By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
It is time to be angry at the gruesome failure of peer review that allows publication of papers, such as the recent effusion of Professor Lovejoy of McGill University, which, in the gushing, widely-circulated press release that seems to accompany every mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness these days, billed it thus:
“Statistical analysis rules out natural-warming hypothesis with more than 99 percent certainty.”
One thing anyone who studies any kind of physics knows is that claiming results to three standard deviations, or 99% confidence, requires – at minimum – that the data underlying the claim are exceptionally precise and trustworthy and, in particular, that the measurement error is minuscule.
Here is the Lovejoy paper’s proposition:
“Let us … make the hypothesis that anthropogenic forcings are indeed dominant (skeptics may be assured that this hypothesis will be tested and indeed quantified in the following analysis). If this is true, then it is plausible that they do not significantly affect the type or amplitude of the natural variability, so that a simple model may suffice:
(1)
“ΔTglobe/Δt is the measured mean global temperature anomaly, ΔTanth/Δt is the deterministic anthropogenic contribution, ΔTnat/Δt is the (stochastic) natural variability (including the responses to the natural forcings), and Δε/Δt is the measurement error. The last can be estimated from the differences between the various observed global series and their means; it is nearly independent of time scale [Lovejoy et al., 2013a] and sufficiently small (≈ ±0.03 K) that we ignore it.”
Just how likely is it that we can measure global mean surface temperature over time either as an absolute value or as an anomaly to a precision of less than 1/30 Cº? It cannot be done. Yet it was essential to Lovejoy’s fiction that he should pretend it could be done, for otherwise his laughable attempt to claim 99% certainty for yet another me-too, can-I-have-another-grant-please result using speculative modeling would have visibly failed at the first fence.
Some of the tamperings that have depressed temperature anomalies in the 1920s and 1930s to make warming this century seem worse than it really was are a great deal larger than a thirtieth of a Celsius degree.
Fig. 1 shows a notorious instance from New Zealand, courtesy of Bryan Leyland:
Figure 1. Annual New Zealand national mean surface temperature anomalies, 1990-2008, from NIWA, showing a warming rate of 0.3 Cº/century before “adjustment” and 1 Cº/century afterward. This “adjustment” is 23 times the Lovejoy measurement error.
Figure 2: Tampering with the U.S. temperature record. The GISS record from 1990-2008 (right panel) shows 1934 0.1 Cº lower and 1998 0.3 Cº higher than the same record in its original 1999 version (left panel). This tampering, calculated to increase the apparent warming trend over the 20th century, is more than 13 times the tiny measurement error mentioned by Lovejoy. The startling changes to the dataset between the 1999 and 2008 versions, first noticed by Steven Goddard, are clearly seen if the two slides are repeatedly shown one after the other as a blink comparator.
Fig. 2 shows the effect of tampering with the temperature record at both ends of the 20th century to sex up the warming rate. The practice is surprisingly widespread. There are similar examples from many records in several countries.
But what is quantified, because Professor Jones’ HadCRUT4 temperature series explicitly states it, is the magnitude of the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties in the data.
Measurement uncertainty arises because measurements are taken in different places under various conditions by different methods. Anthony Watts’ exposure of the poor siting of hundreds of U.S. temperature stations showed up how severe the problem is, with thermometers on airport taxiways, in car parks, by air-conditioning vents, close to sewage works, and so on.
(corrected paragraph) His campaign was so successful that the US climate community were shamed into shutting down or repositioning several poorly-sited temperature monitoring stations. Nevertheless, a network of several hundred ideally-sited stations with standardized equipment and reporting procedures, the Climate Reference Network, tends to show less warming than the older US Historical Climate Network.
That record showed – not greatly to skeptics’ surprise – a rate of warming noticeably slower than the shambolic legacy record. The new record was quietly shunted into a siding, seldom to be heard of again. It pointed to an inconvenient truth: some unknown but significant fraction of 20th-century global warming arose from old-fashioned measurement uncertainty.
Coverage uncertainty arises from the fact that temperature stations are not evenly spaced either spatially or temporally. There has been a startling decline in the number of temperature stations reporting to the global network: there were 6000 a couple of decades ago, but now there are closer to 1500.
Bias uncertainty arises from the fact that, as the improved network demonstrated all too painfully, the old network tends to be closer to human habitation than is ideal.
Figure 3. The monthly HadCRUT4 global temperature anomalies (dark blue) and least-squares trend (thick bright blue line), with the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties shown. Positive anomalies are green; negative are red.
Fig. 3 shows the HadCRUT4 anomalies since 1880, with the combined anomalies also shown. At present, the combined uncertainties are ±0.15 Cº, or almost a sixth of a Celsius degree up or down, over an interval of 0.3 Cº in total. This value, too, is an order of magnitude greater than the unrealistically tiny measurement error allowed for in Lovejoy’s equation (1).
The effect of the uncertainties is that for 18 years 2 months the HadCRUT4 global-temperature trend falls entirely within the zone of uncertainty (Fig. 4). Accordingly, we cannot tell even with 95% confidence whether any global warming at all has occurred since January 1996.
Figure 4. The HadCRUT4 monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies and trend, January 1996 to February 2014, with the zone of uncertainty (pale blue). Because the trend-line falls entirely within the zone of uncertainty, we cannot be even 95% confident that any global warming occurred over the entire 218-month period.
Now, if you and I know all this, do you suppose the peer reviewers did not know it? The measurement error was crucial to the thesis of the Lovejoy paper, yet the reviewers allowed him to get away with saying it was only 0.03 Cº when the oldest of the global datasets, and the one favored by the IPCC, actually publishes, every monthy, combined uncertainties that are ten times larger.
Let us be blunt. Not least because of those uncertainties, compounded by data tampering all over the world, it is impossible to determine climate sensitivity either to the claimed precision of 0.01 Cº or to 99% confidence from the temperature data.
For this reason alone, the headline conclusion in the fawning press release about the “99% certainty” that climate sensitivity is similar to the IPCC’s estimate is baseless. The order-of-magnitude error about the measurement uncertainties is enough on its own to doom the paper. There is a lot else wrong with it, but that is another story.
They say statistics are like bikinis. What they show is interesting and what they hide are the essentials. The science of climate change and the statistics they use are all too often found to be completely naked when an honest intelligent person reviews the supposed result. Pier reviews need to be that way for us all to be given factual and as accurate as possible information on any topic. Thank goodness for people like Christpoher Monckton
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)
Ole!
We award the Lord Monckton ‘two ears and the tail’ for mercifully slaying the Lovejoy bull****!
As soon as I saw that headline this afternoon in WUWT the “99%” number was immediately obviously ridiculous. Thank you for starting to peel back the first and most obvious layer of absurdity. As you say, there is a lot else wrong with it.
I’m very disappointed that science has sunk this low.
Magma, interesting comparison.
And if you cannot find fault with Moncktons article (which you have not), that speaks volumes for the standard required to achieve a phd in climate “science” and exposes the “expert’s” grasp of statistics.
Monckton knows climate.
Excellent post; points well taken.
If indeed Man-Made CO2 is slowing heat energy leaving our atmosphere, to me, a humble mechanical engineer, it would seem to me to be incumbent that we measure as accurately as we can both the Man-Made added CO2 as well as the expected delta T as an indication of additional insulation-effect from that added CO2. An aside – shouldn’t we be concentrating on the thermometer placement and worldwide network of temperature monitoring, isn’t Man-Made Global Warming the crises of our times? But I digress.
Now. We have our measurement of CO2, Man-Made and other. We have our temperature monitoring network. Key point here is both are imperfect, to this any reasonable person would agree who has ever attempted to measure anything – considering Man-Made CO2 vs. global temperature… please. I mean really. This is hubris pure and simple that such enormous, highly variable upon locality (I live in Phoenix Arizona, and temperatures can vary by at least 5 degrees F from my front door to the park across the street which is at a slightly lower elevation, and I have personally measured 7 degrees UHI between urban and rural locations as I live close to the Amerind reservations…)
These are massive data sets and I am not convinced we currently have the ability to quantify the uncertainty. That alone would be a topic I would be interested in seeing – just how to quantify temperature uncertainty. That it cumulatively is within a 99% range of certainty is unfounded. It is not remotely possible. 99% certainty is utterly ridiculous. It is a figment of imagination.
How this was published in a peer-reviewed journal simply escapes my comprehension.
Thankfully there has been no trend towards urbanization since 1880 to further mask any trend from permanent stations. Astronomers are likewise grateful that their remote locations have remained equally immune from any light pollution consequences.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
_____________
Hello again, Magma. I no longer expect you to ever show up around here and offer anything other than logical fallacies, so do your damnedest. You aren’t fooling anyone.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)
Magma, maybe you should take another look at that YouTube video of Richard Feynman talking about the key to science for a refresher…
“…In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”
Magma, do you disagree with Feynman’s statement on the key to science?
lord monckton –
***no uncertainty here! u need to be “environmentally correct”. LOL.
11 April: Reuters: IMF, World Bank push for price on carbon
The leaders of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United
Nations on Friday called upon finance ministers to use fiscal policies, such
as carbon taxes, to combat climate change.
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and World Bank President Jim Yong
Kim were joined by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at their 2014 spring
meetings to address a group of 46 finance ministers and senior officials on
policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Lagarde said their goal was to explain to ministers and officials what
fiscal tools they can use that would benefit the environment while
stimulating global economies.
She said she would discuss how to shift taxation from the traditional labour
and investment base “to a base that is ***environmentally correct,” she told
reporters ahead of the meeting.
Lagarde said carbon taxes and removing fossil fuel subsidies are
“intelligent” ways to reallocate resources to benefit the environment…
Ban called on finance ministers and private investors to hold a meeting in
the coming months that “could pave the way for a common approach” and make
low-carbon investments more attractive to institutional investors…
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/11/climatechange-money-idUKL2N0N31GT20140411
Because the climate models have failed predictively so dismally, and these models incorporate everything that is currently known and accepted as orthodox in the field of climate science, then it is axiomatic that the field itself has failed. They do not have a clue how climate works.
Then along comes this statistical climate modeller with 500 published scientific papers in his working life proving through statistics alone something important and fundamental about climate.
If I get a scientific paper, I expect it to incorporate a reasonably significant amount of work. This climate scientist has 500. Over a 20 year active period, that would amount to 25 per year. There must be some droll stuff in there.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)
======================================================================
“Also, because the argument from authority is not a logical argument in that it does not argue something’s negation or affirmation constitutes a contradiction, it is fallacious to assert that the conclusion must be true.[3] Such a determinative assertion is a logical non sequitur as the conclusion does not follow unconditionally, in the sense of being logically necessary.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Now care to make a real argument?
500 publications! I always find that interesting when someone has so many publications. Think about that for a minute–say you worked at a university for 30 years. 500 publications means over 16 papers a year or close to 1.5 papers a month for 30 years (with no time off). How is that possible when it takes about 2 years to do decent innovative research and publish a paper? Well, the way they do it is a big group publishes a lot of stuff and they put each other’s names on the papers. Lots of times a person never even fully reads the paper that has their name on it. They can’t, they don’t physically have the time.
Line 108 of the preprint at the link reads
108 Tglobe (t ) = Tanth (t )+ Tnat(t )+ ε(t )
There is no division by \Delta T as in equation (1) of the post. Is this a typo or is the source of equation (1) some other document?
Comparing the The National Weather Service’s list from 2002 with the list from April of 2012 of record highs and lows for my little spot on the globe has about 20 of the record highs changed and about 30 of the record lows changed. I don’t mean new ones set but the numbers changed.
If they aren’t even certain of the record temperatures, how can they be certain of the cause of any temperatures?
You said it, MaxLD! My wife worked as a biostatistician in a medical school for almost 25 years and had something over 100 papers. But, most of these were someone else’s research, where she did the statistical analysis. Even so, she worked very hard indeed to participate on 4 or 5 papers a year.
My working hypothesis is that many of Prof. Lovejoy’s papers were as poor as this one. And, the field of climate “science” has such low standards that this sort of nonsense gets published.
The global temperature reconstructions that Lovejoy used to go back to the 1500’s have larger uncertainties than the modern temperature records. So how can he claim a measurement error of only 0.03 C degrees? That’s insane. I’m beginning to think these climate researchers are having a contest to see who can show the greatest willingness to lie for the cause. It’s as if their access to future grant money depends on it.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
magma,
Lovejoy’s data interval was cherry picked and his prox-tology statistical analysis is unsupported by the UN-IPCC accepted HadCRUT4 data and corresponding confidence interval. You could site 2000 ‘publications’ by Lovejoy…. and it would never make his pathetically poor and blatantly biased “Scaling fluctuation analysis and statistical hypothesis testing of anthropogenic warming”, acceptable.
If you find Lord Monckton’s take down of Lovejoy’s activist paean offensive, consider another scientists perspective:
”No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Albert Einstein
The plus or minus 0.15C confidence interval of the UN-IPCC accepted HadCRUT4 data set proves Lovejoy’s cherry picked, prox-tology analysis and confidence interval of 0.01C is wrong.
Valid data trumps proxy bull**** and statistical deceit, every time.
I’m fairly certain that Dr. Lewangoingsking (or however you spell his name) won’t be investing in this paper.
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm | Magma says:
I shudder to think how poor those 500+ publications are. Still, Einstein said to bring only one piece of counter evidence to destroy his theories. Consider Lovejoy’s theories, publications, etc., destroyed.
[snip ]
Christopher,
You mention in this article that “That record showed – not greatly to skeptics’ surprise – a rate of warming noticeably slower than the shambolic legacy record.” I presume you are referring to the Climate Reference Network. Can you provide evidence that the trend in CRN stations is lower than the trend in USHCN stations? As far as I can tell, it is not significantly different: http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-Shot-2013-01-16-at-10.37.51-AM.png
Looks like a spawn of the Drake Equation, covered by WUWT here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Magma. I needed something, anything, to undermine what Monckton have said but I too was unable to do it scientifically.
500 papers ! There is a trick. There can be many authors in one paper. Professors can use their assistants and students to do the research and write papers. The real author is typically a PhD student who has done the work. The professor has of course supervised not one student but many.
Professors have connections to other professors and their co-author their results.
Of course you divide your research into many publications. Each of them contains a tiny part of the results of one research group.
Requiring a large number of papers effectively blocks the entry of outsiders to academia. Without research groups and connections, mass production of papers is not possible.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)
A short comparison
Opponents of special relativity: Physics PhDs from the most prestigious German universities, with copious numbers of publications
A. Einstein*: Teaching diploma; Swiss patent clerk; two papers (not peer reviewed)
In 1905, at time of publication of his paper describing special relativity, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, Annalen der Physik 17: 891
Once of the most confusing aspect of statistics to the layman is confidence limit. 100 per cent confidence actually means covering from minus infinity to plus infinity in the case of the normal curve. The larger the confidence or the higher the number of standard deviations applied meant the exercise is more imprecise and untrustworthy. At 100 per cent confidence level, everything is in.
I’d like to know when the next ice-age is going to occur. These guys must know. If they can claim to know what variations are natural, to such accuracy as to claim that a 0.9 C change must be anthropogenic they have to have natural change nailed down pretty tight. So lets have it, when is the next ice-age.
I used to make thermometers for a living. Well, the company did, I wrote statistical process control software that used the digital thermometers for predictive control of factory machinery. Today in the 21st century, armed with a thousand dollars, you can’t walk into a science/engineering shop and come out with a temperature probe that will give any claim to this type of accuracy. It is PURE fiction. Climate “science” is just a bunch of made up numbers published by fools and promoted by bigger fools. And crooks.
Scott Scarborough: probably not for another few tens of thousands of years, at least as far as Milankovitch cycles go. Though the external forcing associated with ice ages is pretty small; most of the drop in temperatures appears due to internal feedbacks.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/MilankovitchCyclesOrbitandCores.png
“next ice-age.”
What “next”? I can’t be the only one to notice that a hunk of rock bigger than Australia is covered in up to 2km depth in ice, where 98% of all the fresh water on Earth is locked away? The temperature of this planet has been boringly stable for the last 15,000 years. And even the glitch that filled up Bass Strait with 50m of sea water wasn’t a real big deal. If you mention to a greenie that Bass Strait has only existed for 15,000 years their eyes glaze over.
“Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)”
Yes Magma – pretty sad isn’t it. I’m assuming you are saying Lovejoy should know better and has no excuse. If that’s not what you are saying, then I’ve enjoyed watching you embrace the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy while you ignore common sense.
Once again, one of my favorite graphs are relevant:
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
With natural variation like that in the best proxies we have from ends of the earth, the whole premise of looking and finding a human signal much less humans being responsible for most all of the warming with a 99 percent confidence level is just laughably silly.
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable”
“ΔTglobe/Δt”
Is physically meaningless.
Precisely what I keep saying.
In temperature readings the error is often MORE than 1°C to begin with.
Guess we know where your mind is 😉
Scott Scarborough – now that would be climate science worth pursuing. Talk about a climate emergency. Most of Canada will need to relocate as well as much of the USA. Of course we well get our old sea shores back as our continental shelves get exposed. Much of Europe will need to move too.
The scary thing is the good temp proxies show we’ve been in a long term cooling trend for thousands of years. We still have peaks, but each peak tops out at a lower temp than the prior peak. This trend is now about 3000 years old.
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
We are heading to the return of normal conditions but when is still pretty unclear. There may be a tipping point of the geometry of our orbits combined with lowered solar activity that might pop us back into the return of icy conditions in a very short period of time.
One of the things people don’t seem to realize is things like the ‘caveman’ melting out of a glacier or that core drillings in Glacier National Park show that much of the worlds glaciers are only about 3000 years old. which the Ice Core Graph proxy above agrees with. We’ve been cooling for some time and it was warmer the vast majority of time in this current interglacial than it is now.
This full context is what makes this current agenda driven science so sorry to see. The IPCC says the human CO2 contribution was not significant on warming except mid last century to now. Yet even those short term increases happened in other times to the same degree even since the end of the little ice age. There is just nothing really going on here out side of natural variation that I can see.
I’d be nice if man was causing global warming because then we might be able to engineer our way out of the return of what most people call the ice age (technically we are still in the ice age but just are not as ice filled as normal in this short interglacial). But I don’t think we can do much to prevent the return to normal conditions.
“Coverage uncertainty arises from the fact that temperature stations are not evenly spaced either spatially or temporally. There has been a startling decline in the number of temperature stations reporting to the global network: there were 6000 a couple of decades ago, but now there are closer to 1500.”
Wrong.
10,000 in North america alone
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TAVG/Figures/north-america-TAVG-Counts.pdf
Based on the evidence presented here, coupled with our inability to verify Magma’s identity, I can still say with 99% certainty that Magma’s parents had no children that lived past the numerical IQ of their shoe size. Sarc/off
As for the author, I think a financial audit is in order….
Magma :
You are best advised to sit down and consider for a few minutes just how illogical and ill advised your comment is. You have made a fool of yourself.
There is good news however. Hereafter if you submit a well-argued comment or draw attention to pertinent evidence you can be sure your contribution will be considered by everyone on its merits rather than on the basis of an embarrassing record or who you are and what you’ve done – because that’s how intelligent discussion proceeds..
@Peterg : There must be some droll stuff in there.
Yep. For certain, 500 papers? That is why they use a photo-copier, it just keeps on repeating the same droll stuff over and over again.
And by now who ever built the copier should use it as adverting or then maybe not , it must be one very tired copier ( or some really tired interns).
“Magma, do you disagree with Feynman’s statement on the key to science?”
All of those that believe in the ‘science’ (AGW religious doctrine, really) disagree with it. By the way, Feynman has a beautiful chapter on probabilities and statistics (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, chapter 6 http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_06.html ). They should read that, too.
Divide the earth in twelve latitude regions. Estimate for each region a time series of surface temperatures. If these series consisted of error only, their covariances should be zero. It does not matter whether we call it measurement error or natural error. A global signal must show up as positive covariance everywhere in the matrix. I have computed the matrix for the GHCN data (pairwise deletion of missing data) for 1702-2009. With increasing latitude distance the covariances drop to zero. There is only positive covariance between latitude regions on the Northern hemisphere, the more we go in the direction of the Arctic. Conclusions up to the reader. Has this be done in studies I have not seen?
“Statistical analysis rules out natural-warming hypothesis with more than 99 percent certainty.”
Not quite. Assuming everything else is legit with what he has done (ha!), what he has actually done is to show that HIS hypothesis of how “natural-warming” works is wrong. I suspect his hypothesis is only a straw-man and does not reflect the reality of any natural climate processes.
Magma, Maybe Lovejoy obtained his qualifications from a mail order university (a certain Judge who was convicted of perjury obtained a PhD by mail order) or he paid someone to write his Thesis.
The other possibility, if he really is an expert on temperature assessment, is that he is a liar.
As his Lordship states any peer reviewer should be able to make an assessment that Lovejoy’s paper is nonsense and recommended that it be not published. Shame on the reviewers and the editor of the journal.
The result described in this paper only applies if natural variation is random and behaves like Brownian motion. As far as I know no-one has ever claimed that natural variation is stochastic. Instead natural processes are proposed to be cyclic with periods of 60 years and higher. This paper does not address this at all. Instead it reproduces standard high school physics by showing that the probablility of a dust particle in air following a path similar in shape to hadcrut4 is very small.
Magma says: April 11, 9:16 pm (paraphrased):
“Only a proctologist can recognise a turd.”
Wrong.
Come on Mosh
We need you to turn up and explain again how it is OK to change past temperatures by using an algorithm.
tonyb
In connection with various scams, particularly involving cash investments, there is a popular saying (here in Oz):
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
Perhaps this rule should be considered by CAGW alarmists but apparently that is inconvenient for them, (a classic case being the Manna hockey-stick graph).
Or, maybe there is an antonymous rule that is equally logical:
If it sounds too bad to be true, it probably is!
As a geologist I can assure you all, there never were any climate cycles prior to 1950, nor were there any afterwards. The recent warming is 99% certain to be man made, climate was totally static prior to 1950.
That’s what we need to aim for: the climate of 1750AD, 1000AD, year 0, 5000BC or 15000 years ago.
What a crock, the above is such obvious BS, the average temperature of those years varies from approximately +3 to -8 degrees C, compared to what it is today..
