A guest post by Basil Copeland
Lucia, at rankexploits.com, has been musing over Tilo Reber’s posting of a graph showing flat 11 year trends in the HadCRUT land-ocean global temperature anomaly and the two MSU satellite data sets, UAH and RSS. In answer to the question whether global warming is on an 11 year hiatus, “not quite,” says Lucia. She challenges Tilo’s omission of the GISS data set, because notwithstanding questions about the reliability of GISS, it still shows a positive trend over the 11 year period in question. Unless all the measures show a flat trend, Lucia’s not ready to conclude that global warming has been on an 11 year hiatus.
I understand the desire to look at as many metrics as possible in trying to divine what is going on with globally averaged temperature. I also understand the reasons for questioning the reliability of GISS. What I don’t understand is why the only measure of trend that seems to count is a trend derived from linear regression. William Briggs recently had an interesting post to his blog on the relationship between trends in CO2 and temperature in which he introduced the use of loess lines to track trends that are not represented well by linear regression. Loess refers to a type of locally weighted regression that in effect fits a piecewise linear or quadratic trend through the data, showing how the trend is changing over time. Especially in an environment where the charge of cherry-picking the data — choosing starting and ending points to produce a particular result – is routinely made, loess lines are a relatively robust alternative to simple trend lines from linear regression.
Click for a larger image
Figure 1 fits a loess line through the data for GISS using the same 11 year period used by Tilo Reber (except that I’ve normalized all anomalies in this discussion relative to their 11 year mean to facilitate comparison to a common baseline). The red line is the GISS anomaly for this period, about its mean, and the blue line is the loess line. While it varies up and down over the period in question, I would argue that the overall trend is essentially flat, or even slightly negative: the value of line at the end of the period is slightly lower than at the beginning of the period. What this loess line shows is that a linear regression trend is not a particularly good way to represent the actual trend in the data. Without actually fitting a linear trend line, we can reasonably guess that it will trend upwards, because of the way the loess line is lower in the first half of the period in question, and higher in the second half. Linear regression will fit a positive, but misleading, slope through the data, implying that at the end of the period the GISS is on an upward trend when in fact the trend peaked around 2006 and has since declined.
Click for a larger image
Figure 2 is rainbow of colors comparing all four of the metrics we tend to follow here on WUWT. Not surprisingly, the loess lines of HadCRUT, UAH and RSS all track closely together, while GISS is the odd duck of the lot. So what does this kaleidoscope of colors tell us about whether global warming is has gone on an 11 year hiatus? I think it tells us rather more than even Tilo was claiming. All of the loess lines show a net decline in the trend over the 11 year period in question. It is relatively minor in the case of GISS, but rather pronounced in the case of the other three. Of the other three, the median anomaly at the beginning of the period, as represented by the loess lines, was 0.125; at the end of the period, the median anomaly had dropped to -0.071, for a total decline of 0.196, or almost 0.2C.
Global warming on hiatus? It looks to me like more evidence of global cooling. Will it continue? Neither linear regression nor loess lines can answer that question. But the loess lines certainly warn us to be cautious in naively extrapolating historical trends derived by simple linear regression.
Not even GISS can support the conclusion from the last 11 years of data that global warming continues to march upward in unrelenting fashion.
Do we have this same kind of fit for the measurements since 1900? I’d love to see the full 100+ year cycle fitted to the Loess curves.
Basil,
There seems to be a bit of conflict between your point that
“Especially in an environment where the charge of cherry-picking the data — choosing starting and ending points to produce a particular result – is routinely made, loess lines are a relatively robust alternative to simple trend lines from linear regression.”
and
“All of the loess lines show a net decline in the trend over the 11 year period in question.”
For example, if I were to choose 2000 as my starting point, GISS would not show a “net decline”. If I were to choose 1990 as my starting point, all four series would show a net increase. If I choose 1997 as my starting point, all series show a net decline.
Net reductions aren’t really a useful concept in this context as you are just comparing the starting and ending point; rather, loess is good at showing local trends in the data. If you could show the loess lines for the 1979 to present data for all four temperature records (or 1880 to present data for the land-based records), it might be interesting to see how similar or dissimilar the recent trends have been to those in the full record. I’d do it myself, but excel does not support loess, unfortunately.
