documented that the jet stream has shifted northward…
more moisture off the Atlantic Ocean…
while the East Coast was freezing their butts off… the Arctic was experiencing a heat waves –
They were shedding all that cold air and sending it down there to mingle with our warm temperatures.
But remember we are talking about Global warming ~ East Coast snow storms don’t mean squat compared to the glaciers that continue to melt with increasing tempo.
~ ~ ~
Jan. 21, 2011 “This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average,” said Dr. Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at The City College of New York (CCNY — CUNY), who is leading a project studying variables that affect ice sheet melting. ~ ~ ~
As for the South Pole take a peek – http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/antarctic-ice-melt
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As for Pacific ocean regional cold spell, we got the La Nina helping that one along.
Stay tuned bet you a beer it’s going to get hotter, even along the East Coast.

CC: reread your March 5, 2011 at 3:03 pm Yes, what I learned from Jack Barrett. All air molecules have 3 translational modes that are the primary means storing energy since collisions dominate over intercepting LW by many orders of magnitude. Diatomic molecules like O2 add two rotations and one vibration (too weak to store much energy) for a theoretical 29.1 J per K per mole (the measured value is slightly higher). CO2 likewise has two rotations and 4 vibrations (relatively weak again) for 29.1 J per K per mole. H2O is the big daddy with three rotations and three weaker vibrations for 33.2 J per K per mole. That means H2O stores more heat than CO2. Then the question is how much outgoing LW is intercepted by the vibrational modes and it turns out that one angular vibration mode is enough for intercepting a wide range of photon wavelengths so CO2 and H2O are pretty much equal in that regard. Joel can correct any mistakes I have made that paragraph.
Joel, thanks for the confirmation on less/more snow. It’s not in the models (they show positive AO = less snow). It doesn’t show up in long term trends. Yet, when I talk to people who know absolutely nothing about climate or global warming, other than what they hear on TV, they will say things like “all this snow isn’t normal, we must be doing something to the climate” I conclude that is successful propaganda. It doesn’t bother me (as much as it should), but resolves me to keep up the battle for science.

Peter Taylor says:
March 6, 2011 at 6:18 am

Smokey — seconded. Very informative and sane posts, indeed.
Thanks, Peter. Copied, linked, saved.

PS:
forgot to include the reference to Harde:
Geophysical Research Abstracts
Vol. 13, EGU2011-4505-1, 2011
EGU General Assembly 2011
© Author(s) 2011
How much CO2 really contributes to global warming? Spectroscopic
studies and modelling of the influence of H2O, CO2 and CH4 on our
climate