Natural climate cycles are the alarmists’ great heresy, which demand the immediate attention of the Climate Inquisition. For natural climate cycles are the Achilles Heel of alarmist theories, and most important, alarmists want to ensure nobody ever gets to know their dark secret that CAGW never happened in the geological record.
If the great Lew wanted to do something useful, he would probably find that those who don’t believe in natural climate cycles also do not believe, what was it now? Man landing on the moon and tobacco smoke causing cancer – and this time it would be true!!!!
Geology is a real science, while climate science is more akin to astrology. Try finding a non-government geologist who believes in CAGW and you will find it more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
Louis says:
April 11, 2014 at 10:04 pm
‘The global temperature reconstructions that Lovejoy used to go back to the 1500′s have larger uncertainties than the modern temperature records.’
With the way modern temperatures are brutalised I’m not so sure.
Lord Monckton you have spared no expense to avoid calling Lovejoy an idiot so I am going to do that for you. And I wonder when last he might have opened a book on contemporary climate data, analysis, and observed vs modeled data the rest of the world is reading.
The ‘value’ of this paper is all in its press release , and that is all you need to know about its scientific worth.
Magma says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD
Can’t get a Physics PhD to my knowledge. After BSc all science is applied science. Me BSc physics, MSc Solid State Physics for example. Having qualification and written papers does not make you right.
Magma, a hot slimy mess with no direction known.
AND this is another paper of the lowest possible scientific value with too many errors to count.
99% in physics is illogical.
Lovejoy, where have I heard that name before?
Wikipedia:-
“Lovejoy is a British TV comedy-drama series based on the picaresque novels by John Grant….
The series concerns the adventures of the eponymous Lovejoy, played by Ian McShane, a likeable but roguish antiques dealer based in East Anglia. Within the trade, he has a reputation as a “divvie”, a person with an almost supernatural powers for recognising exceptional items as well as distinguishing genuine antique from clever fakes or forgeries.”
Good Lord. Fiction, Fakes & Forgeries based in East Anglia, no wonder it sounds familiar.
Peter Miller you have stolen my thunder.
But, just to reiterate, the geological record shows that there has always been climate change in the history of this planet, well before man came along. There have been glacial epochs when the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been much higher than they are today.
Lieber Herr Frey, bitte übersetzen. Ich danke und verbleibe mit freundlichen Grüßen Ihr Michael Limburg
Statistics?? Well if you have one foot in boiling water and the other in iced water, statistically you should be quite comfortable.
It’s even worse than that, he does not understand Baysian models. He uses a hockey stick C02 record with a Hockey stick (Ammann) paleo-reconstruction to reject the (small stochastic) deduced natural variability as a cause. It never occurred to him that the Ammann data could be (is) wrong… GIGO
Their measurement precision has always bothered me. I have a very sensitive thermometer that reads to 1/10th C. The last digit bounces all around when trying to take a temperature measurement normally. And if you walk around outside with it you see all sorts of temperature gradients than span several degrees at any given time. Heck, you can even feel the gradients on your face sometimes as you walk around. There’s an 8 F difference throughout the year between my back yard and a friends back yard that lives only 5 miles away. All this doesn’t even mention the hourly, daily, seasonal, and yearly fluctuations. Yet this can all be boiled down to a global average value of unthinkable precision? Me thinks not.
From the paper
:The second innovation is to use the CO2
77 radiative forcing as a surrogate for all anthropogenic forcings. This includes not only
78 the relatively well understood warmings due to the other long lived Green House Gases
79 (GHG’s) but also the poorly understood cooling due to aerosols. The use of the CO2
80 forcing as a broad surrogate is justified by the common dependence (and high
81 correlations) between the various anthropogenic effects due to their mutual
82 dependencies on global economic activity (see fig. 2 a, b below).
######################################################
This is NOT an innovation. It is what we did in our paper. I suppose I will have to write him
Is there *anything* in climate science that is reliable and credible anymore? It seems almost every data-set, every ‘peer reviewed’ paper, every over-exaggerated ‘new study’ is tainted, and every single time in the same direction.
This latest one is a typical and blatant example of a ‘report’ designed to fulfil a pre-determined agenda – 99% ffs. It’s clearly an attempt to uplift from the ‘97.1%’ that was previously bandied about.
Keep shining the light Lord M.
This seems to be a rehash of that old standby, temperature regressed against CO2 forcing for the period 1880 onwards. Except that Lovejoy does pay attention to the residuals from the regression – key to any statistical analysis. Remarkably however, it is argued (quoting the dreaded proxies) that these residuals represent all possible ‘natural variation’. This is despite the evident poor fit of the regression over 1880-1940, as indicated by the residuals (see fig 5 of Lovejoy). By definition, residuals from a regression with a constant term must have mean 0. The temperature increase of around 0.8C is then compared to the zero-mean distribution inferred from these residuals. No surprise – such a temperature increase is very unlikely for a distribution derived in this way!
Even if I have this only half right, what can one say, especially as regards the accompanying rhetoric?
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley:
I write to support your critique of the analysis by Lovejoy.
You rightly point out that measurement error prevents the conclusion of Lovejoy from being correct. I add that here is a more fundamental reason why Lovejoy’s analysis cannot be correct.
There is no agreed definition of ‘global temperature’.
Each team which provides values of ‘global temperature’ uses a unique definition of the parameter and frequently alters the definition it uses. Your article alludes to this when it states the variations in locations and numbers of measurement sites, and when it reports the frequent changes to the calculated collations of the measurements.
These variations and changes could be responsible for ALL the observed variations in global temperature values. Simply, an undefined parameter cannot have a precision. And alteration to its definition alters its determination which alters its value. Hence, the variations in global temperature values could be a result of the variations in the applied definition(s) of global temperature.
Therefore, any claim to have determined the precision of global temperature values is spurious.
A more full explanation of these issues is in Appendix B of this item
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
Richard
““Let us … make the hypothesis that anthropogenic forcings are indeed dominant ”
Then a reduction in global temperatures would be impossible (if those anthropogenic forcings do not disappear)
A short comparison:
Magma (Latin for “the dregs”): A nobody (An avatar)
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley: A somebody ( A real person)
“mephitically”
CMoB,
As a hard working, articulate, clear thinking skeptic, you have my respect and thanks. Small criticism: The arcane words are not helpful.
Strange…….All or most of the CO2ers are looking down the road to what they hope is a “super” El Nino. This will cause an up tick in the global temps. You can almost hear them cheering for it. Anyway…..Isn’t this a naturally occurring event? Also…..How can they believe that 99% of it is caused by humans when they have spent the last several years using nature as an excuse for why the temps have flat lined.
So please explain why Prof Lovejoy only included an ‘estimate’ of measurement error and did not include an estimate of coverage & bias uncertainties? Is he assuming (or implying) that coverage & bias uncertainty are smaller than measurement error? Or did he ignore them because they can’t be ‘estimated’? Also, since the measurement error was an estimate, what was the uncertainty associated with the measurement error? Is it anything like the energy budget ‘measurement’ of .6 +- 17 w/m^2?
Aside from the fact that Global Average surface measurement is physically meaningless as others have pointed out and folks like Dr Hansen agree.
It’s worth remarking here that prior to the first Climategate revelations (17 November 2009), I hadn’t noted the expression “noble cause corruption” used except in reference to criminal violations of ethical conduct among police officers “planting or fabricating evidence, lying on reports or in court, and generally abusing police authority to make a charge stick.”
Explanations for why police are susceptible to such corruption are manifold, ranging from bribery through budget aggrandizement, but pervasive in the ranks of government thugs (both in and out of uniform) is a mutually reinforcing sense that “making the world safer” trumps and will always trump the social contract predicated on unalienable individual human rights.
So it has proven with the alarmist “climate catastrophe” cultists masquerading as scientists while actively conniving at suppressio veri, suggestio falsi with generous overlardings of outright data-cooking, not only in pursuit of big bucks in “research” grant funding but also feeding their bloated egos by way of lamestream media propaganda and authoritarian politicians praising them for “making the world safer.”
“Noble cause corruption” beyond the interrogation room with the blood-spattered walls down at the police station as these overweening underperformers glory in playing “Cops of the World.”
eo says:
April 11, 2014 at 10:26 pm
Once of the most confusing aspect of statistics to the layman is confidence limit. 100 per cent confidence actually means covering from minus infinity to plus infinity in the case of the normal curve. The larger the confidence or the higher the number of standard deviations applied meant the exercise is more imprecise and untrustworthy. At 100 per cent confidence level, everything is in.
You’re the one who’s confused. You’re confusing confidence level with confidence interval.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if there were only 100 things the world could possibly do, then no matter what it did, there would be, on average, a 99% chance against that happening. If there’s a 99% chance against something happening, then it must have been caused by humans. Since the total number of things the world could possibly do is much much larger than 100, pretty much everything is caused by humans. Right?
How certain are you that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is a natural cycle driven by changing conditions in the ocean circulation system.
I am about 80% certain of this but maybe others would only be 50%.
Have a look at just the Raw AMO index against Hadcrut4 going back to 1856. Now this is monthly data (rather than the sham of annual numbers that is used so often. The climate does not operate on annual timescales. It is operates with about 2 week periods of up and downs – little understood by most.)
The Raw AMO explains 49% of the monthly variation in Hadcrut4.
http://s8.postimg.org/7vabnd979/Hadcrut4_vs_Raw_AMO_Feb14.png
So multiply that 49% by your previous determination of whether the AMO is a natural cycle. In my case, I can say that at least 39% of the climate is driven by 1 natural climate variable alone.
Now throw in the ENSO and volcanoes and some of the other natural ocean circulation cycles and one can get up to 75% – not 1%.
It is good to see figures 1 and 2 so publicized, as rewriting of data is a core of the matter (although the HADCRUT4 subsequently displayed in this article is one of those rewritten sources).
That is not only because of its large significance in itself:
Converting relatively double-peak temperature history over the past century towards a hockey stick is what allows falsely claiming that it is unrelated to the double-peak history of solar activity meanwhile, while likewise concealing a multitude of other peak and trough matches as illustrated in http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq
As also shown there, the Modern Warm Period (the global warming scare’s basis) is similar to the Medieval Warm Period in both magnitude and prime cause.
(The common disinformation package that solar variation is too small to cause a tenths of Kelvin temperature change, global warming on the order of a 1/1000th change or less in average absolute temperature for now compared to the 1930s, is nonsense in the context of change in average low cloud cover and measured tropospheric ionization up to multiple percent, influenced by greater still variation in solar modulation of CRF).
.
@Mac the Knife 10:07 PM.
No offense intended at all in this comment. I am a huge fan of Einstein but that particular quote can not be reliably attributed to him, although it is widely reported to have been said by him. I have tried to find it and the most frequently given source is an attribution by Alice Calaprice in Quotable Einstein (1996, 2005), in which she attributes it to an issue of the Sunday Times (whose date I have unfortunately forgotten, but I think it was in the 50’s or 60’s. The issue is available online and I have looked at it (I think in JSTOR or some such) and I have been unable to find it. I am afraid it may be a widely attributed quote for which there is no reliable source. It sounds like something he would have said, if he had been asked. If you can find the source I would be grateful.
Mosher says 10,000.
Yes, but most of them have no meaning or history.
How many of them have 100 years of history and ca be used to show a long term history?
Not many.
Dilettantism, per se, in no way diminishes the quality of ones science, indeed it removes hypothetical confounding conflicts of interest. Some suggest that science is harmed by the loss of the non-professional scientist.
To sum up Monckton’s argument one need only go back to statistics 1.01. Garbage in = garbage out.
My Lord,
Mosh above mentions that he, too, has used the assumption that CO2 emissions can serve as a proxy for all anthropogenic warming influences. This, surely, cannot be sensible.
While CO2 forcing is logarithmic, what about UHI? Does it saturate? The paper admits that the understanding of aerosols is inadequate, so is lumping aerosol warming/cooling in with CO2 forcing justifiable? Take my own favourite outsiders in the AGW race, dissolved silica and oil/surfactant pollution of the ocean surface. The first will initially make a steady change in light isotope C left in the atmosphere as less heavy C is sequestered by non-DMS-producing diatoms, the latter will reduce cloud cover as salt and DMS aerosol production is suppressed and warming enhanced by surface effects, but both will saturate and the effect will level off, whereas CO2 will, according to theory, keep warming forever.
The notion of climate sensitivity, defined as the response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2, does not make sense if one simply throws all warming influences into the pot. If humans were only effecting physical processes it might do so, but not where biology is involved.
JF
Hate to say it but I think everybody is overreacting. Our poor Professor Lovejoy is not really a Killjoy after all. Let us read this line carefully:
“Statistical analysis rules out natural-warming hypothesis with more than 99 percent certainty.”
See, all his analysis has done is rule out any natural warming hypothesis that is ‘more’ than 99% certain. A natural warming hypothesis that is ‘less’ than 99% certain has not been ruled out at all and since a hypothesis, by its very definition, cannot be considered a ‘law’ his analysis essentially cannot rule out any natural warming hypothesis whatsoever.
Now, certainly we cannot expect our good professor to be such an incredibly blithering idiot, such a stupendously stupid individual, and to still be employed at such a renowned, and enlightened university of higher knowledge, if our good professor were to imbecilically state that his research does the exact opposite of what it does.
In his precision claim of 0.03 K Lovejoy ignores that temperatures cannot be meaningfully averaged. Cauchy type distribution, law of Large Numbers does not hold. Averaging a thousand stations or what have you does therefore not improve the precision as would be expected with normal distributions.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/do-temperatures-have-a-mean/
[With apologies to A. Einstein]
No amount of peer-review can ever prove me right; a single well-thought root-cause-analysis of measurement uncertainty can prove me wrong.
I wish people would be clearer. When they speak of “surface temperature” they are usually referencing surface air temperature. Considering the typical temperature of the abyss, this is not a minor point. If you wanted to know how the temperature of a car’s coolant varies, measuring temperatures at the tailpipe wouldn’t be the best approach. I like still like Willis’s article on ocean heat as measured by Argo floats http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/02/argo-temperature-and-ohc/ . If accurate, I’m not sure his figure of .03 degrees of warming per decade isn’t worrisome.
Here’s a simple experiment I give my students:
Create some data using y = mx + b + noise(10%)
Do a linear regression.
The students will find the following:
The r-value and p-value will be really good.
Both m’ and b’ will be significantly wrong.
The standard error of the estimate will be garbage.
standard error of estimate
Just because a statistician says something with 99.9% confidence it doesn’t mean that it isn’t junk. Wm Briggs has commented widely on the problem, here’s one example: link
I find the entire concept of a Global Average Surface Temperature absurd. Assuming for one second that such an entity exists. How would one go about measuring it? Just watch the weather report on your local TV and you will see different temperatures for reporting stations with in a few miles of one another. And that is for urban/suburban areas, rural and wilderness areas have even fewer reporting stations. Now recall that the Earth’s surface is over 70% water with very few reporting stations (ships) , the problem of computing the mythical Global Surface Temperature becomes unsolvable. But it gets even worse, since every year an Annual Global Mean Temperature is reported to an accuracy of 0.1C. Really? Wow.
Now a useful entity that might acutely exists would be a total atmospheric heat content. And with enough satellites measuring temperatures/pressures at various altitudes you might even be able to compute that.
Another thing that annoys me is the criticism our learned author receives for using satellite data. Satellite data is the BEST DATA we have. It’s 24/7 global data with no agenda!
I am dumb founded that someone with a PhD in physics would claim 99% certainly on a meaningless non existent entity which is unmeasurable with our current instrumentation. Had I turned in such a paper to my first year physics teacher I would have been given a F and possibly even dismissed from the class.
At least Mosher finally admitted BEST alters data. Everyone knew that, but really Mosher, why should anyone take you seriously?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1979/offset:-0.40/mean:60/plot/rss-land/from:1979/mean:60
I’m not conversant with Haar fluctuations and fluctuation analysis, so I’m going to be puzzling over the math in this paper for awhile. Still, the section above made my hackles rise. We’re getting the standard deviation by scaling multiproxies and coming up with 0.2 plus or minus 0.03K huh.
I question whether one can make such determinations from the proxies. Instruments, sure ok. Proxies? Maybe so, but I’d like to find something to convince me of it before I swallow that.
I propose that the names of all reviewers of peer reviewed papers appear on the papers.
When did climate science reach the conclusion that land use changes were less important then CO2 as an anthropological forcing?
When it’s been warmer before, certainty that it’s not natural is not science, it’s a statistical mind game filled with error and assumption.
As the saying goes When All Else Fails, Manipulate the Data.
Since we aren’t warming, doesn’t that address the natural warming hypotheses with at least 95% certainty?
The other thing I’m wondering is, what conclusion would we come to applying this statistical technique to the Little Ice Age? It seems to me that the temperature variance of the LIA isn’t established (when I look at the most dreaded <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png wikipedia page for example), and the result would depend heavily on the proxies you used. But if you buy that temperatures were .5C lower than ‘normal’ in the depths of the LIA, I find it hard to swallow that we can say with 99% confidence that running .85C high can’t possibly be natural variation.
oops, formatting error.
The other thing I’m wondering is, what conclusion would we come to applying this statistical technique to the Little Ice Age? It seems to me that the temperature variance of the LIA isn’t established (when I look at the most dreaded wikipedia page for example), and the result would depend heavily on the proxies you used. But if you buy that temperatures were .5C lower than ‘normal’ in the depths of the LIA, I find it hard to swallow that we can say with 99% confidence that running .85C high can’t possibly be natural variation.
Three sigma is 99.7% not 99%. In high energy, typically five sigma is required though, not three.
Discussed here.
Lord Monckton,
Shouldn’t the note to your Figure 2 rather read as follows?
But maybe you’re writing from Australia, in which case of course it makes perfect sense. 🙂
By the way, I think this sort of ‘tampering’ by the klimatophiliacs should be given a suitable name. How about calling it a ‘savile data massage‘?
Well done, my Lord. Don´t forget this one either: Beenstock, M., Reingewertz, Y., and Paldor, N.: Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming, Earth Syst. Dynam., 3, 173-188, doi:10.5194/esd-3-173-2012, 2012. “This means, however, that as with all hypotheses, our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint. However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels”. In your face Lovejoy!
‘Pokerguy’: I have to to disagree regarding what you describe as ‘arcane words’.
I thought Lord Monckton’s description of the offending Lovejoy paper as an ‘effusion’ and a ‘mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness’ hugely entertaining.
Sadly the use of colourful English seems to be in decline. Shades of meaning and subtlety are thus being progressively removed, and so we move ever closer to ‘newspeak’.
Yes, I agree that his description isn’t what is typically seen in a scientific paper – but thank goodness that some welcome humour is brought into the discussion!
Magma says:
A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)
===
Thank you Magma. So we are correct to conclude, from his level of qualification and experience, that Lovejoy’s paper is deliberately and deceitfully misleading. In other words a scientific fraud.
It is long over due that this sort of behaviour is called out and those writing, publishing an peer-reviewing such scientific fraud are called to account.
Mark Bofill says: “I’m not conversant with Haar fluctuations and fluctuation analysis, so I’m going to be puzzling over the math in this paper for awhile. ”
That the whole game. All the fancy stats stuff is sand in your eyes tactics. It starts out from some wild and questionable assumptions and approximations. relies proven inadequate multi-proxy mumbo-jumbo, and then pretends to get 99% significant results, in the clear hope that the method will losing any reading it.
It’s the emperor’s cloths all over again. Only really intelligent and well trained people (like Magma , LOL ) can understand it. So no one is supposed to say it’s wrong for fear of looking ignorant.
Luckily , there’s our resident classics BA educated Monckton to point the finger and cry “Look, he has no clothes!”
Thermometers: I have a about 10 them sitting in a beaker at work. About once a year I calibrate some thermocouple sensors against ice and water and boiling water (corrected for the 300 meter altitude). I include the thermometers just because they are there. We do not have good mercury thermometers anymore and the organic fluid filled ones have a horrible flaw. They contain a green dye so one can see the liquid column. I used one to monitor a hot water bath over a long period. Some of the fluid evaporated and condensed in the cooler top of the fine tube. The dye did not do the same. My thermometer now had an invisible part of the fluid column at the top and the indicated temperature was off by a nifty 10°C! During the calibration, I am happy if the thermometers are within 1° C.
Back to the calibration procedure: The ice bath is a Dewar filled with fresh snow, de-ionized water, and covered with a Styrofoam cap. It has as uniform a temperature as I can make. The best temperature indicator I have is actually a meter with a platinum resistance sensor. It indicates temperature variations of at least 0.1°C through the snow and water. Not that surprising as near the top, heat travels down the 1/8 inch diameter stainless rod of the sensor to heat the platinum resistor.
Yes I can easily measure a temperature difference of 0.01°C by making two thermocouples from the same reel of wire and hook them up in opposition. But I have no idea how one would measure an absolute temperature to that degree of precision with a limited budget. +/-0.03° from a bunch of ½° accuracy mercury thermometers stuck in wooden boxes out in the fields is ludicrous. You get a bigger change in a bare wire thermocouple by illuminating it with a laser pointer.
When I look at the paper, the model is defined as:
Tglobe (t) = … +ε(t)
As opposed to the Δε/Δt that is quoted above. The Δε/Δt could be interpreted as a derivative (what else could change over change mean?), but the ε(t) could be interpreted as a function of time.
Given that the value for ε(t) has been written as “0.03 K”, I don’t see how that could be a derivative, since it’s not given in the units of a derivative. The unfortunate thing is, according to the HadCRUT4 total uncertainty, the derivative with respect to time (decimal years) is -.0013.
See this image I made of the HadCRUT4 uncertainty that shows the slope.
The uncertainty as a function of time has a mean value of +/- 0.218, which is far greater than 0.03. So, interpreting the ε(t) as a function of time makes it hard to believe that it can just be ignored.
Digging in the paper, they say they use HadCRUT3 and two other sources for temperature data (NASA GDC and NOAA NCDC). These are gridded data, so my little plot for the global mean has a hard time applying. Don’t worry, though, things get interesting. The paper says:
Well, after scanning through the Lovejoy paper this came up: “In this paper we have argued that since ≈1880, anthropogenic warming has dominated the natural variability to such an extent that straightforward empirical estimates of the total warming can be made”. I don´t think even IPCC agrees with that? If the paper is set-up to “proove” that anthropogenic warming is dominating by first assuming that is a fact and then adjusting the input parameters accordingly, why should anyone be surprised at the outcome? Has Lovejoy been a consultant for the Crimean referendum perhaps?