Jeff and Zeke,
Within the limits of the software I use (gretl), I’ll see what I can come up with. The longer the period, the more smoothing there will be, so some prospect remains for “cherry picking” and I would expect that the downward trend at the end can be “erased” by going far enough back in time. Keep in mind that it is referred to as “local regression” and if you include enough data from the past, you’ll begin to dilute the weight of the data at given points. It will still be better than a linear trend through the data, though.
More later.
Basil
Thank you very much for serious information about global warming. In any case I´d like my grandson to live in a warm, but not too hot world.
Sincerely
Galina Vitkova
Zeke,
Don’t worry about the “cherry picking” argument. Solar cycle 23 (SC23, now 12 years long) has been weaker than the previous 3 solar cycles that encompassed, and probably caused, the global warming from 1972 to 1998. Those 3 solar cycles were some of the strongest since Galileo first noted sunspots. The current minimum between solar cycles 23 and 24 has already been weaker than the SC21/22 and SC22/23 minima for over a year. SC24 just can’t seem to get going with any appreciable strength, and some reputable hypotheses predict that SC/24 will only be 1/3 as strong as SC23.
Two or 3 more years will determine if all bets are off, regarless of cherry picking.
Zeke,
Here’s what I could easily come up with (I’ll need to collate more data to do more):
http://i32.tinypic.com/dggj2u.jpg
It is just UAH, not all of them. And I confess to being a little surprised — not at the lack of decline at the end, but that the loess line comes out higher at the end than the linear fit. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since at this scale, the 1998 El Nino is going to weigh more heavily on the loess result than on the linear trend. Still, the overall warming is less with the loess line than with the linear trend, though at the end the slopes are visually indistinguishable.
Basil
Nice post. I’ve been very surprised to see the use of linear OLS trend lines in analyzing these data-sets. It’s pretty obvious from eyeballing the data that there is serial correlation, which violates the statistical assumptions of OLS. So OLS is invalid in these contexts.
Some claim that OLS is robust to these kinds of statistical violations. But in this case it really matters. Serial correlations means that the trend line is highly sensitive to … you guessed it … starting and end points of the data!
Basil,
I think your UAH loess graph for 1979-2008 illustrates exactly the point of cherry-picking. The argument that using 1997 as the starting point does not constitute cherry-picking since it does not start at the top of the 1998 ENSO is flawed, since it still contains the dominating 1998 ENSO near the first half of the graph, where it will still tend to cause an overall linear regression to be negative. Using the larger range shifts it to the second half of the graph (albeit not by much) which will tend to weight the linear regression upward. Looks to me like the loess is mainly affected by the relatively warm 2002-2006 period.
It seems like the website below needs a conversely stated position website for “How to Talk to a AGW”.
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics#Stages%20of%20Denial
Mark,
I see your point. I do think that as a general principle, loess lines are more robust than linear regression. So they may reduce the problem of cherry picking, but not eliminate it entirely.
I didn’t choose the period in question. I simply those to apply loess lines to provide another perspective to a discussion already underway.
I’ve posted above what happens if we go back to the beginning of the satellite era for UAH, which I imagine makes your point for you.
Basil
Gary P: That SC24 would be as weak as 1/3 of SC23 is likely to be an underestimate. The polar field precursor method predicts SC24 to be 3/5 of SC23. That is still the lowest in the last 100 years. The solar minimum in 1954 [between SC18 and SC19] was even lower than the current minimum, yet SC19 was the biggest ever, so a weak minimum is a poor predictor of the next maximum.
MDDwave (16:07:28 ) : It seems like the website below needs a conversely stated position website for “How to Talk to a AGW”.
I noticed that none of the answers in the above web site were dated after November 2006. Many of them are just factually incorrect with updated data (e.g., satellite records showing no cooling). But you have a great idea; it’d be interesting to see point-by-point debates.
Leif,
Whether 1/2 or 3/5, I think we’ll see moderate temperatures at least until the ramp up to the peak of SC25, and then longer if SC25 is weak. The upward trend in “global warming” may return once SC24 gets underway, but we will not see the same rate of increase we saw in global temperatures through the 1980’s and 1990’s.
I think, then, that regardless of the specifics, Gary P.’s main point is valid: all of our bickering about cherry picking will become moot as the future proves one or the other side of this debate right and the other side wrong.
Thanks, though, for your observation and insight (even if we don’t agree on everything).
Basil
Loess is locally-fitted least squares with weights that decrease as the distance from the data point increases. Two basic parameters determine the “smoothed” line: alpha, the smoothing parameter that governs the weight/distance, and lambda, the parameter that determines whether the fit is linear or quadratic.
Loess gives the analyst choices, as do many smoothing functions. The choices may be evaluated by examining the residuals (actual minus fitted), and sometimes a second loess line can be run through the residual plot to check their pattern (if any).
There is much flexibility in loess fitting, in other words, and some art to it. It cannot be said to be definitive, since there is so much flex. However, loess is just as good as (or better than) a straight line fit for many kinds of data, including the temp time series above.
IMHO, though, one does not need a fit of any kind, but merely examination of the raw data, to see that there is no linearity to it and certainly no clear trend upward as AGW theory predicts. The IPCC predictions (or scenarios, if you will) are for linear temp increases, and that is obviously not happening.
Loess fitting was popularized by William S. Cleveland. His book, Visualizing Data, is a modern classic and I highly recommend it to all data miners. Cleveland was one of those Bell Labs geniuses who invented S, now R, a phenomenal contribution to all sciences, akin, IMHO, to the invention of the wheel.
Since cherrypicking does seem to be a problem with the temperature data, let’s just pick the first data point for the satellite temps and the last.
UAH
December 1978 : -0.199C
May 2008 : -0.18C
RSS
January 1979 : -0.268C
May 2008 : -0.083C
That is an average of 0.1C of warming over the last almost 30 years.
The Models predict 0.6C of warming over 30 years so they are just WRONG.
If 30 years is not enough time to determine whether the models are wrong, then there will never be enough time.
And regression lines sometimes introduce artifact trend lines. Question: What is the regression line for a perfect half circle? Answer: A line at 45 degrees which is an incomplete and inaccurate description of the data of course.
Basil, in my own analysis, I fit rolling linear trends, and then fit the changing slopes to show how trends change over time. These Loess lines diagrams seem to be a fancy way of doing a similar thing, though I don;t think your conclusion is all that robust. I think all you have done is demonstrate 2 things: (1) very recent data given predominant weight will show a negative trend line (which isn’t much different from simply fitting a linear trend line to, say, the last 60 months), and (2) the rate of warming has been declining. I agree with this, as well, but this can easily be demonstrated by fitting rolling slopes.
Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to view things from a different perspective.
Joe
The Idiot
GP: “some reputable hypotheses predict that SC/24 will only be 1/3 as strong as SC23”.
Don’t worry. We understand by the syntax your money may not be on 40. Considering the lateness, and thereafter, the slowness of 24, anything under 67 (= 75 – 8) should be safe.
MDDwave,
I went to the site you posted concerning “How to talk to a Climate Skeptic”, I have also read the simplistic RealClimate.org tripe on solar influences on climate change, and many peer reviewed studies as well.
The posted article stated “…there has been no increase in solar irradiance since at least 1978, when satellite observations began.” How simplistic. It is true that solar irradiance, on average, has changed very little over that time span. During the average 11.3 year solar cycle solar irradiance in the visible spectrum varies about 0.2% and the overall change is even more insignificant (an AGW talking point). The fun part is that the cosmic ray intensity on the earths atmosphere changes by as much as 25% magnitude comparing solar minimum to maximum every cycle. See http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu// and http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/ for examples. Also note that cosmic ray intensity is particularly high during the current solar minimum.
According to Wikipedia:
“After the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896, it was generally believed that atmospheric electricity (ionization of the air) was caused only by radiation from radioactive elements in the ground or the radioactive gases (isotopes of radon) they produce. Measurements of ionization rates at increasing heights above the ground during the decade from 1900 to 1910 showed a decrease that could be explained as due to absorption of the ionizing radiation by the intervening air. Then, in 1912, Victor Hess carried three Wulf electrometers (a device to measure the rate of ion production inside a hermetically sealed container) to an altitude of 5300 meters in a free balloon flight. He found the ionization rate increased approximately fourfold over the rate at ground level. He concluded “The results of my observation are best explained by the assumption that a radiation of very great penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above.” In 1913-14, Werner Kolhörster confirmed Victor Hess’ results by measuring the increased ionization rate at an altitude of 9 km. Hess received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936 for his discovery of what came to be called “cosmic rays”.
Now that was an earned Nobel Prize. When I was in high school, we even had a cloud chamber in our physics class and observed cloud streaks caused by an alpha particle source.
Henrik Svensmark et al. have hypothesized that the solar variations that modulate the cosmic ray signal seen at the can affect cloud formation and hence climate. The mechanism will soon get quantitative testing as soon as the CERN super collider starts up in a year and commences the CLOUD experiments.