In addidtion to Lord Monckton’s persistent perspicacity, his use of wonderfully descriptive phraseology such as “mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness” are a sheer delight to read, as well as often forcing one to scurry for an online dictionary.
Also, “mephitically ectoplasmic emanation” sounds like a good name for a band.
Zeke Hausfather on April 11, 2014 at 10:14 pm
Christopher,
You mention in this article that “That record showed – not greatly to skeptics’ surprise – a rate of warming noticeably slower than the shambolic legacy record.” I presume you are referring to the Climate Reference Network. Can you provide evidence that the trend in CRN stations is lower than the trend in USHCN stations? As far as I can tell, it is not significantly different: http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-Shot-2013-01-16-at-10.37.51-AM.png
In a world where the peer of scientific publications was operationg correctly the Lovejoy paper would neve have seen the light of day. Monckton’s rebuttal is of such high quality that it should be formally submitted — as a rebuttal — to the journal that published Lovejoy’s paper. And,,if they don’t publish the rebuttal, more shame on them
John Archer, I noticed the same error on Fig. 2. I am assuming the adjustment should read that 1934 was 0.1C lower and 1998 was 0.3C higher, otherwise the argument doesn’t make sense.
Not to mention the oceans and many remote locations.
Huh! That would be 1 peer reviewed paper every 2 weeks, 1 day! How is this possible? You must have made a mistake or myself.
With some exceptions, the replies to “Magma’s” comment were the winner in this one, regardless of yet another priceless piece from Lord M. Ya gotta love the precision of good and proper English delivered by an established Englishman. Even if some of it goes over my head, it goes over well 😉 Sometimes the joy is simply in the reading.
==========================================================================
If you count “adjustments” made to the data then Lovejoy might be right.
Look at the current GISS here (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt) and then look at the GISS from January 2012 here (http://web.archive.org/web/20120104220939/http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt).
Even the first numbers from January 1880 are different. What could happen between 2012 and 2014 that could change what happened in 1880? Does NASA have a time machine? Are we to believe that each and every paper record was looked at and analyzed?
I’m 99.9% certain that somebody just sat back in front of his computer and pushed a button to make the “adjustments”.
Really we need to start at the basic assumptions with any measurement system:
1) are the temperature values drawn from one days sample coming from the same population of temperatures found in any other day ?
NO, each days population of temperatures is probably and always potentially unique.
2) what is the standard deviation / error of a sample size of one ? infinity or unknown
3) what is the measurement / instrument error (limit of observation) of a mercury in glass thermometer according to manufacturers ? + – .5 degrees
4) can measurement / instrument error be altered, removed or decreased by a wave of the hand ? No, alteration requires a population of measurements from that individual instrument in situ adequate to quantify the nature & size of the error.
5) does the central limit theorem apply to any surface station temperature data ? No
a) Is the data sampled randomly ? No
b) Are sample values independent of each other ? Let me know if you can get an valid answer to this assumption applicable to the existing data set.
c) > 10% Condition ? Yes, 1 observation will be less than 10% heh.
d) Is the sample size must be sufficiently large ? No, 1 observation is somewhat too low /sarc
6) Obviously multiple, non-rigorous, ad hoc, “adjustment” of values with the wave of a hand is not going to do your certainly any favors.
Conclusion:
The conclusions of this paper are bullcrap. All surface station data is characterized by more certainty than is warranted from the data itself
Magma says: April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
” A short comparison: S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications ”
Do you realize how much BS he has produced.
Personally, I suspect he is a skeptic. He will gather statistics on how many researchers and medias will cite him. After that, he will reveal that his study was a hoax to measure the credibility of those believing in the global warming sham.
“and sufficiently small (≈ ±0.03 K) that we ignore it.”
Yeah, right.
How did this arrant nonsense pass any sort of review, and how did it get published?
Did the taxpayer pay for this rubbish?
re: Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
…now there’s peer review one can trust to be honest and thorough, not to mention humorous at times.
re: Magma
…1st rule of holes.
What all have failed to understand here from this paper by Canadian Professor Lovejoy we (Canada) have “secret” high tech the rest of you bums have not yet produced. I’d tell you but it’s very, very secret. We have, shall I say loosely, developed the ability to measure, absolutely precisely, world wide temperatures at a glance. The jealousy, so evident here, is uncalled for and downright embarrassing. Moreover, we’re developing a “stealth” snowmobile so when we invade next winter you won’t see us coming until its too late.
albertalad says:
April 12, 2014 at 10:06 am
“What all have failed to understand here from this paper by Canadian Professor Lovejoy we (Canada) have “secret” high tech the rest of you bums have not yet produced…
… Moreover, we’re developing a “stealth” snowmobile so when we invade next winter you won’t see us coming until its too late.”
___________________
Bring it, hoseurs.
(Eh?)
500 papers. I guess that makes Lovejoy 200 papers smarter than Einstein.
Alan Robertson says: Bring it, hoseurs. (Eh?)
—————-
Lol!
As a layman, I have sufficient education and work experience to appreciate facts as amply displayed by contributors to this web site.
As a layman, I have and do, ask myself who has an interest in promoting untruths against the interest of all of us on this Planet and for what purpose. I wish I could answer my own question with solid facts and can only ascertain that greed/stupidity and lust for power, supercede knowledge and its quest. May this site and its contributors garner strength and continue. Well done Anthony Watts.
“His [Anthony Watts] campaign was so successful that the U.S. climate community were shamed into establishing a network of several hundred ideally-sited temperature monitoring stations with standardized equipment and reporting procedures.”
Um no. USCRN was established before Watts started WUWT or his Surface Stations project so the the above statement is simply false.
REPLY: Yes, DRowe is correct, USCRN preceded my work. What IS true however is that as a result of my owrk, NOAA removed many of the worst stations from the USHCN network – Anthony
Many thanks to all who have commented so very kindly.
I apologize for the error in the caption to Fig. 2, where I inadvertently transposed the words “higher” and “lower”.
Lord Monckton,
It’s difficult to say which is more fun: your shafting of that squealer, Lovejoy, or pig sticking. Come to think of it, it amounts to the same thing, with the only difference being whether one does it on horseback or not.
In either case it’s a noble sport for the truly dedicated gentleman. 🙂
Stick it to ’em, m’lud! Oink oink, squeal squeal!
Presumably humans had little influence before 1950. However the slope on Hadcrut4 between 1900 and 1950 is larger than from 1900 to date. Perhaps CO2 causes cooling?
See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/to:1950/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/trend
The “500+” publications of Mr. Magma, attributed to Lovejoy, might just be the number of reprints printed to hand out to the remaining subscribers of the Montreal Gazette and the Toronto Star…
Nancy C says:
April 12, 2014 at 4:37 am
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if there were only 100 things the world could possibly do, then no matter what it did, there would be, on average, a 99% chance against that happening. If there’s a 99% chance against something happening, then it must have been caused by humans. Since the total number of things the world could possibly do is much much larger than 100, pretty much everything is caused by humans. Right?
Sure, you’re wrong. The 99% chance is only true if all 100 things are equally probable. The rest of what you say is wrong, too. Even if all things “the world could possibly do” could be caused by humans, this wouldn’t have any implication for which ones could be caused by humans or for whether any of them that could be caused by humans actually was caused by humans.
CORRECTION
Sure, you’re wrong. The 99% chance is only true if all 100 things are equally probable. The rest of what you say is wrong, too. Even if all things “the world could possibly do” could be caused by humans, this wouldn’t have any implication for which ones could be caused by humans or for whether any of them that could be caused by humans actually was caused by humans.
Delete “for which ones could be caused by humans.” The sentence should be:
Even if all things “the world could possibly do” could be caused by humans, this wouldn’t have any implication for whether any of them that could be caused by humans actually was caused by humans.
William Briggs has a hilarious take on this paper:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8061
So if the historical temperature record is ever adjusted by more than 0.03 K again, doesn’t that invalidate his basic assumption? And indirectly prove that the variation is natural?
Bob F:
You ask at April 12, 2014 at 3:18 pm
The answer to your first question is ‘yes’,
and
the answer to your second question is ‘no’.
Lovejoy’s analysis is meaningless because it assesses something which has no agreed definition so it can be – and is – often changed Please see my above post at April 12, 2014 at 3:08 am: this link jumps to it
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/lovejoys-99-confidence-vs-measurement-uncertainty/#comment-1611518
Richard
How to do a proper global temperature analysis.
Use a historical weather recreation software. This uses similar computer code that is used to predict future weather. Known temperatures as recorded by instruments or proxies help guide the progression of the weather recreation through time and space. Advantages are; known physics are used to bound the range of possible weather / climate conditions. This helps to provide an error range in further analysis for example.
Additionally, urban heat island effect computer code is used to model temperatures surrounding climate motoring instruments.
This is a tiny excerpt from the sub core project code named Bastardi, part of the much larger group of projects comprised within the code named Wattson Project. Sorry, no further details at this time. I would like skeptics to know though that something wonderful is being developed to help our cause, but much work is still to be done. Fortunately the financing is in place.
ggm
Climate Change we can believe in.
Climate Change for the better.
Weren’t the voters in Egypt and Iraq under Saddam 95% certain the incumbents were the right choice?
Please note a correction to the original text: it now says that the effect of Anthony’s campaign of inspecting the sites of U.S. weather stations led to closure of several poorly-sited stations, but that nevertheless the ideally-sited US Climate Reference Network (which in fact predated Anthony’s campaign, and was not a consequence of it as I had incorrectly stated) continues to show warming at a lesser rate than the legacy network.
The straight-line distance between where I work (Mt Vernon, WA) and where I live (Oak Harbor, WA) is about 13 miles. I’ve personally experienced temp differences as high as 27F between the two places only 30 minutes apart. In the summer, on sunny days, the difference is greatest. The average difference in Summer is about 15F. On cloudy days and in Fall and Winter the difference is much less.
John Mason’s Graphic of Greenland Ice Core
Such a cool graphic I saved it on my desktop.
My take on Dr Lovejoy’s paper is different from that of Lord Monckton. The data represent time-series, so spurious correlation must be excluded.
Autocorrelation is a problem with time-series data and must somehow be dealt with. The ARIMA model may be appropriate since it specifically considers autoregressive relationships. Stationarity of the variables is a problem that econometricians have learned to control before coming to conclusions about correlation among variables. Econometricians deal with this problem using cointegration rather than correlation.
In the case of climate, a group of Israelis found that, “global temperature and solar irradiance are stationary in 1st differences whereas greenhouse gases and aerosol forcings are stationary in 2nd differences. We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance.”
The group asked the question: Does CO2 concentration polynomially cointegrate with global temperature during the period 1880–2007 and thus support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period?
The Israeli group concluded, “We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period.”
My opinion, based on the statistical methodology used by Dr Lovejoy, is the same as Professor Wegman gave in reference to Dr Micheal Mann’s work leading to the so-called “Hockeystick”. Physical scientists should seek the assistance of professional statisticians when they wish to apply statistical models to data. Otherwise they risk the pitfalls of dubious results, not least spurious correlation.
Reference: Beenstock, Reingewertz, and Paldor Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming, Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 3, 561–596, 2012.
URL: http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/561/2012/esdd-3-561-2012.html
Jan Lindström says:
April 12, 2014 at 7:58 am
Well, after scanning through the Lovejoy paper this came up: “In this paper we have argued that since ≈1880, anthropogenic warming has dominated the natural variability to such an extent that straightforward empirical estimates of the total warming can be made”.
empirical estimates? based on guesstimations?
“Now, if you and I know all this, do you suppose the peer reviewers did not know it?” (Lord Monckton)
Beer review, Pal Review ? Well, Mylord, the villains have struck again.
It is time to let this badly reviewing academic pseudo-aristocracy hear the sound of
le “Ça Ira”:
“Les aristocrats à la lanterne…” Just to come closer to some illumination, of course.
It’s time for a revolution in peer-review, I think.
Hey guys, I know you’re having a lot of fun all agreeing with one another in here, but a lot of your arguments suffer from pretty fundamental flaws. I’m just going to drop you a line so you have something else to band-disagree on.
As a foreword, and with full disclosure, I am currently finishing an honors physics degree at McGill university. I took an electricity and magnetism class with Lovejoy, and while I found his lecturing style terribly dry, I have nothing but respect for him as a researcher. A colleague and friend of mine is collaborating on a paper with him (in the area of multifractal cloud formation) and I assure you, he happily offers first author to anybody who contributed more than him and frequently rejects/revises figures which don’t meet his scientific standards.
To the accusation that discarding the error term is invalid:
This was discussed in the article proper, and again in one of the referenced papers. Needless to say it is much better justified than this article/rebuttal accuses it of being. Physicists, of all scientists, take quoting errors VERY seriously. Not least of which non-linear physicists whose specialty is being able to distinguish stochastic data from error.
To the accusations that Lovejoy can’t have written most of his papers:
The two most published mathematicians are Erdos (who published over 1500) and Euler (whose volume of work exceeds Erdos) – ostensibly the two best respected. You’re going to have to come up with a much better reason than “there are too many of them” to disregard his work. In particular, Erdos collaborated on almost every one of his papers, yet nobody accuses his work of being invalid because of it.
To the accusations of cherry-picked data:
Cherry-picking climate data is much more widespread in the circles of climate change denial. This article/rebuttal, for example, contains figures and conclusions which appear in a vast minority of print, many of which simply exclude errors or the underlying analysis/explanation in a cheapened attempt to make a point.
Quote:
“The plus or minus 0.15C confidence interval of the UN-IPCC accepted HadCRUT4 data set proves Lovejoy’s cherry picked, prox-tology analysis and confidence interval of 0.01C is wrong.”
The recent leveling off of temperatures and the post war drop were both addressed in the article by Lovejoy and are consistent with his analysis. To those who didn’t understand the technical jargon in the article, his “fat-tailed” probability distributions really do represent the worst-case scenario (these distributions can included cases with infinite variance).
Quote:
““…In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”
Magma, do you disagree with Feynman’s statement on the key to science?”
This type of argument is commonly known as a straw man. Instead of visiting the original debate, you assert without evidence that it is equivalent to an argument you expect to be able to win (in this case, whether Feynman’s statement is correct). The same can be said of the smartass with the Einstein quote.
Quote:
“This seems to be a rehash of that old standby, temperature regressed against CO2 forcing for the period 1880 onwards. Except that Lovejoy does pay attention to the residuals from the regression – key to any statistical analysis. Remarkably however, it is argued (quoting the dreaded proxies) that these residuals represent all possible ‘natural variation’.”
This was addressed in the paper by Lovejoy, where he found the residuals from his CO2 fit were compatible with those from all natural variation. He argued that this was the case because of the tight correlation between economic activity and CO2 output.
There’s more, but that should be plenty for you to chew on.
The anonymously anonymous “Non Nomen” will forgive me for being less than enthusiastic about the notion of “les aristocrats a la lanterne!”.
@Lord Mockton
It was the “academic pseudo-aristocracy” I was referring to **GG**.
I’m pretty satisfied that a genuine Viscount teaches these “Peers” manners.
Your obedient servant
Non Nomen
Maybe someone should turn a searching eye on the other 500 papers for which he did the statistical work. “There must be some droll stuff there.”
Nice analysis, Anthony. Manipulation of the data sets is fraud, but the real question is how do they get away with it. Also, I think a 500 year measurement period is too short to verify what is happening in a 134 year target zone.
Between 1880-1945 the temperature of the earth climbed substantially maybe half the total temperature climb we’ve seen in the whole period 1880-2014. This was because of a massive run up in temperature from 1910-1940. However every estimate of co2 I’ve seen shows virtually no significant increase in co2 concentration in the atmosphere (at most 10%) compared to the 40% increase since 1945. Therefore how does lovejoy explain this unexplainable rise before 1945.
Just two points about the data.
1) I don’t understand why Monckton divided my equation by Δt because the measurement error ε(t) has statistics that are essentially independent of Δt as shown by fig. 1 (bottom curve) of the paper referenced (Lovejoy, S., D. Schertzer, D. Varon, 2013: How scaling fluctuation analyses change our view of the climate and its models (Reply to R. Pielke sr.: Interactive comment on “Do GCM’s predict the climate… or macroweather?” by S. Lovejoy et al.), Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss.,3, C1–C12, http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/ESDD.comment.14.1.13.pdf).
In the figure, I simply took 4 globally averaged surface temperature series from 1880 (NOAA, NASA, HAdcrut3, Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR)) and computed the standard deviations of their differences as a function of time scale. They all agree with each other to ±0.03K up to ≈ 100 year scales. Since one of them (the 20CR series) used no station temperatures whatsoever (only station pressure data and monthly Sea Surface Temperatures), any biases from manipulation of temperature station data must be small.
2) The multiproxies all agree well with each other up to about 100-200 year scales (see e.g. fig. 9, 10 of Lovejoy, S., D. Schertzer, 2012: Low frequency weather and the emergence of the Climate. Extreme Events and Natural Hazards: The Complexity Perspective, Eds. A. S. Sharma, A. Bunde, D. Baker, V. P. Dimri, AGU monograph, pp 231-254, doi:10.1029/2011GM001087, http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/AGU.monograph.2011GM001087-SH-Lovejoy.pdf, see also ch. 11 in Lovejoy, S., D. Schertzer, 2013: The Weather and Climate: emergent laws and multifractal cascades, 496pp, Cambridge U. Press). The multiproxies disagree with each other at longer scales, but this is irrelevant, only the statistics at 125 year scales are important.
Another way of saying this is that the actual (absolute) paleotemperatures are irrelevant, only the 125 year temperature changes are relevant.
You can have your medieval warming (and other warmings if you like, and they can be very big, bigger than the 2013 temperature if you must!), but this is not relevant to the analysis.
-Forces of Darkness
Professor Lovejoy, welcome! Mr. Monckton will be along soon to respond.
Magma says: @ April 11, 2014 at 9:16 pm
“A short comparison
S. Lovejoy: Physics PhD; climate, meteorological and statistical expert; 500+ publications
C. Monckton: Classics BA; nil; 1 (not peer reviewed)”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thanks for another great reason to push the defunding of ALL science and Universities.
If this is the type of drivel that academia now puts out we can save ourselves billions of dollars by yanking that funding. Given the huge government debts and the fact the IMF is now pushing for a 10% global wealth confiscation to put the government debts back to pre-2008 levels we need to come up with the places to cut funding. So again thank you for pointing out a very obvious area where western governments can cut across the board with little or no actual lost.
The International Monetary Fund Lays The Groundwork For Global Wealth Confiscation
Intellectually surrounded Lovejoy is. Mercy in critical applied reasoning show not. (Yoda style grammar is fun)
Intellectually surrounded with no mercy by at least these four:
1) pottereaton (comment above at April 12, 2014 at 2:59 pm) points out William Briggs’ statistical finding of Lovejoy’s inane circular reasoning => http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8061
2) both Jan Lindström (comment above at April 12, 2014 at 7:33 am) and Frederick Colbourne (comment above at April 12, 2014 at 6:44 pm) point out the Beenstock (et al 2012) cointegrating statistical analysis that Lovejoy’s naïve statistical approach cannot compete => http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/561/2012/esdd-3-561-2012.html
3) Christopher Monckton’s lead post on the certainty of Lovejoy’s lack of proper accounting for uncertainties.
4) The ‘eyes in the sky’ analysis by UAH and RSS give Lovejoy’s conclusions no love.
Lovejoy surrounded is. Viable intellectual defense Lovejoy has not.
John
I am forced to conclude that the author knowingly misrepresented what can be concluded from the investigation, and that the reviewers are incompetent. The publication should have it reviewed again and ultimately withdrawn for over-reaching.
“Please note a correction to the original text: it now says that the effect of Anthony’s campaign of inspecting the sites of U.S. weather stations led to closure of several poorly-sited stations, but that nevertheless the ideally-sited US Climate Reference Network (which in fact predated Anthony’s campaign, and was not a consequence of it as I had incorrectly stated) continues to show warming at a lesser rate than the legacy network.”
No it doesnt.
CRN rates of warming match the rest of the network quite well.
Further, the newest most accurate satillite data (AIRS) also matches the “corrupt” network quite well.
The Gold standard (CRN)
compared to the rest of the network
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-Shot-2013-01-16-at-10.37.51-AM.png
Tony
“Come on Mosh
We need you to turn up and explain again how it is OK to change past temperatures by using an algorithm.”
It’s pretty simple.
1. You can never avoid using algorithms or theories. All thought rests on assumptions.
2. All you have are records. Records require interpretation. they do not speak for themselves
example: You have a written record that claims the temperature was -198C.
You check other records and find that other records show -19.8C
You apply an algorithm that assumes the -198C was an error with the decimal shifted.
3. You do the best job you can in QA and document what you do.
basically, no record can be taken at face value. A good skeptic questions everything.
A bad skeptic puts his trust in things that are demonstrably wrong because he likes the answer.
Here is another fact
As we recover more and more records.. as we digitize old records from south america and africa, and canada, we find that the past was colder than Hansen and Jones though it was.
Go figure. more data, better answers. Keeping an open mind and a skeptical mind.. we find less wrong answers.
“At least Mosher finally admitted BEST alters data. Everyone knew that, but really Mosher, why should anyone take you seriously?”
Huh.
You dont quite get it.
1. All data is ingested from open sources. Un altered.
2. QA is applied. If a station reports -198C whlle its neighbor reports -19.8 C. we flag
the data as suspect.
3. Stations are merged where the metadata and data says they are the same station.
4. We compute the field using methods promoted and championed by skeptics
What is the field? The field is the BEST PREDICTION of what the temperature was at that location. This is called the expectation.
The raw data of a station will differ from the expection. But the expectation is the best statistical prediction of the temperature at that location GIVEN the raw data.
If a researcher wants to use the expectation as opposed to the raw data, we provide time series of the stations in two forms: raw form and adjusted to match the regional expectation.
You can use either one depending on your scientific leanings.
Since we used methods that skeptics told us would be the best methods for finding the true temperature, most skeptics should use the expectation. Why? well because that is what the method they demanded produces.
Professor Lovejoy gets two Brownie points: the first for having the courage to enter the lions’ den (we shall growl at him, but we shall not eat him), and the second for having the sense of humor to sign off as “Forces of Darkness”. Courage and a sense of humor are rare qualities among supporters of the official line on climate, so I begin by welcoming him.
He raises three points. First, he asks why I expressed terms in an equation concerned with changes in temperature over time as ΔTn / Δt ? Alas, I had a corrupt copy of the draft paper which appeared to have been written that way.
Secondly, he says that the standard deviations of the differences between his four globally averaged temperature series since 1880 (NOAA, GISS, HadCRUT3 and 20CR) agreed with one another to 0.03 K up to centennial timescales, justifying him in ignoring any error term. Here we come up against a methodological concern about the approach to error and its propagation.
I shall go along with him to the extent of observing that the least-squares linear-regression trends on the first three datasets (using monthly data) since 1880 are within 0.05 K of one another.
However, as the head posting pointed out, the 2-sigma error bars published by Hadley/CRU occupy an interval [+0.15, -0.15] K, or 0.3 K in all – ten times his error term, and a very large fraction of the 0.9 K global warming since 1880 (at which time, as my graph plotting the error bars makes clear, the error bars were considerably broader than they are today).
It follows that the conformity between the three datasets may be (and probably is) either coincidence or a consequence of inter-comparison, a deadly process in which keepers of the temperature datasets seem to indulge no less vigorously than climate modelers. The danger in inte-rcomparison that in the end everyone agrees to make the same errors.
Thirdly, the Professor argues that the data tampering to which I had referred was likely to be insignificant because one of his four input datasets, the 20th-Century Reanalysis, did not use land station temperatures at all but (if I understand him correctly) inferred the global temperatures from land station pressure data and sea-surface temperatures, and still produced results similar to those of the three temperature datasets.
While I welcome in general any reasonable attempt to calibrate uncertain and rather poorly-maintained temperature records (see Climategate emails, passim), the sea surface occupies 71% of the Earth’s surface, so I should not a priori expect that much difference between a dataset which, as to its land values, naturally had to be calibrated against existing temperature records and, as to its sea values, was dependent upon the same data as they.
Fourthly, the Professor rather optimistically says that because of the negligible discrepancy between 20CR and the rest “any biases from manipulation of temperature data must be small”. Alas, even if that too were no mere coincidence, other biases are all too evident.
For instance, McKitrick & Michaels (2007) found so significant a correlation between regional rates of industrial growth and regional rates of warming that they concluded that temperatures over land had been overstated by double between 1980 and 2002. “Using the regression model to filter the extraneous, nonclimatic effects reduces the estimated 1980–2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half”. And 1980-2002 was where the thick end of the warming since 1950 is thought to have occurred. More about that period in a moment.
Fifthly, the Professor says the multiproxies agree with one another on the 125-year timescale in question, even if they disagree over longer timescales. He says we can even take the medieval warm period as being warmer than 2013 [as the overwhelming weight of evidence from the proxy reconstructions all over the world suggests: see the medieval warm period database at co2science.org], but only the past 125 years are important.
Here again, my concern is methodological. If the medieval warm period was indeed warmer than the present, and if the rate of warming from, say, 1695-1735 was twice the fastest supra-decadal warming rate that has occurred since, as the Central England record suggests it was, then the mere fact that the 20th century warmed at a far from unprecedented rate and to a far from unprecedented absolute temperature tells us – on its own – nothing about what caused the warming.
From 1983-2001, for instance, a naturally-occurring reduction in global cloud cover caused a radiative forcing of 2.6 Watts per square meter (Pinker et al., 2005). Now, the entire anthropogenic influence from 1980 to the present, according to IPCC (2013), amounts to just 1 Watt per square meter. So the natural forcing during the period of rapid global warming that coincided with the positive or warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was thrice the anthropogenic forcing.
So, let us cast up the temperature record since 1880. From 1880 to 1910, global temperatures fell. From 1911-1945, they rose. But on any view we cannot have been much to blame, because according to IPCC the anthropogenic forcing from 1750-1950 was at most 0.6 K.
From 1951-1975 temperatures did not change. From 1976-2001, coincident with the positive phase of the PDO and the naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover, they rose. When the PDO transited to its negative phase late in 2001, at which moment the cloud cover returned to normal, the warming stopped and has not occurred since.
So the only period since 1880 during which a) the weather was getting warmer and b) we could in theory have had something measurable to do with it was 1976-2001. And during that period the natural forcing from the lack of cloud cover was thrice the anthropogenic forcing.
Based on these considerations, Monckton of Brenchley (2010) concluded that the IPCC’s interval 3.3 [1.5, 2.5] K for climate sensitivity is excessive by at least a factor 2. And that is before one takes into account McKitrick & Michaels (2007) and the statistically-significant influence of the urban heat-island effect.
As best I can make it out, Professor Lovejoy did not take into account any of these papers in his analysis. The notion that one can determine climate sensitivity to 2 decimal places, without taking into account the substantial error bars in the temperature data themselves, without taking account of the previous periods of more rapid warming and of higher global temperatures, and without taking account of the other major influences to which I have referred, is, to say the least, problematic.
Any paper that pretends to a very precise determination of climate sensitivity without taking explicit account of all these (and many more) necessary considerations amounts to little more than guesswork. Fashionable, yes. Reliable, no.
References
Monckton of Brenchley, C.W., 2010, Global brightening and climate sensitivity, in Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International Seminar on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies, World Federation of Scientists [A. Zichichi and R. Ragaini, eds.], World Scientific, London, 167-185, ISBN 978 981 4531 77 1.
McKitrick, R.R., and P.J. Michaels, 2007, Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S09, doi:10.1029/2007JD008465.
Pinker, R.T., Zhang, B., and Dutton, E.G., 2005, Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation? Science 308, doi:10.1126/science.1103159.
A few more comments:
Since I’m in the lion’s den, I might as well make a last attempt to be understood.
The peer review system functioned well:
I’de like to correct the record here: from your perspective, the peer review system worked very well – it only failed 25% of the time. Indeed, the paper was rejected from three different journals before being accepted. Ironically none of the reviewers even mentioned the main conclusion about the statistical testing. Instead, they were fixated on: a) claiming that the first part of the paper was unoriginal – and b) in one memorable case (that quoted in the acknowledgements), that the paper’s claims could not be done without a GCM, I was told to “go get your own GCM”.
In other words, the system did indeed do its best to keep out the riff-raff but no system is perfect….
No tax payer money was wasted:
Again, you should be pleased: in Canada there is currently no body that funds academic research into the Atmosphere or Climate, the conservative government axed the Canadian Centre for Climate and Atmospheric Science back in 2011; this work was unfunded.
The accuracy of the data:
The issue of accuracy of the surface measurements is overblown for several reasons
a) The key is the accuracy of the data at century scales, not at monthly or even annual scales. One could imagine that as one goes to longer scales, the estimates get better since there is more and more averaging (if each annual error was statistically independent, the overall error would decrease as the square root of the averaging period). Actually the figure referred to in the paper (the source of the estimate +-0.03 oC), shows that – interestingly – the accuracy does not significantly improve with time scale! Yet the root mean square differences of the four series (one of which uses no station temperature data whatsoever), is still low enough for our purposes: about 0.05oC. If the corresponding variance is equally apportioned between the series, this leads to about +-0.03 oC each.
b) If you don’t like the global series I picked, choose your own and then use fig. 10 to work out the probability. You will find that the probability rapidly decreases for changes larger that about 0.4oC, so that to avoid my conclusion, you’ll need to argue that the change in temperature over the last 125 years is about half of what all the instrumental data, proxy data and models indicate.
c) Again, I think there is a misunderstanding about the role of time resolution/ time scale. Taking differences at 125 years essentially filters out the low frequencies. In other words, you can have your medieval warming. You can roast the peasants, but that is irrelevant for the result.
-Forces of Darkness
“The key is the accuracy of the data at century scales, not at monthly or even annual scales.”
Please be so kind to explain to a common man at what time intervals the data is collected. How often does a meteorologist or his ADC goes out to his weather booth and takes a reading of the data reqired? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month or once a year or even once per century? I presume that the accuracy of data is best when there are as many reliable data as possible available. Unfortunately, the number of wx-stations has considerably decreased and as you may concede, satellites cannot spot every place at the required times where once a wx-station used to be. And that becomes a question of the grid applied. IMHO it makes absolutely no sense at all to choose grids that are measured in miles by three- or even four-digit numbers and then trying to interpolate data from it. As you may know, most of the earth’s surface, may it be land or sea, is notorious for the lack of reliable wx-stations.
So I quite agree with you on the required accuracy, but accuracy is, in many parts of the world, wishful thinking.
So you can’t seriously call for accuracy of data without being able to harvest them neither in required quantity or quality.
Predictions and probabilities on wishful thinking is, so it seems to me, unsound and unprofessional. That is, besides other flaws, one of the reasons why the IPCC-preferred models all failed.
Shaun,
I am beginning to like you! Having had papers rejected for similar reasons I know the frustration, especially if the reviewers appear not to have understood what the paper is about. Your paper indeed essentially proves that stochastic natural variation alone cannot explain the temperature record. What it doesn’t show is that a combination of AGW and natural climate cycles is the best explanation of the observed temperature record. It is not a binary decision between either natural variation or AGW but is far more likely a combination of both. The pause in warming is probably due to the same downturn as that observed between 1940 and 1970. The good news is that taking natural cycles into account results in lower CO2 climate sensitivity.
cheers
I have to say that I have a real concern with an underlying assumption that somehow in the 1950s global carbon emissions took off in comparison with previously. What did happen in the 1950s was a growing interest in air pollution that allowed us for the first time to quantify emissions. Prior to that our numbers are at best scant.
Consider for example the Battle of the River Plate. It took four British warships to destroy one German warship. One of the main differences between these ships was that the Graf Spee was an oiler whilst the British ships were steamers running on coal. This (amongst other things) was why the German pocket ships were such a problem they had much greater range.
Now if the transition from coal/steam to oil could produce such a greater efficiency then why do we not see any of these gains in the so called emissions estimates.
Consider also that in the 1950s/60s Europe first transitioned from dispersed space heating (mainly coal fires) to localised town gas generation (using town gas) and then to natural gas each step of which would have introduced significant carbon efficiencies and yet once again we see no evidence of this in the data.
Consider also that at the turn of the last century, massive amounts of logging and land clearing were going on in Australia as land was cleared for farming and the forests destroyed. Don’t think this is insignificant – the cleared area in Western Australia alone is almost the same size as the entire United Kingdom and all of that happened in approximately 60 years. The method used was logging and chaining where a chain was dragged through the bush after all mature trees were logged and then the piled up heaps were burned.
My point is that I have real doubts that the databases on carbon emissions are accurate before the 1950s, since the quality of the records would not be good enough, except perhaps during the highly inefficient global industrialised war that was waged in the late 1930s/early 1940s – (how can that be insignificant?).
I’m not sure what that means – in terms of the overall AGW meme but I do think that we might need to be careful in considering that human carbon emissions were only significant after the 1950s.
@pokerguy
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com
It never ceases to amaze me that the claimed precision quoted by is so far beyond the precision of the source records. Measuring temperatures to the precision often claimed is not trivial and far beyond the precision limits of the worst data in their sources.
At 9:22 PM on 13, April, Larry Ledwick had commented:
For the past thirty years, I’ve been wondering very much along these lines about the multiple-decimal-places claims of the “climate catastrophe” cadre, seldom or never with a “plus-or-minus” figure anywhere in their presentations. I couldn’t help recalling my undergraduate course in Instrumental Analysis back in the 1960s, particularly in light of all the emphasis on statistical significance since “evidence-based medicine” came to be emphasized in the 1990s.
To the best of my decidedly non-mathematical appreciation of “wriggle room” – the borderlands of uncertainty in the measurement of physical phenomena – the intrinsic defects of various investigatory methods tend effectively to compound as you build from one kind of assessment to another and so forth, until the precision and accuracy of your results are a whole helluva lot less than the sort of “pickle barrel” specificity claimed (to take one spectacular example) for the oh-so-secret Norden bombsite during World War Two.
That was when I caught the whiff of a con game.
following comments – ignore
[Please stop posting this inane comment. You do it all the time, and it makes no sense. ~ mod.]
Steve Mosher says “there are 10,000 temperature stations in N America alone”.
But the graph at his link seems to indicate that although there were about 10,000 recently its down to about 600? If so, what is the reason for the big change?
Do temperature stations always measure the same thing, eg do they all do max and min over a 24 hour period, or do they do samples at set points in time.
Professor Lovejoy’s latest response is remarkable in a number of respects. First, it leaves almost all the points in the head postings and in my detailed response to his earlier comment unanswered.
Let me begin, as before, by finding something to agree with. The fact that none of the reviewers who (rightly) rejected the paper did so on the most obvious ground – that the statistical analysis is, to put it mildly, defective and the result unduly ambitious in the precision claimed – merely confirms how unsatisfactory the pal-review system has become.
I also agree with Professor Lovejoy that the insistence of one reviewer that he “go get his own general-circulation model” reflects badly on the pal-review system. GCMs have visibly failed to predict global temperature accurately, and the inference is that they have overegged climate sensitivity just as they have overegged warming.
And I am delighted that the Canadian Prime Minister accepted advice from me and others that no more money should be spent on nests of totalitarians masquerading as “scientists” and making fortunes at the taxpayer’s expense by whipping up a baseless scare among innumerate, woolly-headed politicians and journalists.
Also, for the sake of being maximally agreeable, I agree that taking periods that are approximate multiples of the 60-year cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will be less prone to naturally-caused distortion than other periods. 125 years is close enough (though, in the global instrumental record, the mean PDO cycle length is around 58.4 years, so 117 years would have been better than 125).
Professor Lovejoy suggests that I do not understand what he did. I understand it all too well. I also understand what he did not do. It is simply not pardonable to hand-wave about how errors may perhaps get smaller the longer the period of record. For with global temperature records the error bars get considerably larger the further back one goes.
Let us put some numbers on it.
On HadCRUT4 for February 2014, the central estimate of global temperature followed by the uncertainty interval is +0.30 [+0.14, +0.46] K, a range of 0.32 K. However, for January 1850, the values are –0.69 [–1.09, –0.29] K, a range of 0.8 K. And we’re only talking about a warming thought to be 0.9 K, of which some appreciable fraction – perhaps as much as a third – probably did not occur in reality at all.
And the Professor, with a bit of statistical jiggery-pokery, can magic these substantial uncertainties away? I don’t believe it. I don’t think he had any idea how large the error-bars on the monthly temperature anomalies are. Most people – including climate scientists – don’t. Do you see any error-bars on the global temperature record shown in the IPCC’s summaries for policy-makers? Of course not: they would give the game away at once. The measurement error is a substantial fraction of the total claimed warming. They have to hide the error-bars so they can keep on telling us “the science is settled” when even the quantum of warming isn’t.
Yet in real physics, rather than in the fantasy world of the modelers, every result is dependent upon measurement, and every measurement is subject to a measurement error, so every result is – at least to the degree of the measurement error – uncertain.
One is reminded of Richard Feynman’s celebrated remark that if one finds oneself having to try to demonstrate a result by statistics rather than by math and physics one should stop and rethink.
Furthermore, the annual errors are not statistically independent: that was the whole point of my demonstrating just a couple of examples of the data tampering that has been going on. There are many more such examples globally. One cannot, therefore, pray in aid the alleged “independence” of the monthly temperature readings from one another in the hope that the large errors will sufficiently diminish over time.
By the time one takes into account deliberate biases from rent-seeking scientists wanting to sex up the temperature record to keep the panic dollars flowing, and inadvertent biases from the urban heat-island effect, and failures to take into account natural forcings such as the cloud-cover forcing that was thrice the supposed anthropogenic forcing from 1983-2001, I say again that it is simply not possible to declare a climate sensitivity to two decimal places, as Professor Lovejoy has done.
When I was taught math (I’m still learning), one of the first things I was taught was not to express a result to a precision greater than that of the least precise of the initial conditions. Professor Lovejoy has offered insufficient justification for breaking that rule.
How, then, will climate sensitivity be determined? Even if there were a definitive method of determining it to a precision of, say, 0.5 K, I am not sure that the profiteers of doom in the climate-science industry would ever accept it. My own approach to determining it is to go back to the central physical equations. The errors in those equations are numerous, and – like the temperature tamperings – they all point in the direction of exaggeration.
So we are going to have to continue the CO2 experiment and just wait and see. In November 2006, when I first put my head above the parapet and asked questions in public about the official viewpoint, I said that some warming was to be expected, but on balance probably not very much. There were shrieks of rage from the totalitarian academic Left when I wrote that, as the Climategate emails show. Well, from November 2006 to March 2014, taking the mean of the two satellite datasets, the least-squares linear-regression trend has been just 0.06 K, equivalent to 0.8 K/century, exactly the same as in the 20th century. In other words, not a lot.
Sorry, sir, but your paper was bad science, bad math, and bad statistics.
Reading Professor Lovejoy’s paper, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t written with tongue firmly planted in cheek!
It is the hockey stick in disguise, complete with finely crafted handle, created with input by the master himself and finished off with “Mikes Nature trick”.
Which explains his thinly veiled snark about roasting peasants (#comment-1612991):
Put simply, it is natural variability flat-lined with a grafted athroprogenic / “Data” uptick!
Have a closer look, it is hokey statistical!
I hereby christen this paper the “Hokey Stat” 🙂
The first point that needs to be made is Moncton’s “Corrupted Paper” which he insists he has and is the reason he got the maths wilfully wrong, was clearly pointed out to him. This should be a clear indicator of the type of person we are dealing with here. Then his claim that “the Climate Reference Network [showed] a rate of warming noticeably slower than the shambolic legacy record” this in Moncton’s language is verbal diarrhea. Moncton goes on, and on, and on about the amounts of warming and cooling over the last 125 years and how it can’t be specifically attributed to anthropogenic causes, but alas! Lovejoy shows where Moncton was wrong and of cause Moncton concedes, stating “I agree that taking periods that are approximate multiples of the 60-year cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will be less prone to naturally-caused distortion than other periods. 125 years is close enough”. But at the end Moncton thinks all the data sets are corrupted as he states “keepers of the temperature datasets seem [to] agrees to make the same errors.” All these conniving traits are key to his inability to publish anything in a peer review journal.
[snip. Enough with your ad hominem junk science. ~ mod.]
At last, that rarity these days, a sneering troll who, in the end, resorts to referring readers to a Communist blog funded by a convicted internet-gaming fraudster. Meanwhile, the world fails to warm as ordered, though the ridiculous Whittless, who as far as I know has published no more in a peer-reviewed journal than Al Gore, demonstrates his unfamiliarity with the reviewed literature by suggesting that I have never published anything there. More homework needed, one feels.
I hope you can see with your eyes the irony of you calling someone a troll.. At the end of the day I dont mind who runs a particular website, as long as the facts are true about you, which in this case they are, so it will suffice. I only wonder why anyone would let you post the profanity you sequester. But you only have to look at the Heartland Institute funding for WUWT to see why they allow you. By all means amuse us all with a link to your published peer reviewed journal article, because you can’t just keep pretending something exists in the hope someone out there will believe you mockton.
Michael,
You are contributing about as much to this thread as a drunk who comes to dinner and craps himself. You haven’t contributed anything, refuted anything, you haven’t even delivered an impressive insult. Pathetic and poorly organized ad hominem has been the best you’ve been able to deliver. I expect your comments have largely been ignored until now because nobody cared to get cockroach guts on their shoe by stepping on you.
Since you apparently lack the self awareness to realize it, let me do you a favor and point out that you are accomplishing nothing here except demonstrating your intellectual bankruptcy and petty spite. It’s embarrassing to have to point that out to another human being and nobody enjoys it, so why don’t you scurry off and spare the rest of the readers the disgust of dealing with you.
Sincerely.
What is there to add, that paper speaks for itself.. It clearly comes to a 99% confidence rate of anthropogenic warming over the last 100 years. The paper explains that given the error bars from each data set are averaged out and with the use of four different data sets coinciding within 0.03oC of each other, 0.03oC became the new error bars. The paper shows over 125 year intervals from the year 1500, volcanic eruptions and solar forcing are constant and there was no climate shift at all. Not until the beginning of 1900 that CO2 forcing is added to the climate system do we see a climate shift. Nothing else changes, solar stays the same, volcanic eruptions stay the same. To add more confidence to the results the paper even considers aerosols and CO2 temperature lag. The paper is spot on and the only remark that is being stated by Monckton is his distaste for such a high confidence rate, and that remark is based on conspiracy theories.
Michael Whittemore,
Read this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/claim-odds-that-global-warming-is-due-to-natural-factors-slim-to-none
…because you’re fixated on your True Belief that man-made global warming exists. It doesn’t, at least not to any measurable, observable degree.
db
The link you gave explains the Lovejoy paper in good detail, it does not contradict it. This post of Moncktons is an attempted rebuttal of the paper. This is why I am here.
I noticed before you linking your Greenland temperature record which can be seen here http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg Last time we spoke I told you that it was a fake! Yet you still use it, again I will show you the facts http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210klarge.png
Michael,
In which case, why are you posting? You freely admit you’ve got nothing to contribute.
Could you possibly demonstrate any more clearly that you have no concern about questionable scientific methodology and that you are suffering from confirmation bias, because I’m at a loss to imagine how. Doing away with the error bars because the data are close? Do you think this is acceptable in principle or will you admit that this is acceptable to you only because you like the result?
So you move on to demonstration that not only do you not understand the paper, but that you are ignorant of the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. Dr. Lovejoy makes an argument that MWP and LIA are irrelevant,
but his argument is not that they did not occur.
Presumably because you like the result.
Cockroach overachiever award! Not being content with establishing that you’ve got nothing to contribute, that you couldn’t possibly care less about questionable scientific methodology, that you don’t understand the paper and appear to be ignorant of the mainstream accepted historical temperature record, you proceed to show that you have poor reading comprehension skills. Additionally, it speaks none too highly of your critical thinking abilities if it does not trouble you at all that such claims are derived from noisy and unreliable proxies. If this is all you could gather from what Lord Monckton wrote, perhaps you should close your mouth, put on your big boy pants, and try reading again. Slowly.