Do your homework MDDwave. The latest counter argument to Svensmark is Sloan et al. which looked at short duration bursts of solar activity (not the cosmic radiation itself) and found a slight affect. Imagine, it takes a long time for solar radiation to reach the edge of the heliosphere and then again the time for the moderated the cosmic rays to reach the earth. They were looking for a decrease in existing clouds instead of an increase in newly formed clouds. Give me a break. Sloan et al. said that they detected less than expected changes. Well of course, given the biases noted above. But most importantly they found a link.
As for the IPCC saying they determined that their GCMs predict CO2 forcing would be more than 12 times the solar forcing, they were referring to solar irradiance which as stated above varies only a fraction of a percent.
So there!
Your analysis is very thought provoking. Yet…
I’m fear that presenting data with supportable analysis will sway the AGW/ACC crowd about as much as presenting demonstrable genetic trends will sway ‘Intelligent Design’ proponents. It is no longer a question of science, it it ever really had been about science at all.
Why do I say this?
Noting that the temperatures are rising due to human fossil-fuel use was first noted in a study specifically commissioned by Ms. Thatcher in England to show this result, in order for her to use it as a weapon against striking coal miners.
It was ‘political interference with the scientific method’ at the outset, and there has not been any evidence that this has ever changed. Now, uniformly denying access to the data the IPCC used for its latest ‘report’ – even though these materials are to be fully accessible for at least 5 years according to IPCCs own rules, has further undermined the public confidence in the honesty of this debate. No matter how much ‘good science’ follows, the whole field will have been irrevocably tainted.
Now, more and more people are beginning to suspect that the scientific language was hijacked and the scientific method subverted in order to advance a specific dogma, which is not at all related to science – and never had been. I suspect that ‘science’ as a whole will never fully recover from this debacle.
Another blow to Hansen. Empirical reality is a hard concept for someone who has staked their whole life on a hypothesis.
That Hansen guy is nuts. msut be where Al Gore got his ideas form.
Oh– I agree linear regression isn’t the only way. But, it’s the one that can be “flat”.
I’m not familiar with Loess lines. But, if we do do linear regression, Giss is flat since 2001– which is the year I think most rational for comparison to the AR4. But that’s only 7 years.
How does this loess fit look if you go back to 1988? (As long as today is the aniversary and all.)
Leif,
Thanks for correcting me on your prediction for SC24 being 3/5 instead of 1/3 the strength of SC23. My bad. I appreciate and respect your work using the polar field precursor method. It is far more acceptable than any other methods.
However, models such as the Low-Frequency Modulation Model of Clilvered et al. that use strictly statistical analysis of past cycles, predict more of a Dalton type minimum for SC24 and SC25. I realize that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, which is what low-frequency analysis is all about, but then, we really don’t know what the sun will do.
I get excited overly excited on this stuff. Every time i see some Fool-aide drinker in a fish costume at a global summit of some sort, I just want to shake ’em and say WAKE UP. MDDwave and those like him will push us to international global socialism to stifle the industrialized nations and also prevent underdeveloped nations from industrializing. AGW is dangerous. Fuel from food is dangerous. Most of their remedies will doom Sub-Saharan Africans to being beasts of burden pedaling man-powered irrigation pumps supplied by carbon offset scams. Sub-Saharan Africans are using dried dung for cooking and heat instead of fertilizing their fields. Those solutions are racist. The underdeveped countries need electricity, and they need it in industrial amounts now. Underdeveloped countries have high birth rates because they are underdeveloped, which means women have 8 or nine children if the women don’t die during labor. It goes on and on.
Now goal of the AGW crowd is 350ppm CO2 in the atmosphere when we already have 385ppm.
I hope the sun busts them all, then we can go back to investing in climate change mitigation instead of thinking Science or Gaia is god and we are more powerful than the sun.
Joe (Diatribical Idiot),
It does sound that there isn’t much difference between your rolling trends and loess lines. As for giving the recent period more weight, that’s obviously true, but if you want to really give the more recent period more weight, try Hodrick-Prescott smoothing. 🙂
Basil
Basil,
I think you will find that it closely follows PDO. SSN not a factor since if you plot decadal smooth you will find that ssn will closely match ssn only because they are both decade in length. The kicker is that if both are in sequence or are they symbiosis. I hope this makes sense.