The cherry on top of the turd sundae. The accusation of conspiracy theory.
Having advanced your own baseless conspiracy theory,
you proceed to accuse others of indulging in conspiracist ideation. Well, no thanks. I deal with cleaning sewer spills like that enough when the topic of Dr. Lew comes up, I’m not taking a dive back into that sceptic tank to follow an amateur cockroach.
Please don’t hesitate to respond if I can be of any further assistance.
How many times do you want it repeated Mark, 3 data sets 1 completely independent, adding them all up and focusing on 125 year intervals, reduces the error bars and this is the same for the paleoclimate records. What number do you want the error bars to be? How many different independent data sets do you want? If one person sees you walking down the street then another sees you and then another, then a bus full of people drives by and they all see you! There is a high probability you are walking down the street. The probability is not the same for each person like Monckton suggests, but for all of them combined.
Your MWP and LIA comment suggests that you did not read the paper or you did not understand it. The paper found that solar and volcanic forcing are constant, this means that even if solar forcing was slowly increasing, the warming was constant. When looking over 125 year intervals there was no significant climate shifts, the climate is steady up until 1900.
Monckton makes himself very clear, the data sets have big error bars! But he thinks that all the data sets even if we had hundreds of them from multiple sources, would not matter, because they would all be corrupted. As he stated “keepers of the temperature datasets seem [to agree] to make the same errors.”
Michael,
Arguments of substance? Good. This is an improvement.
The paper did not find that solar and volcanic forcings are constant. The paper did not say that warming was constant. The paper argued that solar and volcanic forcings are stationary. You need to understand the difference between the terms constant and stationary for this to make sense. A stationary time series doesn’t mean it’s constant, it means it’s statistical properties don’t vary over time.
I have read the paper. I don’t understand Haar fluctuations or fluctuation analysis, as I’ve previously stated in this thread. I know a little bit about error propagation in general though, and this:
sure isn’t the way I learned to handle uncertainties. In my experience, given X and Y with uncertainties then the uncertainty of Z(X,Y) is obtained by adding the uncertainties of X and Y in quadrature. It is possible that I overlook some valid statistical technique which can be used to reduce uncertainty in this case. Regardless, the statement I quoted in the paper is enough to justify scrutiny of the handling of uncertainty in my eyes.
With nothing but genuine respect for Dr. Lovejoy, I do not say that Dr. Lovejoy is wrong. I say that I am not convinced that Dr. Lovejoy is right.
Finally,
Why don’t you let Lord Monckton speak for himself? Nobody needs you to tell us what he thinks when he’s commenting on the thread personally.
Michael
I wrote an article on noticeable climate change in which I concluded that the 50 year or longer centred paleo proxy record failed to capture real world temperatures where we all actually live
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
You will also Note there a carefully researched glacier record. So glaciers advanced and receded even though climate was static.?
The highly variable climate with its severe downturn to the lia! the astonishing recovery between 1695 and 1740 and then the downturn again are all illusory?
The records show a notable upturn in the first half of the 16th century and a generally settled climate as warm or warmer than today from around 850ad to around 1200ad with another notably warm period around 1350
Tonyb
Michael Whittemore says:
“I noticed before you linking your Greenland temperature record which can be seen here http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg Last time we spoke I told you that it was a fake!”
Take up your truly ignorant complaint with Prof. R.B. Alley. He provided the data, as you could see right in the chart if you had only looked.
You also don’t seem to understand that there is not just one ice core data source, and that each one shows some variation from the others. But in general, they all agree. And the fact is that the chart you linked to has no identifiable provenance. Apparently it was fabricated by one of the alarmist blogs you frequent for your misinformation, and now you pass it off as “the facts”. But as we know here, baseless assertions like that are dismissed as baseless opinion.
Your religious belief in climate catastrophe does not permit you to open your mind to any other point of view, or any facts that contradict your True Belief. It is amazing that despite the debunking of every alarmist climate prediction, that anyone can still take them seriously. Cognitive dissonance is the explanation: accepting only those limited things that allow you to remain a True Believer, and rejecting everything else.
One more time: EVERY alarmist prediction has failed. No exceptions. There has been no runaway global warming, despite [completely harmless, beneficial] CO2 rising steadily. All alarmist predictions were that “carbon” would cause climate catastrophe [otherwise, who would really care?]
There is nothing anyone can say that would open Whittemore’s mind. Fortunately, he is one of only a small clique that still believes in their CAGW nonsense [WUWT has far more readers than all the alarmist blogs combined]. The rest of us can look out the window and draw reasonable conclusions. Only the Whittemore types try to tell us the real world isn’t the way we observe it. Luckily, there aren’t very many in his clique, and as the world fails to warm, there are fewer every day.
For the sake of completeness, I still question the standard deviation of 0.2C derived from the multiproxies. The text in figure 7 says:
…and the dashed lines show one standard deviation error bars estimated from the three 125 year epochs indicated in fig. 5 indicating the epoch to epoch variability.
Figure 5 shows the means of the three multiproxies, with associated uncertainties +/- 0.084C, +/- 0.083C, and +/- 0.093C. Really? Maybe so, what do I know. That seems astonishing to me, that the proxy error bars are that tight. If I understand properly, the .2C standard deviation is key for making the statistical decision about natural vrs. anthropogenic.
DB stealey
I note that your graphic and the one from MIchael use a different temperature axis to each other on the left hand side. Surely if you add Michaels 1.44C to the 1855 Easterbrook figure we end up with a value somewhat lower than the MWP. Is that correct or am I misreading it?
To make a proper comparison the graphics ought to be on a like for like basis.
Mind you, I am always bemused as to why the ice cores are thought to be such a reliable global proxy as they certainly don’t reflect current circumstances-the arctic being much warmer, relatively, than elsewhere and with some places actually cooling sharply over the last decade..
tonyb
tonyb,
I have no idea where M. Whittemore’s graph came from. I agree that they are different. I was pointing out that his assertion that his graph shows “the facts” and claiming that the one I posed by R.B. Alley was a “fake” should be reversed: his graph has no provenance, while the one I posted has “by R.B. Alley” in the graph.
Whittemore can post whatever he wants here. But I am careful to link to credible charts, and do not appreciate them being called fakes. That was his opinion, and like most of his assertions, it is wrong.
Mr Whittemore, who displays a poor understanding of elementary statistics, tries to assert that averaging several datasets each with large error bars produces a new dataset with error bars that are less large. There’s no legitimate way to tighten error bars of 1º C and more – the errors that obtain from 1500-1990 – and obtaining an error-bar of only 0.03º C. I suspect that Professor Lovejoy did not know how wide the error-bars were. Even in the 20th century, the uncertainty interval (to 2 standard deviations) is 0.8º C at the beginning of the century, and 0.3º C at the end. The HadCRUT4 dataset, which is publicly available, publishes not only the central estimate of the monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly but also the error interval, together with the individual contributions from the measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties.
No amount of statistical prestidigitation can make so large an error interval disappear. Professor Lovejoy accordingly produced a result based on a misunderstanding of the reason for and the extent of the errors in measuring global temperature, combined with a further misunderstanding of the additional uncertainties introduced by the poor representation of aerosols and of variations in global cloud cover. Taking all of these uncertainties together, no definitive conclusion can be reached by any method about climate sensitivity. In my own published papers on the subject, I say no more than that the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration will probably be less than 1º C, which was heresy at the time when I first published it but is now increasingly widely supported in the reviewed literature.
For the biggest uncertainty of all is in the determination of the temperature feedbacks that, in the models, multiply the small direct warming from CO2 by 3. There are powerful mathematical reasons why any such large multiple is implausible, if not impossible. The direct warming from CO2, all other things being equal, is little more than 1º C. And we do not even know whether all other things are equal: for the climate exhibits formidable temperature homeostasis, and it is possible that warming will be even less than the 1º C that theory suggests. For these reasons, even the IPCC has abandoned its attempts to identify a best estimate of climate sensitivity.
Lord Monckton provides an excellent example of why on-line peer review is far preferable to the usual old timey peer review process. Thousands of reviewers are more knowledgeable than 3, even if 900 out of every thousand may be less educated. Crowd sourcing works, and it works well — it is much better than pal review when it comes to honest science.
Dr. Lovejoy’s paper has been ripped to shreds here and elsewhere. Of course he doesn’t see it, because he views it as his ox being gored, instead of the way he should view it: as an advance in scientific knowledge. Only those hypotheses that remain standing after skeptical review can be considered valid science. Lovejoy’s paper fails, but he should not be criticized for trying. Falsifying his claims is worth something. The basic problem for people like Dr. Lovejoy is that the Real World does not agree with, or support his conclusions. And Real World observations always trump assertions — cf: Feynman
Lovejoy also appears to have no understanding of the climate Null Hypothesis. Nothing observed now is either unusual, or unprecedented. It has all happened before, and to a much greater degree — prior to human industrial emissions. Thus, there is no “human fingerprint” discernable in global warming. There never was.
Mark Bofill says: April 16, 2014 at 10:37 am
I agree with what you said, “A stationary time series doesn’t mean it’s constant, it means it’s statistical properties don’t vary over time.”
Tonyb says: April 16, 2014 at 11:02 am
Now I know where Monckton cut and pastes from! As you state “CET [Central England Temperature Record] is said by a number of scientists to be a reasonable proxy for global”.
When you use all the proxy data sets the warming during the last century becomes more in line with Lovejoys paper http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/clip_image0041.jpg. A question though, why does the year 1820-1920 take the form of a century and all the others are in 50 year gaps? And also to further the Lovejoy paper, he looks at 125 year intervals, not 50 years as you have.
dbstealey says: April 16, 2014 at 11:03 am
The graph is fine db! It’s the fact it ends at 1855!!! That is not the Hockey Stick at the end.
Monckton of Brenchley says: April 16, 2014 at 6:03 pm
A person with the worst reputation in the climate change arena! Or a distinguished scientist..And I quote Mr. Lovejoy (Shaun Lovejoy says: April 14, 2014 at 6:10 am) “The key is the accuracy of the data at century scales, not at monthly or even annual scales. One could imagine that as one goes to longer scales, the estimates get better since there is more and more averaging (if each annual error was statistically independent, the overall error would decrease as the square root of the averaging period). Actually the figure referred to in the paper (the source of the estimate +-0.03 oC), shows that – interestingly – the accuracy does not significantly improve with time scale! Yet the root mean square differences of the four series (one of which uses no station temperature data whatsoever), is still low enough for our purposes: about 0.05oC. If the corresponding variance is equally apportioned between the series, this leads to about +-0.03 oC each.”
Michael
The 1820 to 1920 period is the only one where two consecutive 50 year records averaged out the same. Which illustrates the difficulties in using long term paleo proxies, because as you can see the temperature oscillated considerably and the average of lots of extremes is not really an equitable climate.
We are far better to look at the annual and decadal record which shows the often astonishing variability of our climate rather than the longer term which averages it out to something it never was.
tonyb
db Stealey
I’m still bemused as to why arctic ice cores should be seen as a good proxy for global temperatures when our experience shows the Arctic often does not reflect what is happening elsewhere.
Also, as far as I can see Michaels 1855 figure plus 1.44C still puts us below the MWP doesn’t it?
tonyb
climatereason says: April 16, 2014 at 11:50 pm
“The bottom black line shows his 1855 “present”, and it intersects the red line in the same places as his chart. I’ve added a grey line based on the +1.44ºC quantum calculated from the GRIP temperature data, and two blue crosses, which show the GISP2 site temperatures inferred from adjusted GRIP data for 1855 and 2009.” (http://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm)
Michael,
And we’re back to the slime carnival of logical fallacies I see. I hoped for better, for a moment there you were doing well.
Listen to me for just a minute, please. I’ll try to be as brief and clear as I can.
Do you like the fact that when your turn the key in your car, you can be confident that the machine won’t suddenly explode and kill you? That you can sleep on an long flight with high confidence that you’ll wake up alive? That you can flip light switches, drive over bridges, and so on, and take it for granted that nothing catastrophic is at all likely to happen?
That confidence doesn’t come for free. Guys like me (engineers), use mathematical and scientific principles, developed by guys like Dr. Lovejoy, to accomplish these things. But we care about these things because they work, not because of anybody’s credentials. I listen carefully when guys like Dr. Lovejoy speak, not because their credentials mean they are right, but because their credentials flag them as someone I’d expect them to have a legitimate point. But they have to be able to demonstrate that what they claim is true for me to be able to accept it. I don’t have the luxury of taking their word for it. I either have to understand why they are correct, or be able to demonstrate statistically that even though I don’t fully understand the science that I can depend on it in some context. That’s my responsibility as an engineer. That’s why the world (well, the civilized world anyway) is a more or less safe place, despite all of the rolling gasoline bombs we ride around in and all the cruise missiles we sit in to get from place to place.
To make matters worse, it’s not always black and white. Dr. Lovejoy makes an argument about the 0.03C. It’s not (in my view anyway) that he is certainly wrong, the problem is that the approach he uses doesn’t appear to pass the standard rigor tests I’m used to. Sure he could be right. Has he demonstrated that he’s right? That’s the question.
This is plenty hard enough without guys like you running around injecting smear or logical fallacy into the mix. Give it a rest.
Mark Bofill says: April 17, 2014 at 6:24 am
I don’t think you understand who Monckton is.. Go and research who he is and what he has done. Until then don’t tell me how I should behave.
Michael,
How can you not understand this? Lord Monckton could be Adolf Hitler or the second coming of Christ himself and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference regarding the validity of his arguments. Same for Dr. Lovejoy, same for you, same for me. If the most evil guy in the world observes that gravity near the earth accelerates objects at 9.8 m/s^2 in a vacuum, what does his evil have to do with the correctness of his observation? If Mother Teresa were to tell you cyanide isn’t poisonous to humans, what difference does it make that it’s Mother Teresa saying it?
You understand this. You’re choosing to ignore it. Am I right?
Michael
Neither you nor DB Stealey has answered my question as to why the Arctic ice cores are seen as such a good proxy for the globe? The arctic-as it is currently-often seems to go its own way.
tonyb
Monckton Bunkum Part 1 – Global cooling and melti…: http://youtu.be/fbW-aHvjOgM
Mark Bofill says: April 17, 2014 at 7:31 am
How can you not understand? Monckton is well known for what he does and he has not rebutted Lovejoys published peer reviewed paper or even had a comment posted to the journal. He simply feels that “By the time one takes into account deliberate biases from rent-seeking scientists wanting to sex up the temperature record to keep the panic dollars flowing”… that some how this means Lovejoy should have had bigger error bars..
climatereason says: April 17, 2014 at 7:38 am
Tony B did you not link some work you did on the Central England Temperature Record? and claim it is good for a global perspective? Either way, no, it is definitely not a global record, its one at one spot on the whole Earth!. Which is also why claiming at the end was the Hockey Stick is ridicules!
TonyB,
Polar temperatures are a good proxy for global T over long time frames per the 2nd Law. Heat does not remain in one place, it tends to even out, planet-wide. If polar T begins to rise or fall over long time frames, it is reflecting what is happening with global temperatures.
Polar temperatures are not precise records of the past. But they do show long term trends, which are corroborated by other proxies like stalagmites, tree rings, etc. Ice cores are accepted by the scientific community as being representative of long term changes in global temperatures. Only a few anti-science cranks like Michael Whittemore believe that both Poles [which both show concurrent rises and declines in T over long time frames] are ‘one spot on the whole earth’. But there is no teaching people like that, is there?
M. Whittemore says:
I don’t think you understand who Monckton is.. Go and research who he is and what he has done… Monckton Bunkum… And so on.
Whittemore, you are a truly despicable character. Take your ad hominem attacks and accusations elsewhere. Readers of thinly-trafficked blogs like SkS might like your invective, but it is not appreciated here. Lord Monckton is a better man than you will ever be, doubled and squared.
And:
The graph is fine db! It’s the fact it ends at 1855!!! That is not the Hockey Stick at the end.
Now that we’re back to discussing science facts and observations, this chart is recent. So what is your complaint now? And where is Mann’s bogus Hokey Stick? It seems to have disappeared for the past 17+ years. That is a long time, especially considering all the wild-eyed predictions from the alarmist crowd — all of which have been falsified.
When one’s predictions have all turned out flat wrong, normal people re-assess their position. They admit that their conjecture was wrong. But not the swivel-eyed lunatics who comprise the alarmist crowd. They refuse to believe what the planet is clearly telling us: that CO2 is not the bogey man they thought it was. In fact, there is no evidence whatever of any downside due to the rise in CO2. It is harmless, and beneficial. More is better. Not that Mr Whittemore could ever accept that fact.
Finally, Michael Mann’s predictions have been debunked. ALL of them. He has zero credibility now. The question is: why do you still Believe? Planet Earth is decisively showing that Mann was flat wrong.
Where is your god now? Time for a new religion, eh?
Michael,
Lord Monckton puts forward his (rather uncharitable) opinion of the motivation of ‘rent-seeking scientists wanting to sex up the temperature record’. If you find that offensive, OK. I can understand where you’re coming from. I’m not much concerned about anybody’s opinion in that regard.
So vehemently disagree with Lord Monckton’s opinions. Let’s say I do too, just for the sake of argument. OK? Just to see where it takes us. That dirty Lord Monckton, how dare he make such outrageous claims about panic dollars. Preposterous!
Great. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what’s left? Oh, the error bars.
What’d be really great is if I could show that pesky Viscount that he’s full of it. Wouldn’t it? I think so! Let’s try. Let’s take a look at error bars and how we deal with them. Let’s google it.
Errors: What they are, and how to deal with them a PDF of a series of lectures from Rutgers University. I read the document and see that the basic approach for combining uncertainties is to add them in quadrature (Refinement of the rules for independent errors). Is that what Dr. Lovejoy did? Hmm. Doesn’t look like it.
Error Propagation and the Meaning of Error Bars another PDF, this one from the University of British Columbia. This one is more in depth. There’s a method if I know the covariances of the variables. They warn of some pitfalls, and talk about the more general approach again of combining uncertainties in quadrature. They warn that even though this is widely used, it won’t necessarily give the correct answer! Combining uncertainties is a complicated subject. Did Dr. Lovejoy deal with this? Hmm. It looks to me like he dismissed the whole issue.
ERROR ANALYSIS INTERLUDES:…Adding in quadrature is the rule we use when we think the two errors are
independent of each other. In the example above, it’s quite likely that your measurement
is too low and your friend’s is too high, or vice versa. However, if the two quantities are
not independent of each other, for example if the same person paces off both halves of
the field with a systematic error in stride length that effects both halves equally, then
adding in quadrature isn’t the right thing to do. In that case, the errors would simply add
together….
So on and so forth.
It is not for me to presume to teach Dr. Lovejoy, who obviously has a vastly stronger grasp of maths than I do, how to handle propagation of uncertainty. I’m not delusional. I’m not going to disrespect the man by approaching him with my bachelor degree understanding of how to handle this. He already knows it better than I do. He teaches guys like me how to do this stuff for a living. I don’t know why he approached the problem the way he did. I can speculate all day, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that I’m not permitted to take his word for it. For whatever reason, he wrote his argument the way he did. It doesn’t look like he handled the error bars properly. If I’m making an error, or overlooking something that makes his approach OK, I’m sure somebody sharper than me will eventually bring that to light. Until then though, it’s not persuasive.
Darn, right? It would have been lovely if the evil Lord Monckton had it wrong and I could have shown it. Oh well. That’s the way it goes.
Huh, did I hose my links? Must’ve screwed up the formatting. Here:
Errors: What they are, and how to deal with them
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/ugrad/389/errors.pdf
Error Propagation, and the Meaning of Error Bars – UBC …
http://www.phas.ubc.ca/~oser/p509/Lec_10.pdf
ERROR ANALYSIS INTERLUDES – the Department of Physics
http://www.phys.uconn.edu/~hamilton/…/laberrors.pdf
dbstealey says:
April 17, 2014 at 8:48 am
LOL 🙂 I am extremely happy you have a new graph db, if anything, you have made all this worth it.
Mark Bofill says:
April 17, 2014 at 9:16 am
If you have one data set that when averaged says that globally May 1901 was say 21oC and then you have three other data sets that all say May 1901 was within 0.03oC of 21oC. How many data sets would you need before you could have high confidence that globally May 1901 was 21oC +-0.03oC?
Michael,
We’re scrambling together two different concept.
1) Using the error bars:
If I had one data set that says globally May 1901 was 21C +/- .03C and the errors were done properly I’d be confident. The trouble may be that we’ve become desensitized to seeing mutually exclusive claims being treated as if they’re all correct. If I have a dataset that says 21 +/- .03C and another dataset that says 22 +/- .03C, a mistake has been made somewhere. They can’t both be right, the error bars don’t even overlap. In this case, I treat all of the error bars as suspect. Lest you start to think this is unreasonable, remember how nice it is that cars don’t explode for no apparent reason when you crank them.
1b) Applying this to the real problem at hand:
Say, let’s check Lord Monckton’s claim about Hadcrut4. Maybe he was blowing smoke and we can catch him at it:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/diagnostics.html
Looks to me like the error bar on Hadcrut4 run around 0.2C prior to 1900 actually, according to the method of Mark 1 Eyeballing. Maybe 0.1C or 0.15C in modern times? Hey, the magic of fact checking, it looks like Lord Monckton may have overstated the case.
This being said, the error bars are a heck of a lot more than 0.03C. If we don’t know the temperature in 2000 better than +/- .1C, how to swallow that we know the temperature to within +/- 0.03C hundreds of years ago?
2) Forget the error bars and look at each dataset as an observation:
With enough observations we can get a handle on this. The expected value of a random variable is the mean, so averaging the observations gives us an estimate of the expected / most likely value. With enough observations we use the sample mean and the observations to compute the sample variance and standard deviation, and we can use those to estimate confidence intervals to put probability bounds on the estimate of the mean. The trouble with this approach is it takes more than 3 or 4 observations to get a good estimate, unless you already know the characteristics of the population you’re sampling. The estimate improves with the number of observations. I think the rule of thumb is around 40 minimum when you don’t know anything about the population ahead of time.
Michael
Britain is a ‘weather vane’ surrounded by ocean and very well tied in with weather systems, AO, Jet stream etc. The arctic is not.
There are many scientists who have done studies on CET and correlation to the much wider geographic area , including Phil Jones and De Bilt. I think the relationship to the Northern Hemisphere is stronger than to the entire globe
tonyb
Mark Bofill says:
April 17, 2014 at 11:10 am
Great post. I had assumed you would be up to the task if I posed you a question.
From what the paper says “e is the measurement error. The latter can be estimated from the differences between the various observed global series and their means; it is nearly independent of time scale” and from what Lovejoy said “The key is the accuracy of the data at century scales, not at monthly or even annual scales”. There seems to be more to it?
Lovejoy references this paper to explain it “How scaling fluctuation analyses change our view of the climate and its models” http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/C793/2013/esdd-3-C793-2013.pdf
Thanks Michael.
I think an analogy for what Dr. Lovejoy is doing here could be stated like this: I measure a flat. I use my ruler, I use my measuring tape, and I use my caliper. I get 3 numbers that are awfully close and the difference between the numbers is darn small. This is the measurement error, it’s small, and I’m ignoring it.. I think the trouble with this is that these global series might not be reliable the way that a ruler and a measuring tape and a set of calipers are, and that this approach isn’t the safe way to handle the uncertainty. If the numbers were close by coincidence, or due to systemic error, there’s no protection in this approach against that risk.
Unfortunately, you’ve come to the well once too often and the well is dry. I don’t understand what Dr. Lovejoy is saying here. I don’t want to muddy the waters by stating what I think he seems to be saying, because what I think he seems to be saying here doesn’t make sense. The two possibilities I can think of are, 1. Dr. Lovejoy is making an argument that doesn’t make any sense because it’s invalid and 2. Dr. Lovejoy is making an argument that I’m utterly missing the point of.. Between the two possibilities I’m erring on the side of caution for now and assuming it’s #2. But I haven’t figured this out yet.
climatereason says: April 17, 2014 at 11:57 am
During the end of the last ice age, warming in the north which melted ice (fresh water) into the ocean, caused the atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to stop/reduce. This caused the southern hemisphere to warm and the north to cool. My point is, there is a lot to consider when thinking globally. http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/shakun-et-al.pdf
Of cause if you want to have a good idea of the temperature of the Earth it has been found that over the last 500 million years (as far as we have proxys) CO2 has governed the temperature of the Earth http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.full.pdf. Even Lovejoys paper has shown that CO2 is the cause of the recent warming.
Michael Whittemore says:
April 17, 2014 at 12:25 pm
Of cause if you want to have a good idea of the temperature of the Earth it has been found that over the last 500 million years (as far as we have proxys) CO2 has governed the temperature of the Earth
+++++++++++++++
If CO2 was the control agent why have an ice age when the PPM was higher than today?
Oh. Maybe that was the point of all the discussion about whether or not the forcings were stationary!
So here’s what I think, and thanks Michael for making me think it through a few extra times. He’s talking about getting more accuracy on longer timescales. More observations give you a better idea of the mean, right? The reason it didn’t make sense to me was because I thought this was like shooting at a moving target; the mean changes and so observations over time aren’t observations of the same thing. But the mean doesn’t change if you can show the series is stationary!
I’ll reread it and think about it and rethink my position after that, but I betcha that’s what he’s getting at. My apologies for being dense if this was the case and it was obvious to everybody else. :/
mkelly says:
April 17, 2014 at 12:50 pm
The sun was 4% weaker 500 million years ago. It has slowly increased to its current output. When you add up the forcing from the sun and CO2 you get the temperature of the Earth over the last 500 million years. As the sun has gotten hotter over the last 500 million years, we have been luck that mountains have weathered CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is why the Earth goes in and out of ice ages. The last ice age ended due to the sun changing its orbit/tilt increasing sunlight to the northern hemisphere which melted ice and stopped the atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). This caused the southern hemisphere to warm up because all the warm water that went up to the north through the AMOC was stuck in the south. This caused large amounts of CO2 to be released from the southern ocean. Due to CO2 being a global gas, it mixed thought out the globe and warmed the Earth. The amount of CO2 that was released governed how warm the Earth was and this is what we call the Holocene. As time goes by very high mountains weather CO2 out of the atmosphere which pushes us back into an ice age. But we have increased CO2 that has stopped the chance of another ice age and will warm the Earth.
Nah, nevermind. That doesn’t appear to be what he was saying. I’ve been staring at this too long and I’m starting to see shapes in tea leaves. I’m going to drop this thread I think.
Thanks all.
Mark Bofill says:
April 17, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Lovejoy references this paper to explain it “How scaling fluctuation analyses change our view of the climate and its models” http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/C793/2013/esdd-3-C793-2013.pdf
its a good read, it explains Haar and the need to reduce the 0.2oC error bars which they suggest is natural macroweather.
Thank you for your support! Here’s a link to a Question and Answer sheet that I’ve made up to try to explain things as clearly as possible. Any comments/ suggestions are welcome!
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/esubmissions/Questions.Answers.17.4.14.pdf
Prof Lovejoy says he has been “flooded” with rebuttals to his paper. That is not surprising, since the paper is basically nonsense. He adds a lot of assertions in his link above [such as: Mann’s Hockey Stick “has not been discredited…” &etc].
Where has Lovejoy been? On another planet? MBH98/99 has been so thoroughly discredited that Mann dares not provide his methodologies, data, metadata, or anything else that would allow others to falsify his conjecture — which is the job of any honest scientist. McKitrick and McIntyre have repeatedly debunked Mann, from his hokey stick chart, to his upside-down Tiljander sediments. If Prof Feynman were alive he would rip both Mann and Lovejoy to shreds, because neither of them has any use for the Scientific Method or it’s corollary, the Null Hypothesis.
For one example out of many, Mann hid data that would have completely eliminated his hokey stick shape, in an ftp file named “censored“. By hiding raw data that would have totally debunked his conjecture, Mann was able to fabricate his scary hockey stick shape [which Planet Earth has decisively falsified over the past decade and a half]. Yet Lovejoy asserts that Mann is not discredited?? That says a lot about Lovejoy, doesn’t it? In fact, it calls into question everything else he claims [“Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”].
There is a lot of statistical mumbo-jumbo in Lovejoy’s paper, but I am satisfied when a professional statistician, William Briggs, says it’s hooey. [I also wonder what Prof Wegman would say about Lovejoy’s statistical mumbo-jumbo.]
There is also a lot of rhetorical cleverness in the questions, but it does not hide the fact that nothing claimed is evidence of a “human fingerprint” in global warming, because there is no such scientific evidence [and by ‘evidence’, we mean either raw data that leads to a solid conclusion, or empirical observations that conclusively show human activity; neither peer reviewed papers nor computer climate models are “evidence”]. Once again: there is no such scientific evidence, and the fact that Lovejoy’s paper has to use such pretzel-like contortions supports the Null Hypothesis: everything observed today has been exceeded in the past, and by a large degree — and prior to human emissions ramping up. It has all happened before, and all of the wild-eyed runaway global warming predictions have failed.
Scientific evidence is always lacking in these ‘carbon-scare’ papers, which are basically nothing but assertions. They are written to get tickets punched on the grant gravy train. Unfortunatly, that works all too often, to the detriment of hard-bitten taxpayers. Michael Mann showed the way. Now Mann is the rainmaker, and universities love him for the loot he brings in. Funny thing, though, Mann is scared spitless of engaging in any fair debate, in a neutral venue with a mutually-agreed Moderator. I suspect that Mr Lovejoy feels the same as Mann. Because YouTube never forgets. [If I am wrong, I will man-up and write a sincere apology here; I would love to watch a debate like that. But I think I’m spot on. [Would Lovejoy debate Monckton? Or Lindzen? There’s a challenge, eh?]
The basic fact is that even über-alarmist Phil Jones admits that there is no difference between past warming steps prior to the recent surge in [harmless, beneficial] CO2, and more recent warming events. They are all natural. There is also no “human fingerprint” observable in the CET record, or in many other cities with a long temperature record. If someone has to resort to statistical mumbo-jumbo in order to fabricate a claim of man-made global warming, then he has lost the debate. Basic scientific truths are just not that complicated.
Lovejoy will cash in, of course, and weary taxpayers will be fleeced once again. But those who might be inclined to give Lovejoy or any others in the self-serving alarmist clique any credence should keep in mind that none of them, even with their multi-million dollar GCMs, were able to predict the biggest climate event of the past century: 17+ years of no global warming. Not one of them predicted it! They all parroted the catastrophic AGW nonsense that made Mann rich and (in)famous. So those who tell us they know what’s up with the climate are self-serving charlatans. They do not know — but they are either too proud, or too devious, to admit it. That makes them bad scientists.
M. Whittemore says:
LOL 🙂 I am extremely happy you have a new graph db, if anything, you have made all this worth it.
That’s it? That is Whittemore’s response?? If that is the best he can do, he is inept. Why? Because MW’s complaint was that the previous graph I linked to had stopped short of Mann’s Hokey Stick. So, fine gentleman that I am, I assisted MW by posting a recent graph showing there is no hokey stick now. But his response indicates that Mr Whittemore is totally out of rational arguments. Hey, Mann has been thoroughly debunked. And now, even his lemming is at a loss for any counter other than “LOL”.
Next, Whittemore says:
Of cause if you want to have a good idea of the temperature of the Earth it has been found that over the last 500 million years (as far as we have proxys) CO2 has governed the temperature of the Earth
That is another assertion, with no basis in fact. Nothing like that has been “found”. On all time scales, from months to hundreds of millennia, multiple observations show conclusively that ∆CO2 follows ∆T [plenty of charts are available, just ask].
Effect cannot precede cause [except in the minds of the wacky climate alarmist cultists]; therefore, CO2 cannot “govern the temperature of the Earth”. At most, CO2 is a very minor 3rd-order forcing, which is swamped by many larger effects. That is why there has been no global warming for the past 17+ years, despite a large increase in harmless and beneficial CO2. <—[this is entirely logical. It is based on verifiable empirical evidence. But unfortunately, it will never convince the hard-core alarmist cultists.]
So Whittemore keeps digging:
Even Lovejoys paper has shown that CO2 is the cause of the recent warming.
As I have shown above, Lovejoy showed no such thing. He completely disregards both the Scientific Method, and the climate Null Hypothesis: if there is a “human fingerprint”, then why is it completely invisible? Lovejoy has no answer.
As mkelley says above: If CO2 was the control agent, why have an ice age when the PPM was higher than today?
Why indeed? And the ppm were many times higher in ice ages. CO2 was also much lower during warming cycles; there is simply no correlation with temperature. Empirical observations prove conclusively that CO2 has no cause-and-effect relationship with temperature. None whatever.
But some folks will believe anything that feeds their True Belief. They will endlessly cherry-pick, and then dispense with all facts that do not support their catastrophic runaway global warming belief system. That is not science, that’s witch doctor ju-ju. Or religion. It is anything but science.
dbstealey says:
April 17, 2014 at 7:11 pm
Your understanding of science is belittling! Lovejoy said he had an influx of purported rebuttals! Which he asserts with facts, unlike yourself db. Lovejoy has blown your null out of the water, I feel sorry for you. Of cause you will still have the intellect to think a single proxy record could show a multiproxy hockey stick! From the year 1855! And just so everyone can see the facts, something db knows nothing about, the hockey stick has been tested and retested http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html
“There is a lot of statistical mumbo-jumbo in Lovejoy’s paper” LOL
I cant believe you are still bring up your use of that faked graph of yours, I am not discussing the hockey stick db, I was pointing out your wilful use of the graph and the fact you did not even try to understand what it was your graph was saying. You can try your best to change the subject to the hockey stick, but you have lost any real credibility in my eyes and I am sure many others.
For you to be given a published peer review paper that has factually and empirically found a correlation between CO2 and the temperature of the Earth over the last 500 million years, a paper that has not been rebutted and is accepted science.. This is what you say “That is another assertion, with no basis in fact.” You db are losing your pathetic fight
See, Uncertainty Measurement. N.I.S.T. or Metrology, Uncertainty Measurement.
Well, that was sort of helpful. I’d rather look at the methods and code directly than read Dr. Lovejoy talking about them, because I still wonder if I’m doing this the way he did it. Anyway, I still have some reservations, conceptually.
Looking at the root mean squared of the differences between the datasets over time and finding a small number tells you that the datasets predict each other well over time. They agree. (BTW, I’m still checking that the .05C number is in fact so, but I’m willing to take on faith that Dr. Lovejoy didn’t compute this wrong for now. But when I try to work out the RMS of the differences between say GISS and NOAA for 2012, I end up with a much bigger number, .16C. Maybe I need to look at more data. Maybe I’m just making some stupid mistake.) There’s not much error if you define error as difference between the datasets. My problem is: how confident am I that the datasets reflect reality in the first place? Oh, not in recent times. But going back to the early days? RMS between the sets by itself isn’t going to give any insights into systematic errors that affect all of the datasets, just independent errors.
Of course Dr. Lovejoy talks about this.
Well, I gotta understand Haar fluctuations to understand that. And then I gots to buy it.
It’s certainly interesting anyway.
One little point for the 0.05: work out the mean of the four series and then look at the statistics of the differences between each series and the overall means. Do this over a range of scales. Using Haar is best – the averaging gives more converging results – but it shouldn’t be too different than raw differneces.
Thanks Dr. Lovejoy.
M. Whittemore says:
Your understanding of science is belittling!
Don’t feel belittled, Michael. I know my understanding of science has that effect on you, but all you need to do is read WUWT for a few years, and you will begin to get up to speed on the science.
Also, you wrote:
Lovejoy said he had an influx of purported rebuttals.
Mikey, misrepresenting Lovejoy’s comment doesn’t help your case [such as it is]. Lovejoy wrote that he has been “flooded” with rebuttals to his paper. “Flooded” is a much more accurate term than your simple ‘influx’.
Why would there be a flood of rebuttals? It is clearly because Lovejoy’s paper is just another weak attempt to disregard mountains of empirical evidence by using statistical ju-ju – the same ju-ju that has been falsified by other statistcians. So, who to believe? The real world? Or Prof Lovejoy? Because they cannot both be right.
Next, Mikey says:
I cant believe you are still bring up your use of that faked graph of yours
You are dissembling. I set you straight on that a couple of times now: that is not ‘my’ graph; that is Prof R.B. Alley’s graph. You may not know who Alley is. He is a respected climatologist. Take it up with him if you don’t like his graph. Go tell him it’s “fake”. Report back what he tells you.
You hate the empirical facts I post, because they are not refuted by the only Authority that is totally credible: Planet Earth. They are facts that the planet provides to us. You hate them, because they debunk your alarmist nonsense.
Next, Mikey says:
For you to be given a published peer review paper that has factually and empirically found a correlation between CO2 and the temperature of the Earth over the last 500 million years, a paper that has not been rebutted and is accepted science…
When will Mikey stop making false assertions? Probably never. Lovejoy’s paper did not find anything “empirically”. You don’t seem to know what that word means. As I have shown you repeatedly, using empirical observations, the only correlation between CO2 and temperature shows that ∆CO2 is caused by ∆T. There are no empirical observations over the past 400,000 years that show changes in T being caused by changes in CO2. None at all. That proves that changes in CO2 are caused by changes in T; not vice-versa. CO2 is responsible for some negligible warming at current concentrations. But it is so tiny that it is not even measurable. All measured changes show that ∆T causes ∆CO2. There are no exceptions.
You have causation backwards, therefore naturally your conclusions are wrong. That is why you keep reiterating your chart nonsense. Just because you keep saying it means nothing. You accuse Alley of a “fake” chart, when the chart you posted has no provenance whatever. It was fabricated and overwritten by one of the alarmist blogs you frequent. Forget them, they are sources of misinformation.
Stick around here, where you will begin to learn something – if you are able to open your mind enough. Be skeptical of all the wild-eyed “carbon” claims. Not only are they false alarms, but being a skeptic is the only honest way to approach science. Skeptical scientists are the only honest kind of scientist.
Next, you write your laughably impotent words: You db are losing your pathetic fight.
Mikey, that is simply another one of your false assertions. You are a newbie here, and you don’t understand that it is assertions like that which are truly pathetic. If skeptics were losing the fight, then Michael Mann would not be going ballistic, and calling skeptics all sorts of names. He would not feel the need to lie about his non-existent Nobel prize, or use false proxies like Tiljander’s. If we were losing this fight, polling results would not be showing that the public is rapidly losing interest in your “carbon” scare. If we were losing this fight, you would not feel that you have to keep re-posting your debunked nonsense about Alley’s “fake” chart.
Finally, the following facts have never been refuted:
1. CO2 is harmless. No global harm from the rise in CO2 has ever been identified.
2. CO2 is beneficial. The biosphere is measurably greening as a direct result of the added CO2.
Those two facts destroy the false “carbon” alarm. Unless you can credibly refute those facts, you have lost the debate.
Mikey, you are under the spell of a religious True Belief, therefore you are incapable of deviating from the Algore Gospel. Fortunately, your little clique is getting smaller by the day. People just do not care about the “carbon” nonsense any more. It’s an old scare. It’s tired. Worn out. And there are only a few of your kind left.
Pretty soon, you might be the only one.
dbstealey says:
April 18, 2014 at 1:43 pm
This paper shows that globally during the last ice age over 90% of warming happen before CO2 rise. Temperature lagged CO2 rise. http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/shakun-et-al.pdf
This paper shows that CO2 was over 9000ppm in the past, this can’t be caused by temperature it is produced from volcanic eruptions. Of cause it also shows that even though co2 was over 9000ppm it had to be that high to keep the earth from going into an ice age because the sun was 4% weaker back then. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.full.pdf
Here is your graph again and as everyone can see the graph is fine it’s what you have added to it. http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Correction, my last comment was meant to to say 90% of warming happen AFTER CO2 rise.
Regarding my 9000ppm paper you have to pay for it. This link is free https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&ved=0CEAQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk%2Fpeople%2Fmem%2Fco2-main-ct-knob-lacis-sci10.pdf&rct=j&q=control%20knob%20co2&ei=jmBSU6WcO8WplQX2r4CwAg&usg=AFQjCNFmp08uoSMa6dkcdmfYn0r87Wxwxg&bvm=bv.65058239,d.dGI
My bad I have been referencing the wrong paper. This is the right paper regarding 9000ppm. http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf
Posted on April 11, 2014
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Figure 2: Tampering with the U.S. temperature record. The GISS record from 1990-2008 (right panel) shows 1934 0.1 Cº lower and 1998 0.3 Cº higher than the same record in its original 1999 version (left panel). This tampering, calculated to increase the apparent warming trend over the 20th century, is more than 13 times the tiny measurement error mentioned by Lovejoy. The startling changes to the dataset between the 1999 and 2008 versions, first noticed by Steven Goddard, are clearly seen if the two slides are repeatedly shown one after the other as a blink comparator.
Rather sloppy work, presumably ‘1990-2008’ should be 1880-2008?
“The startling changes to the dataset between the 1999 and 2008 versions, first noticed by Steven Goddard”
Really ‘startling changes’? They were documented in 2001 and were done by the USHCN, you shouldn’t believe anything the pseudonymous ‘Steve Goddard’ tells you.
The ‘tampering’ you refer to includes:
Time of observation debiasing,
Station history adjustment,
Filling of missing original data.
Which of those do you believe to be inappropriate?
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
Once again CAGW religious acolyte Michael Whittemore shows us how wrong he is.
Changes in global temperature [T] cause changes in CO2 – not vice versa. There is plenty of empirical evidence proving that cause and effect. But there is NO long term empirical evidence showing that changes in CO2 cause changes in global T. All the evidence shows that ∆T is the cause of ∆CO2. Prof Caillon’s peer reviewed paper showed the same thing.
When someone refuses to accept verifiable real world evidence, they are a religious True Believer. But the rest of us can see that T is the cause of CO2, and that fact alone completely destroys the “carbon” false alarm.
Also, that ridiculous grant-trolling paper Mikey linked to claiming that CO2 is the planet’s “control knob” is pseudo-scientific nonsense. Despite the claims, there is no scientific evidence supporting that assertion — as I show in numerous links.
Empirical [real world] evidence and bservations always trump assertions, and all empirical evidence for at least the past 400,000 years shows conclusivly that T leads CO2 – not vice versa.
[Phil. says: “Rather sloppy work”. I wonder, did the pseudonymous Phil. miss the post right above his? Or the 2:16 am post? If so, rather sloppy.☺]
At 7:30 AM on 20 April, dbstealey had written:
There must be hundreds of thousands of ex-Biology majors in the world’s population, and absent that consideration there are millions of people with experience of setting up and maintaining aquaria, and all of these folks have got to be familiar (in theory or in practice) with Henry’s Law and the temperature dependency of the Henry coefficient.
All other things being equal, because the partial pressure of a gas dissolved in water increases with warming (inducing escape of the gas from the water into the atmosphere), the “carrying capacity” of that volume of water – it’s ability to retain that gas in solution – drops off with temperature increase.
By far the planet Earth’s biggest inorganic “sink” of carbon dioxide is the quantity dissolved in big bodies of water which interface with the atmosphere. If those big bodies of water warm for any reason, they lose “carrying capacity” with regard to dissolved gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
Thus significant (global) oceanic warming must induce similarly significant increases in atmospheric CO2 content. That’s where the rising partial pressure of dissolved carbon dioxide sends the molecules.
Thus the “fossil” assessments of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels provided by ice core analyses demonstrate (and will always demonstrate) that oceanic warming has always preceded increases in CO2 as a trace component of the atmosphere.
This ain’t just “peer-reviewed science” but the manifestation of a well-known and unimpeachable law of physics.
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 7:30 am
[Phil. says: “Rather sloppy work”. I wonder, did Phil. miss the post right above his? If so, rather sloppy.☺]
I didn’t miss it, I’m rather puzzled as to what relevance you think Whittemore’s referencing the wrong paper has to my critique of Monckton’s post?
While we’re at it:
dbstealey says:
April 17, 2014 at 7:11 pm
There is a lot of statistical mumbo-jumbo in Lovejoy’s paper, but I am satisfied when a professional statistician, William Briggs, says it’s hooey. [I also wonder what Prof Wegman would say about Lovejoy’s statistical mumbo-jumbo.]
Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor that he regurgitated what M&M gave him and even failed to understand it properly. I guess he’d continue to repeat whatever he’s told.
Phil. says:
April 20, 2014 at 9:03 am
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor that he regurgitated what M&M gave him and even failed to understand it properly.”
I see we have arrived at the height of objective scientific understanding.
I can see why you would look at a single temperature data proxy from Antarctica and try and pull it off as a global proxy to shows a correlation with CO2. You did it before with your Greenland single proxy which you altered to make everyone think it ended with the hockey stick http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg. It does not work like that. But to my utter surprise you have actually referenced a peer reviewed paper! It’s a fantastic start to your understanding of science. But if you actually read the paper it says
and here is a link to the paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html
as you can see there is no correlation. But when you consider forcing from the sun, which was 4% weaker 500 million years ago you find a perfect correlation. As can be seen in this graph http://sustainableloudoun.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/fi3.png from this paper http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf
“The CH4 increase at 2810 m [would] thus signal a first warming in the North […] CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation […] This sequence of events is till in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing.”
This information led to a study that looked at global temperature proxys of both the northern and southern hemispheres during the last deglaciation. What they found was that when you get a global temperature, CO2 lags temperature rise. They found that over 90% of the warming that happened on Earth all took place after CO2 rise. Here is the graph from the paper with the yellow dots being CO2 and the blue line being the global temperature
The last point I need to explain is CO2 and temperature correlating over the last 500 million years. I know you like graphs so I will link some. So here is a graph that shows CO2 and temperature over the last 500 million years
I am grateful that you referenced a paper db, but it was from 2003 and a lot has happened in science since then.
– High Priest –
Tucci78 is correct, and he gives a very clear explanation of why CO2 follows temperature.
But if folks like Michael Whittemore accept that cause and effect relationship, then their entire rationale for demonizing carbon is lost.
There is no empirical evidence showing that T follows CO2 on any extended time frame. That happened briefly, from about 1980 – 1997. That anomaly has reverted to it’s long established causation. But it was enough to stir up Hansen and many other riders on the grant gravy train.
I can’t really blame them for chasing taxpayer loot [actually, I can]. But the ones who confound me are folks like Michael Whittemore, who are ridden with confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. They cherry-pick only those ‘facts’ that support their [Belief], and reject everything else — like hundreds of thousands of years of ice core evidence.
The nonsense doesn’t stop there. Whittemore repeatedly calls the graph I posted “your graph”, and “that faked graph of yours”. Whenever I point out that it is R.B. Alley’s graph, and that the faked graph is the one Whittemore posted, it goes right over his head. Bias and dissonance.
MW says: I am grateful that you referenced a paper db, but it was from 2003 and a lot has happened in science since then.
This is another problem with the swivel-eyed runaway global warming contingent. First, the papers Whittemore cites are not science. They are evidence-free opinions. Scientific truth doesn’t change, and a 10-year old paper is actually fairly new. But Whittemore doesn’t like what it says, so he simply rejects it out of hand, for no credible reason. More cherry-picking of what he wants to hear, and what he doesn’t. That is what religious Belief does. Dogma is all.
Next, the pseudonymous “Phil.” says:
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor…
Pure ad-hom; zero science. Prof Wegman is tarred and feathered by the pseudonymous Phil. for one reason: Wegman exposed Mann’s shenanigans. Wegman was Chairman of National Research Council’s Committee on Applied Statistics, but the pseudonymous Phil. falsely claims that Wegman does not understand statistics.
When folks like the pseudonymous Phil. must resort to that kind of underhanded ad hominem attack, it is obvious to the most casual observer that he has lost the science debate.
∆T causes ∆CO2. Try falsifying that, instead of name-calling and fabricated accusations.
Finally, the pseudonymous Phil. says:
I’m rather puzzled as to what relevance you think Whittemore’s referencing the wrong paper has to my critique of Monckton’s post?
It is because the pseudonymous Phil. wrote about Lord Monckton:
Rather sloppy work, presumably ’1990-2008′ should be 1880-2008…
I was merely pointing out to the pseudonymous Phil. that Whittemore had made the same kind of errors, but the pseudonymous Phil. never attacked him for being ‘sloppy’. But the pseudonymous Phil. is so easily “puzzled”. ☺
Tucci78 says:
April 20, 2014 at 9:19 am
There must be hundreds of thousands of ex-Biology majors in the world’s population, and absent that consideration there are millions of people with experience of setting up and maintaining aquaria, and all of these folks have got to be familiar (in theory or in practice) with Henry’s Law and the temperature dependency of the Henry coefficient.
All other things being equal, because the partial pressure of a gas dissolved in water increases with warming (inducing escape of the gas from the water into the atmosphere), the “carrying capacity” of that volume of water – it’s ability to retain that gas in solution – drops off with temperature increase.
By far the planet Earth’s biggest inorganic “sink” of carbon dioxide is the quantity dissolved in big bodies of water which interface with the atmosphere. If those big bodies of water warm for any reason, they lose “carrying capacity” with regard to dissolved gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
Thus significant (global) oceanic warming must induce similarly significant increases in atmospheric CO2 content. That’s where the rising partial pressure of dissolved carbon dioxide sends the molecules.
Thus the “fossil” assessments of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels provided by ice core analyses demonstrate (and will always demonstrate) that oceanic warming has always preceded increases in CO2 as a trace component of the atmosphere.
This ain’t just “peer-reviewed science” but the manifestation of a well-known and unimpeachable law of physics.
Indeed, but it works both ways, if sufficient CO2 is added to the atmosphere to maintain the concentration above the Henry’s Law value the flow is from atmosphere to ocean, unless the ocean temperature is increasing even faster.
The argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature doesn’t work very well with the idea of a ‘hiatus’ in global temperature over the last 15+ years since CO2 has increased about 50ppm during that time!
At 10:56 AM on 20 April, confronted with the ineluctability of Henry’s Law, Phil. weasels:
There is no “argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature “ at the present time, you loon. Have I disparaged Keeling’s work, which includes (and has continued to be confirmed by) isotopic analyses of the undeniably anthropogenic character of the modern-era trace increase in this trace atmospheric gas component, proving its origin as the product of purposeful fossil petrochemicals’ combustion? Indeed, is there verifiable evidence to the effect that the “ocean temperature” (I’m assuming that “overall” is intended here) has actually been “increasing” in the century-and-a-half during which instrumental thermometry has been possible?
Despite the progressing warmist corruption of oceanography by way of political funding and “pal review” in the scientific periodicals over the past thirty years or so (see Climategate), bathythermographic data collection has been held to standards of rigor by military necessity, for oceanic temperature gradients figure large in the sonographic imaging techniques critically important in submarine and antisubmarine warfare. As a consequence of such information gathering (to the extent that these data are not held secret for the preservation of military advantage), we know that the oceans overall have not been warming to any significant extent when it comes to the Henry coefficient, and therefore outgassing of dissolved CO2 could to no real degree have figured in any of the observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Sure, that increase is in atmospheric CO2 anthropogenic. Since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution (which corresponded coincidentally with the end of the Little Ice Age), there’s no argument that the combustion of coal – a fossil fuel – has been continuous and accelerating. However, has the resultant increase in CO2 been adverse in its effects? Is there any evidence to support any contention that said increase – and more, as anthropogenic CO2 release is projected to increase further – could ever be adverse?
In spite of billions upon billions of credit units (dollars, Euros, yen, pounds, whatever) thrown down the rat hole of alarmist “climate research” over the decades, no such evidence has yet been presented by any of the third-rate academics with second-rate credentials who’ve consistently proven themselves to be first-rate charlatans conniving with the bloated kleptocrats pushing the IPCC agenda.
If this trace anthropogenic increase in the trace carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere were sufficient to engender increases in atmospheric CO2 partial pressure such that the dissolution of carbon dioxide in ocean water were mensurably increased thereby, there would surely be experimental demonstration of the degree and extent to which this phenomenon might take place.
Right?
I’m a medical doctor, with my own experience in the marine biology lab having been back during the Nixon Administration, but it’s not rocket science to devise such methodology in vitro, even with nothing more than the equipment available (for example) in the average community hospital. We run arterial blood gases analyses every goddam day as a matter of routine.
Surely our grant-sucking “climate science” quacks have designed and completed demonstrations of the atmospheric/oceanic CO2 exchanges dictated by Henry’s Law at least a hundred times or more – trying to grind out some sort of publicity in favor of their “activist messaging” (and their further raids upon the public purse) – with far more sophisticated and expensive means of instrumental analysis since their catastrophe caterwauling began back in the ’80s.
So (pace the field of oceanography) does your blather hold water?
Hrm. No evidence.
Of course, the results of such investigations having proven “disappointing,” they probably haven’t gotten into the vauntedly peer-reviewed literature much….
dbstealey says:
its not rocket science.. You really need to try and stop thinking one proxy temperature record can be used as a global indicator.
April 20, 2014 at 10:46 am
You dont really expect anyone to believe that the graph you referenced which shows a hockey stick from a Greenland ice core that ended in 1875.. was created by R. Alley right?
Regarding Henry coefficient, that is how CO2 is released out of the oceans during the last deglaciation! There was no cars back then db! But Temperature lagged behind CO2 rise as can be seen in this graph
Regarding the paper you referenced LOL I like what it says db, I even quoted it remember?
“The CH4 increase at 2810 m [would] thus signal a first warming in the North […] CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation […] This sequence of events is till in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing.”
– High Priest –
Phil. says:
April 20, 2014 at 10:56 am
Just a quick point, ocean warming has not slowed down nor has sea level rising. But yes ocean acidification is continuing due to anthropogenic CO2. But the way they determine if the rising CO2 is anthropogenic is to measure the reduction of Oxygen from the atmosphere and the amounts of fossil fuels burned. CO2 that is formed during chemical combustion also has a specific chemical structure that can be distinguished from natural CO2.
dbstealey says:
April 16, 2014 at 11:03 am
Michael Whittemore says:
“I noticed before you linking your Greenland temperature record which can be seen here http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg Last time we spoke I told you that it was a fake!”
Take up your truly ignorant complaint with Prof. R.B. Alley. He provided the data, as you could see right in the chart if you had only looked.
Yes, he provided the data but whoever drew your graph used an incorrect time-axis and consequently misrepresented it!
Tucci nails it. There is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 is harmful in any way. That makes the carbon scare a complete waste of time and money. I have no idea why the true believers continue to flog that dead horse. Is it the inability to admit being flat wrong? Or is it due to mental illness?
Michael Whittemore changes the subject, and talks about methane. But he is the only one who cares. No one else has even mentioned it. Methane is a strawman argument that he set up and then tries to knock down. But methane doesn’t matter. That’s why that particular arm-waving scare has gotten no traction. Who cares?
MW continues:
Just a quick point, ocean warming has not slowed down nor has sea level rising. But yes ocean acidification is continuing due to anthropogenic CO2.
Ah. Another strawman. No one is arguing that ocean warming and sea level rises are not happening. Both are normal and natural.
But the universal alarmist predictions were that sea level rise and ocean warming would be accelerating rapidly by now. That has not happened. The predictions were wrong.
It is the same with ocean “acidification”. Ain’t happening. Daily testing at the Monterey Bay aquarium inlet pipe [from a mile out in the ocean] shows no so-called “acidification” since the aquarium was built.
Finally: the CO2 added to the atmosphere is a net benefit, with no downside. Why would anyone complain about something that is a clear benefit? It is like complaining that there are antibiotics in the world. Or fossil fuels. Both are so beneficial that anyone complaining about them must have a screw loose.
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 5:25 pm
I am sure you don’t back down very often so it’s very rewarding when you change the subject.
– High Priest –
Shaun Lovejoy says:
April 17, 2014 at 3:09 pm
Thank you for your support! Here’s a link to a Question and Answer sheet that I’ve made up to try to explain things as clearly as possible. Any comments/ suggestions are welcome!
This
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/esubmissions/Questions.Answers.17.4.14.pdf
Michael Whittemore, may I deconstruct? Thank you:
Your first graph is debunked by Planet Earth. Despite a 50 ppmv rise in CO2, there has been no rise in T.
Since the real world trumps all your models, charts, pal-reviewed papers, statistics, and assertions, you might as well give it up. Catastrophic AGW is complete nonsense.
Every scary prediction by the alarmist cult has failed. But religious True Believers will never accept what empirical evidence is telling us. Cognitive dissonance explains a large part of it. Then there is confirmation bias, and the refusal to undertand Occam’s Razor, and the Null Hypothesis, and even the Scientific Method.
Next time you post a chart, try to find one that reflects reality. Otherwise, you have no credibility.
========================
Michael Whittemore says:
I am sure you don’t back down very often so it’s very rewarding when you change the subject.
– High Priest –
First off, you’re just a lemming follower. The high priest is Algore.☺
I don’t back down unless I am wrong. If I’m proven wrong, I admit it. That is the central difference between skeptics and climate alarmists: skeptics just want scientific knowledge, wherever it leads. But mile thick glaciers could once again descend on Chicago in a new Ice Age, and the alarmist crowd would still be running around in circles, flapping their arms and clucking their nonsense about runaway global warming.
And of course, Mikey is wrong once again. I didn’t change the subject, I replied to Tucci — as any jamoke could see in the first 3 words.
So tell us, Mikey: are you ever right? About anything?
Michael Whittemore says:
April 20, 2014 at 11:24 am
But Temperature lagged behind CO2 rise as can be seen in this graph
===
Michael, that’s only because temp and CO2 were plotted at the same starting point…
move either one up or down from that point and you can make it show things it’s not meant to show
Tucci78 says:
April 20, 2014 at 12:42 pm
At 10:56 AM on 20 April, confronted with the ineluctability of Henry’s Law, Phil. weasels:
Indeed, but it works both ways, if sufficient CO2 is added to the atmosphere to maintain the concentration above the Henry’s Law value the flow is from atmosphere to ocean, unless the ocean temperature is increasing even faster.
The argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature doesn’t work very well with the idea of a ‘hiatus’ in global temperature over the last 15+ years since CO2 has increased about 50ppm during that time!
There is no “argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature “ at the present time, you loon.
I take it you aren’t familiar with the arguments of dbstealey? For example he immediately followed your post with this
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 10:46 am
Tucci78 is correct, and he gives a very clear explanation of why CO2 follows temperature.
At 7:45 PM on 20 April, warmist loon Phil. quoted nothing more than the first line from the first paragraph in my post of 12:42 PM (same date):
…obliterating:
…thereupon to blather:
Phil. (the religious zealot climate catastrophe putz) must have missed out on scientific investigations such as those of Pedro, Rasmussen, and van Ommen [Clim. Past, 8, 1213-1221, 2012], in which – despite those reporter’s climate quack alarmist bias, evident in the sucktard press release promulgated upon preliminary rather than final revised publication of their paper – it had been demonstrated (yet again) that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have always lagged increases in oceanic temperatures by centuries.
Pedro et al fined that lag down toperhaps 400 years (less than the eight hundred years estimated within the wriggle room (± 200) imposed by the analytical methods available a decade ago), but centuries nonetheless.
This study was assessed and considerably discussed in Watts Up With That? shortly after publication (New research in Antarctica shows CO2 follows temperature “by a few hundred years at most” posted on July 23, 2012). But doubtless Phil. missed that entry in Mr. Watts’ Web log.
Being familiar with Mr. stealey‘s prior posts on this thread and elsewhere, I was relatively certain that he’d been referring to works like Caillon et al (2003) and Pedro et al (2012) when he made that remark endorsing my appreciation of how Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.
Mr. stealey – unlike our Phil. – is literate in the science pertinent to paleoclimatological evidence of atmospheric CO2 variations.
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 10:46 am
The nonsense doesn’t stop there. Whittemore repeatedly calls the graph I posted “your graph”, and “that faked graph of yours”. Whenever I point out that it is R.B. Alley’s graph, and that the faked graph is the one Whittemore posted, it goes right over his head. Bias and dissonance.
As pointed out that graph was not produced by Alley, it is an example of a graph which uses his data misplotted with an incorrect time axis.
Next, the pseudonymous “Phil.” says:
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor…
Pure ad-hom; zero science. Prof Wegman is tarred and feathered by the pseudonymous Phil. for one reason: Wegman exposed Mann’s shenanigans. Wegman was Chairman of National Research Council’s Committee on Applied Statistics, but the pseudonymous Phil. falsely claims that Wegman does not understand statistics.
When folks like the pseudonymous Phil. must resort to that kind of underhanded ad hominem attack, it is obvious to the most casual observer that he has lost the science debate.
Not only do you not understand the meaning of ‘pseudonymous’ but you don’t know what an ‘ad hominem’ is. You brought up Wegman as an authority, I pointed out:
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor that he regurgitated what M&M gave him and even failed to understand it properly.”
It’s not that he doesn’t understand statistics but that he didn’t understand the particular statistics applied in that case, the mistakes he made in his report show that.
∆T causes ∆CO2. Try falsifying that, instead of name-calling and fabricated accusations.
No ‘fabricated accusations’ just facts.
Finally, the pseudonymous Phil. says:
I’m rather puzzled as to what relevance you think Whittemore’s referencing the wrong paper has to my critique of Monckton’s post?
It is because the pseudonymous Phil. wrote about Lord Monckton:
Rather sloppy work, presumably ’1990-2008′ should be 1880-2008…
I was merely pointing out to the pseudonymous Phil. that Whittemore had made the same kind of errors, but the pseudonymous Phil. never attacked him for being ‘sloppy’. But the pseudonymous Phil. is so easily “puzzled”. ☺
Like a child who’s learned a new word and misuses it all the time to the amusement of the grown-ups!
Whittemore didn’t write the blog post, Monckton did, at least Whittemore realized that he made a mistake.
The pseudonymous “Phil.” says:
Like a child who’s learned a new word and misuses it all the time to the amusement of the grown-ups!
Phil. me boi, you started using that word. So don’t snivel and cry when others make fun of you.
Me, I like the word! It fits you to a “T”. If you don’t like it, start using your name instead of an
anonymouspseudonymous screen identity……and I note that you still cannot falsify ∆T causes ∆CO2.
You mention my first graph but I only linked one in my last comment to you, either way I shall explain.. again..
You state my “first graph is debunked by Planet Earth. Despite a 50 ppmv rise in CO2, there has been no rise in T.” I take your comment is talking about the resent pause in atmospheric temperature after 1999. As you can see from this graph CO2 and temperature follow a good correlation during the last hundred years http://oi62.tinypic.com/2cey4w.jpg.
But of cause you can’t just look at CO2 and temperature without considering all the other aspects of the climate system. Volcanic eruptions, solar forcing and other greenhouse gasses all need to be considered. This graph shows the forcing that has taken place over the last century http://oi62.tinypic.com/2d98wv4.jpg.
As can be seen when other facings are considered the decreases in global temperatures correlated well. This is how science works! Even Lovejoys recent paper shows how CO2 forcing matches temperature rise over the last century http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8
This means that as you stated before, that only the resent CO2 correlation debunks all the other science I have referenced is not true. This includes the correlation between CO2 and temperature over the last 500 million years and the temperature lag of CO2 rise during the last deglaciation http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/lovejoys-99-confidence-vs-measurement-uncertainty/#comment-1617438
– High Priest –
Tucci78 says:
April 21, 2014 at 3:44 am
You mention “Being familiar with Mr. stealey‘s prior posts on this thread and elsewhere, I was relatively certain that he’d been referring to works like Caillon et al (2003) and Pedro et al (2012) when he made that remark endorsing my appreciation of how Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.”
Mr Straley does tend to post this fallacy. As you seem to do as well. The papers you refer to look at a regional proxy temperature, not a global one. During the deglaciation refereed to in the papers you cite, globally only 10% of the warming happened before CO2 rise. That means globally over 90% of the warming happened after CO2 rise.
In response to my earlier post today, in which I’d observed that
….at 7:19 AM the pernicious Michael Whittemore crapped himself in public with:
First and foremost, you stupid schmuck, your use of a graph bereft of legend doesn’t even demonstrate what the various plotted points and lines represent, much less the source of the information tracked in the visual element. You got anything like a friggin’ reference URL to fill in those blanks, and perhaps to attribute the graph to its source on this Web site? For all we know – IN CONTEXT – that graph might have been presented in Watts Up With That? only to demonstrate that your cultist fantastical contention against Henry’s Law is as bereft of factual congruity with the physical universe as has been every other goddam spatter of spew with which you’ve been polluting the ‘Net in your fraudulent effort to “keep the skeer on” the potential victims of your fascist faction’s antiscientific bamboozlement.
Just what the hell so you claim to have in support of your blithering batpuckey about how “globally over 90% of the warming happened after CO2 rise,” anyway? When the EVIDENCE gathered and reported thus far demonstrates the above mentioned lag, your extraordinary – indeed, outrageous – contravention thereof requires a whole helluva lot more back-up than merely yanking a naked assertion, steaming and stinking, from out’n your cloaca and waving it around while you squeal like a stuck stoat.
Tucci78 says:
and here is a link to the paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html
April 21, 2014 at 9:40 am
I can understand your frustration, its not easy having it handed to you. I have already explained it to Mr. stealey so a simple cut and paste will suffice.
“The CH4 increase at 2810 m [would] thus signal a first warming in the North […] CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation […] This sequence of events is till in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing.” http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf
This information led to a study that looked at global temperature proxys of both the northern and southern hemispheres during the last deglaciation. What they found was that when you get a global temperature, temperature rise lags CO2 rise. They found that over 90% of the warming that happened on Earth all took place after CO2 rise. Here is the graph from the paper with the yellow dots being CO2 and the blue line being the global temperature
For some reason you seem to say I have a “fantastical contention against Henry’s Law”, I assure you I do not, I merely want to correct your opinion that “Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.”
If you actually look at the graph, it explains everything that most people would need to understand it. Its colour coded..
At 10:15 AM on 21 April, the execrable Michael Whittemore fails yet again to source the post on Watts Up With That? from which he stupidly drew the legend-less graph to which he keeps referring, but he did make reference to Shakun, Marcott et al [Nature 484, 49–54 (05 April 2012)], which preposterous spouting of warmist crap had been muchly ripped asunder on Mr. Watts’ Web log immediately after those friggin’ idiots infesting Nature haplessly puked it up, notably in:
(a) A new paper in Nature suggests CO2 leads temperature, but has some serious problems (4 April 2012)
(b) A reply to Shakun et al – Dr. Munchausen Explains Science By Proxy (6 April 2012) – a detailed dissection of the data from which Shakun and his co-religionists confabulated their craptacular bilge, providing the following final conclusion:
(c) Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy! (8 April 2012) – where we read:
(d) Did Shakun et al. really prove that CO2 preceded late glacial warming? [Part 1] (9 April 2012) – whence Whittemore sucked out that graphic image file to fling it nakedly before honest men in this forum in order to peddle his stinking tripe.
(e) Shakun, Not Stirred, and Definitely Not Area-Weighted (9 April 2012)
(f) Shakun The Last, I Hope (11 April 2012)
(g) More fatal flaws in the Shakun et al. Nature paper claiming that CO2 preceded late glacial warming [Part 2] (18 April 2012)
So two friggin’ years after Shakun et al (2012) went down the goddam tubes, this Whittemore specimen is trying to peddle this busted bicycle as if there were anything of validity – y’know, like science – to support his contrafactual antiscientific warmist bovine excrement.
Egad. And the banhammer hasn’t been dropped on this putz yet?
It’s fun observing how totally deluded some of the alarmist crowd can get. They cherry-pick only those things that they believe will support their “carbon” scare, and reject the mountains of evidence contrary to their belief system. Michael Whittemore is a prime example of that cognitive dissonance.
So if I may, I will destroy Whittemore’s claims — not that it will make the slightest difference to Whittemore’s True Belief, because as the great Leo Tolstoy wrote about folks like MW:
That describes Michael Whittemore to a “T”.
Whittemore says to Tucci [commenting on the ∆T/CO2 relationship]:
Mr Straley does tend to post this fallacy. As you seem to do as well.
To call hundreds of thousands of years of empirical observations a “fallacy” sounds exactly like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers [waiting for their flying saucer] in his seminal work on cognitive dissonance. Dozens of ice core records in both hemispheres show conclusively the cause-and-effect relationship between T/CO2: ∆T causes ∆CO2, not vice-versa. But since that scientific fact does not fit Whittemore’s wacky world view, he simply rejectes it as a “fallacy”. See what we’re dealing with? Major cognitive dissonance.
Whittemore continues:
But of cause [sic; you constantly make this error. It is: ‘of course’] you can’t just look at CO2 and temperature without considering all the other aspects of the climate system.
But Mikey, the alarmist crowd does exactly that all the time. Without “carbon” to demonize, they are dumbfounded.
Next:
Even Lovejoys recent paper shows how CO2 forcing matches temperature rise…
Wrong as always. It shows no such thing. That graph, like the one you posted, is a simple overlay. They do not show cause and effect. They only show a coincidental rise. The graphs I regularly post explicitly show causation, which is always: ∆T causes ∆CO2. I have also posted numerous graphs showing that CO2 remains completely flat, while T rises — over hundreds of years.
MW also repeats the word “pause”, which as the rest of us know, is not accurate. Global warming has stopped. Not just for a few months, but for more than seventeen years. Even NASA/GISS admits to that fact. To call it a pause would require global warming to begin again. Unless and until it does, there is no “pause”. Global warming stopped. That is a fact.
Next:
You mention my first graph but I only linked one in my last comment to you, either way I shall explain.. again..
Mikey sounds exactly like Mrs Keech, ‘explaining’ to the Seekers why the flying saucer didn’t arrive as predicted. His graphs explain nothing about causation. They bamboozle the credulous, who have already made up their minds and as a result, do not need much in the way of evidence. But for skeptics, here is a Wood For Trees chart that does show causation. Anyone can see that CO2 lags T. There are no charts showing that T is caused by CO2. I know; I have looked everywhere. The best anyone has done is to overlay T and CO2. But that does not show which changed first. The charts I post do, and I have a lot of them, from months to hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, the claim that “carbon” causes global warming is evidence-free. It is a baseless conjecture, nothing more. A Belief.
dbstealey says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:32 am
“That graph, like the one you posted, is a simple overlay.” I thought you had read Lovejoys paper? You have a lot of worthless stuff to say about something you have not even read! Of “course” (thanks for the correction) it is CO2 forcing, it says it on the graph too. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2
The alarmist crowd believes the following conjectures:
1. The globe warmed over the course of the 20th century
2. The planet is warming right now
3. Global warming will continue in the future
4. This warming is unusual, unnatural, and unprecedented
5. Global warming is a bad thing
6. Global warming is caused mostly by human-emitted CO2
7. Humans can reduce their global CO2 emissions
8. A large amount of warming could be reversed if CO2 was lowered
9. The amount of CO2 emissions that would be reduced by passing a ‘carbon tax’ will lower global warming by enough to be worth the economic pain of such a tax
I agree with the first. But as JoNova says [that’s where I got these]: “Convert me!”
Because I disagree with the second one. The third is unknowable. The 4th is flat wrong, as is #5. The 6th has no scientific evidence to support it, but there is plenty of evidence to falsify it. #7 is possible, but it will never happen. Again, there is no good evidence that #8 is a fact; it is only a conjecture. And #9 is ridiculous.
JoNova challenges the alarmist contingent to do the following:
• Stop making predictions that don’t come true.
• When you make a prediction, don’t just say something “might” happen.
• Don’t live your life like you don’t believe a word you’re saying.
• Stop the hate.
• Stop avoiding debate.
• Answer questions.
• Stop enjoying catastrophes.
• Don’t use invalid arguments.
• When you are wrong, admit it and apologise.
• Stop claiming that 97% of scientists agree that humans are warming the globe significantly.
• Stop lying. If you think it is okay to lie if it’s for a good cause, you are wrong.
• Rebuke your fellow Warmists if they act in an unscientific way.
• Stop blaming everything on Global Warming.
• Explain why the only solutions are always big-government “progressive” policies.
Michael Whittemore is guilty of all except the ‘lying’ part, IMHO. He is not deliberately lying, because he actually believes the runaway global warming nonsense. That aside, I would appreciate it if he and his side would follow those guidelines. It would be a first.
Skeptics are not perfect, but we are far better and more honest/ethical than the other side. Really, there is no comparison. The only honest scientist is a skeptic. The rest are self-serving, and they lead acolytes like Whittemore astray.
M. Whittemore says:
You have a lot of worthless stuff to say…
Who elected you to deem what is “worthless”? Your comments have devolved into baseless and wrong assertions. No wonder your arguments are getting thrashed.
It’s like Whack-A-Mole, and it’s just as fun. Every Whittemore conjecture is destroyed as soon as it pops up.
For example, MW is still fixated on his mistaken Belief that a simple overlay shows causation. It doesn’t. MW cannot understand that. Graphs like his and Lovejoy’s show coincidental rises, and nothing more. I am still waiting for MW or anyone else to post an actual graph, with provenance, showing long term causation where CO2 changes temperature. i have repeatedly shown the reverse is true: T causes CO2 changes.
But neither MW nor any other deluded alarmist has ever been able to produce any evidence showing that over a long time frame, that ∆CO2 causes ∆T. The reason is simple: because it doesn’t. ∆T causes ∆CO2, not vice-versa. Thus, the entire “carbon” scare crashes and burns.
It’s tough on folks when their entire Belief system is falsified. But that happens in science.
Why have you not posted my comment?
[Reply: there is nothing in the spam folder. Sometimes WordPress drops the ball. Just re-post your comment. ~mod.]
dbstealey says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:32 am
But for skeptics, here is a Wood For Trees chart that does show causation. Anyone can see that CO2 lags T.
No they can’t, since you have removed most of the change in CO2 from the plot, you show that a minor fluctuation in the CO2 correlates with surface temperature fluctuations, most of the change in CO2 is independent of surface temperature.
Phil. has his confirmation bias in high gear. The only folks who can’t see that changes in CO2 follow changes in T are the ones who know that if they admitted that one scientific fact, their entire Belief system would come crashing down around their ears.
That’s OK. The rest of us can see that on scales from months, to years, to hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 follows T. Tucci explained the mechanism very well. It’s also interesting that despite Phil.’s scientifically baseless nitpicking, there are no long term charts showing that changes in CO2 cause changes in global temperature.
This is thoroughly amusing to me. We are watching people desperately trying to evade a basic scientific truth. If they admitted that fact, they would be saying that falsifying the “carbon” scare is entirely good news for humans, and for the entire biosphere. It was all just a false alarm.
But they would also be admitting they were wrong all along. So they would rather have a climate catastrophe and be right, than say: “Whew! Good thing we were wrong about CO2! It was all just a false alarm, and now we can stop wasting piles of money on it.”
Human nature is fascinating, isn’t it? Instead of being happy that runaway global warming, climate catastrophe, and the CO2 scare were all wrong, and that humanity lucked out, instead they still fervently wish for monstrous climate disasters — just so they could claim their predictions were right!
I suppose folks like that don’t have mirrors in their homes. Because how could they look at themselves without feeling disgust?
Y’know, before the initial Climategate information dump hit the ‘Net in November 2009, I had only seen the expression “noble cause corruption” used in reference to a type of police misconduct:
In other words, it was a dereliction of duty among police officers (who violated procedural mechanisms designed to prevent them from violating the civil rights of us “civilians”) and prosecuting attorneys (whose objectives were to attain high conviction rates [“Just win, baby”] rather than to see cases adjudicated according to the intent and the letter of the law).
Then the Climategate information – including not only the email communications of the Climatic Research Unit correspondents but also the deliberately corrupted temperature datasets and the “hockey stick”-outputting climate modeling software – confirmed the long-held suspicion that the preposterously overblown anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarm wasn’t just the result of blithering incompetence on the part of a few half-educated hacks masquerading as scientists but rather a concerted connivance perpetrated by credentialed charlatans willfully lying their asses off to feed politicians and similar professional crooks an excuse to pillage and impoverish honest human beings all over the planet.
Not too long thereafter, the chittering root weevils of the lamestream leftard statist establishment media began burbling the words “noble cause corruption” when it came necessary to acknowledge the vile, arrogant mendacity of the “climate consensus” perpetrators.
Y’know. “They did it (and they’re still doing it) for a good cause!”
Uh-huh. Nothing wrong with lying your ass off – knowing that what you’re doing is going to cost innocent people big chunks of their lives, their liberties, and their property – as long as you’re supposedly doing it “for a good cause.”
A kind of inverted noblesse oblige (damnably ignoble conduct for an allegedly noble purpose). Best of intentions, right?
Sic transit Mr. “Whittemore”. aka “major9985″
And Sic semper tyrannis, too. .
At 6:09 AM on 23 April, climatereason writes:
Ah, if only “Big Oil” would grease my palm a little….
dbstealey says:
April 22, 2014 at 11:42 am
As much as you want to debate this subject, you need to reference science, we cant argue with someone that just makes stuff up. I said to you before that you have to consider all the forcings not just CO2 and I showed you lovejoys forcing graph http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8. Of course you deny the graph is real (even though I referenced the paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2) and you say “But Mikey, the alarmist crowd does exactly that all the time.” Yet here you are doing it, hypocrite! I dont mind what you are doing, it really does not matter, I just care about governments not doing anything. So I think I will just have to focus my attention there.
I have made myself extremely clear and shown all the science. I know the immaturity that I am dealing with here and also the fact you are paid by the Heartland Institute. I hope you have mirrors in your house db and I hope you have kids who can look back at what you have done.
Dont expect a reply.
– High Priest –
M. Whittemore says:
I have made myself extremely clear and shown all the science.
If you really believe that, you are completely deluded. Your “science” is nothing but scientifically unsupportable assertions and conjectures. You avoid scientific evidence, because you have no real evidence.
Also, you should read Roger Sowell’s recent post on torts. You state flatly:
I know the immaturity that I am dealing with here and also the fact you are paid by the Heartland Institute.
You are a liar, Mr. Whittemore. A liar. Either post verifiable evidence that I am “paid by the Heartland Institute”, or apologize for your lie. I will not tolerate someone like you publicly lying about me. I have recourse.
Darn, Stealey. I was hoping that if you were getting paid by Heartland you could set me up…
How come nobody solicits me with those dirty Big Oil dollars?!?
:p
/ silly
Fine smokey, I mean dbstealey. I will rephrase my comment in that I don’t know if you get paid to be a moderator or get some sort of benefits from it but you work for an entente that is funded by the Heartland Institute.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate
REPLY: For the record Mr. “Whittemore”. aka “major9985”
1. Mr. Stealey volunteers his time here. He’s retired and mostly homebound taking care of his wife who has an illness. He does this to help keep the blog in order for me and to give himself something to do to feel useful. If you have a problem with that, I don’t care.
2. Heartland doesn’t pay WUWT to blog anything, as we’ve stated many times but you are just too stubborn to read about. See the WUWT FAQs.
3. This is what came of the money that Heartland helped me line up with a private donor: http://www.climatereferencenetwork.org Go ahead tell everybody how evil that site is, showing NOAA data. Meanwhile millions are pissed away every day in grants for global warming and people like yourself are still hung up on that $44,000 used to buy equipment and computers and programming to make that happen. I never got the part 2 of the funding to complete it because angry squawking idiots like yourself chased the donor away after Gleick committed his crime of wire fraud.
4. You’re no longer welcome here, so beat it, chump. I don’t have time for denigrating fools that just want to hurl the vitriol they parrot without actually checking what they are squawking about. All your future comments will automatically go into the bit bucket.
5. Feel free to be as upset as you wish.
– Anthony
This comment won’t be read by a lot of readers, since the thread is old. But my thoughts are as follows.
First, my sincere thanks to Anthony, who is the most honest, ethical man I know. He endures constant slings and arrows from a despicable crowd of reprobates who are not fit to shine his shoes.
If it were not for Anthony Watts, the lies and propaganda of the anti-science clique would rule. Anthony provides a forum for logic-based pushback with WUWT.
I am proud to assist in my minuscule way. I have put in about ten hours a day since this site began. Anthony has graciously allowed me to moderate comments, and I bend over backward to be fair. I recieve no compensation of any kind. In fact, I contribute monthly.
When in doubt, I always approve comments, because I believe that the strength and popularity of WUWT is due largely to its censorship-free policy. Readers decide what is true, and what is nonsense; WUWT does not have to tell them what to think. Common sense emerges from the comments.
The tide is turning, and it is due in large part to Anthony Watts’ incredible dedication to the truth. He has made more of a difference than anyone. When people look back at this great debate many years from now, the name Anthony Watts will stand out as the one who brought truth and transparency to the climate debates. That is a hella accomplishment, and of course it could not be done without all the commenters who support honest science.
As for M. Whittemore, he blew it. Now he is relegated to a few thinly-trafficked blogs where his fellow head-nodders will all agree that WUWT shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Whittemore has lost the privelege to speak to many thousands of WUWT readers. That does not happen very often here. But Whittemore deserves it.
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
As A Briton I find the Guardian to be an embarrassment at times to scientific reporting and to free speech. I suggest that any warmists posting here should also post on the Guardian comments site when there is a climate related story and express mild sceptical views. They will soon find it deleted.
The readership of the Guardian is dwindling rapidlyand it is losing a great deal of money, yet it still holds sway in the British Establishment. It is a shadow of the great campaigning newspaper it used to be and frankly it is laughable that obviously intelligent people like Michael should continue to believe in the claptrap they (often) push out under the guise of environmental reporting.
This idea that people like Michael has that sceptics such as myself are funded by some mysterious entity called ‘Big Oil’ is also simply laughable.
tonyb
dbstealey says:
April 22, 2014 at 11:42 am
Phil. has his confirmation bias in high gear. The only folks who can’t see that changes in CO2 follow changes in T are the ones who know that if they admitted that one scientific fact, their entire Belief system would come crashing down around their ears.
You are the one who has the confirmation bias, you continue to believe that your graph shows something that it does not. Modern CO2 changes follow fossil fuel emissions with a small modulation due to ocean temperature changes. Your removal of the data trend and rescaling of the residual (inadequately documented) obscures what it really happening, particularly to those who don’t understand what the WFT functions do exactly.
climatereason says:
April 23, 2014 at 6:09 am
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
Abusing one’s moderating privileges by going back and editing your own posts after they have been replied to, without indicating that you have done so is inappropriate.
Trimming the whineage, at 7:32 AM on 23 April, Phil. had written:
Er, yeah. What part about the Keeling Curve is it you figure Mr. stealey doesn’t get yet?
The trace anthropogenic contribution to a trace component of the atmosphere (increasing as it must, with the continuing and accelerating purposeful combustion of fossil petrochemical fuels) isn’t disputed, you [snip]. What’s at issue is whether or not that trace increase has had – or could ever have – any adverse impact upon the climate by way of the greenhouse gas effect.
Has it slid past your [snip] head that nobody pushing the alarmist “climate catastrophe” garbage has yet been able to provide EVIDENCE in support of the crippled conjecture that pushes this nominal greenhouse effect as the only begetter of (much less a significant factor in) deleterious world-wide climatic conditions?
When your [snip] supposition was first brought to my attention in 1981, I recall having responded to the correspondent who’d mailed me that clipping as a curiosity (asking what I thought of this [snip] fatuity): “It looks as if they’re overstating the greenhouse gas effect of total atmospheric CO2 by at least three orders of magnitude.”
My correspondent was Dr. Petr Beckmann, one of America’s most acerbically outspoken advocates for nuclear power, and we had a good time contemplating how this “carbon condemnation” [snip] would actually oblige the leftie ‘viro idiots to confront the fact that nuclear fission is actually better for the environment than is the coal cycle.
No release of CO2, but also less radiation release by way of the uranium fuel cycle by a long chalk. (All that radioactive thorium in coal ash, y’know. Chemically carcinogenic, too.)
But, no. Back in 1981, both Dr. Beckmann and I figured that nobody could be stupid enough to base any kind of public policy decisions on that fantabulous fuggheadedness.
“Man-made global warming” because of carbon dioxide? Yeah, right….
climatereason says:
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
Thanks, Tony. Phil. has a problem, but I treat him very fairly [I can’t speak for the several other mods]. It would be easy to censor Phil.’s nasty ad hominem attacks on Lord Monckton and Prof Wegman, among others, but I believe that open debate allows readers to make up their minds about who is right, and who is wrong.
I post all of Phil.’s comments without any snips or deletions. I do the same with others. You are right, the Guardian [and almost all other alarmist blogs, including once-ethical ones like Scientific American] censor skeptics’ comments. That is because they do not have credible arguments. Really, why else? That is abusing moderator priveleges. But Phil. will never criticize them for that, even as he wrongly criticizes us. Readers can make up their own minds about the pseudonymous “Phil.”.
Phil. continues to repeat his assertion that “your graph shows something that it does not.” But despite my repeated requests, Phil. has never posted a graph showing that CO2 is the cause of changes in global temperature.
Phil. has decisively lost the argument, and the entire debate. Skeptics have shown with irrefutable, empirical scientific evidence, that ∆T is the cause of ∆CO2. But there is no measurable evidence that ∆CO2 is the cause of ∆T, therefore, their entire “carbon” argument fails. And with it, the whole runaway global warming scare is falsified. The planet itself concurs.
The difference between scientific skeptics and Phil. is that Phil. can never admit it when he is wrong. As a commenter on the Judith Curry thread wrote:
..and we sceptics are accused of denying the science…? What Dr Curry demonstrates is that the alarmists not only deny the science, they obfuscate it, muzzle alternative perspectives and castigate those who would speak out. Utterly despicable.
dbstealey says:
April 23, 2014 at 9:43 am
climatereason says:
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
Thanks, Tony. Phil. has a problem, but I treat him very fairly [I can’t speak for the several other mods].
Perhaps it would be better if you weren’t moderating threads in which you are also taking part?
I do have a problem with your practice of going back and editing your posts without indicating that you have done so.
It would be easy to censor Phil.’s nasty ad hominem attacks on Lord Monckton and Prof Wegman, among others, but I believe that open debate allows readers to make up their minds about who is right, and who is wrong.
In fairness you’d also have to censor Monckton’s ad hominem, which would keep you very busy since he is the master of them! In fact I haven’t made such attacks on Monckton, I do recall suggesting he was ‘calendrically challenged’ when he made three dating errors in a single post.
Regarding Wegman, when he was presented as an authority I objected based on his proven record of plagiarism and errors he made in his presentation of the statistical treatment carried out by M&M.
That’s not an ad hominem, that’s criticizing his record.
Phil. says: [” … “]
I censor no one. If you have a problem, which it appears that you do, there are literally millions of other blogs you can post on. But you like to post here. Why? Maybe it’s because of WUWT’s millions of readers.
I treat everyone the same, per Anthony’s Rules for Moderators. Stay within site Policy and your comments get posted — as you can clearly see. You are given leeway to post whatever you like. That is more than your pals give skeptics.
You will not get a more fair shake anywhere else than here. That is the truth, and you know it.
I [like many other skeptics] have been banned from several blogs, including Scientific American, simply because I posted charts that they did not want their readers to see. Their excuse was “name calling”, which I was very careful to avoid, knowing they would use any excuse to delete my comments.
But they really didn’t need any excuse, did they? ScAm censors uncomfortable facts that they don’t want their readers to be aware of. That makes them propagandists with an agenda, doesn’t it? If you were a straight shooter, you would take them to task for not allowing different views. But you don’t. Truth be told, you probably approve. Because there is just not much credible science to support the climate alarmist cause.
Next, your version of ad hominem and mine are different. I won’t belabor the point, except to note that you get to post your comments here like everyone else, and you are not snipped [by me, anyway], for your ‘ad-hom’ comments. The way I see it, readers will arrive at what they think is the scientific truth of the debate by reading comments from both sides. So take your best shot — and be grateful that Anthony provedes a forum where everyone can express their opinion.
You’ve taken repeated shots about the moderation here, which by all accounts but yours, is the best moderation there is on any site. This thread is almost two weeks old now, and the handful of readers still following it know your opinion about moderation — which is a comment that is entirely and always off-topic. So any future comments about moderation here will be deleted as such. You should be thankful that you get to have your say, here on the internet’s very heavily read “Best Science & Technology” site. I only wish I could have my say the same way, on blogs with your point of view. But I can’t. I’m censored. Really, that should tell you a lot about who is honest, and who isn’t.
Then they fight you
.
It will be over soon