What strikes me about that graphic is that you can see what I have heard talked about over at Climate Audit. Hansen’s GISS diverges cold in the early years and warm in the later years. You can see the impact of adjusting the past colder and the present warmer around some break point. Now since the break point for each data stream (each recording station) isn’t at the same point, there is a long period of convergence with the other data sets in the center but as you go back farther in time, you get on the “cold” side of more and more of the break points and the negative adjustments accumulate. In the center you have some adjustments going positive but some are still negative and as you get closer to the present you eventually get to a “tipping point” where so many are adjusted positive that it begins to become more obvious in the divergence from the others in the warm direction.
Gary P: the cosmic ray intensity at solar minima returns to the same value [alternating a bit between a ‘peaked’ and a ’rounded’ top – for well-understood reasons] and the current minimum is not special. See e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux.png so if cosmic rays are important then the temperature now is no different from what it was in 1954.
Mark,
I have to disagree with your point about cherry picking. There were seven El Nino/La Nina events over that time period. All of them influenced the slope. The largest influence was not even the 98 El Nino, but rather the La Nina that immediately followed it. I took a stab at quantifying the effects of the 7 El Ninos and La Ninas during that period, and it appears to me that there is no justification at all for the claim that the flat trend is caused by a selection of end points. Here is what I did. The period is slightly different, since it begins with Jan 98, but I think that the results would be similar regardless.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/05/ten-year-hadcrut3-enso-effects.html
lucia,
Since 1988, a loess line through GISS looks like this:
http://i32.tinypic.com/14bj7ef.jpg
At the end, the trend is still positive, at a rate of 0.056C per decade (well below the current IPCC scenarios/forecasts).
Basil
Basil:
While I respect Lucia’s opinion on which data sets to use, in my mind one has to draw a quality standard somewhere. On top of all of the quality problems that Anthony has documented with the data, I think that there have been adjustment choices made with GISS that are designed to give warming results that increase the trend. I think that this paper does a good job of explaining some of those choices.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/CorrectCorrections.pdf
crosspatch also has a good take on it above.
And of course the divergence over the last decade should also tell you something. The decadal divergence is .13C. That is well over half of the .2C decadal trend that is blamed on CO2 by the warmers.
Once we do a better analysis on HadCru data we may find out that it has many problems of its own. But for right now I have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and my personal choice is not to accept GISS for any purpose. I believe that it would be excusing agenda oriented work to use it. Just my opinion.
Regarding the use of a linear regression trend line, I don’t wish to claim that this is the best method. But it seems to be a commonly used method, even among the warmers themselves. So in order to have a common basis of comparison and to avoid arguments about methods, I will probably continue to use it. On top of that, I’m lazy and Excel will do the calculations and fit the line for me.
Sorry about taking so long to respond, but I’ve been motorcycling through the Rockies – trying to get those poor trees a little more CO2 to grow with. 😉
Leif Svalgaard (20:21:43)
I believe we were in a cooling phase in 1954. So if it is the same as 1954, I would say there would be some more cooling on the way. Maybe 20 more years worth.
Gary Plyler,
Sorry that I so poorly stated my point. By referencing the realclimate.org, I was not endorsing the position. I agree with you that the arguments at that site are simplistic. After reading items in “Whatsupwiththat”, “”realclimate.org” argument in ‘The temperature record is simply unreliable’ is silly.
I was merely trying to point that there should a website similar to that site with a structured ouline of arguments, but presenting the counter AGW position. From what I seen, this website has many of the elements, but not in a structured outline format.
Leif Svalgaard writes:
The relevant measure is ionization near ground level – since low level clouds produce cooling but high level clouds do not make much difference.
Our records and data for ionization near ground level are fragmentary and incomplete. For those years for which we have good data, we get a pretty good correlation – more ionization, cooler weather, less ionization, warmer weather.
The data that supposedly shows a poor fit relies on various proxies that one might think might reflect ionization at seal level – but, of course, if one takes this approach, then a poor fit is pretty much guaranteed regardless of the truth of the hypothesis, since proxies are proxies. And if one *wants* a poor fit, one is bound to find proxies that will deliver.
Basil,
Thanks for that 1979-present graph. As you said, we will all see in a few years how this whole thing plays out. The one take-away seems to be that we shouldn’t place too much weight on the anomalous first few months in 2008 unless they continue. If 2008 as a whole ends up being considerably below the trend (say, below 0.15 relative to 1979-1998 baseline), it might serve as a bit of a wakeup call to the climate science community that we need to reassess some assumptions of the magnitude of natural forcings.
Mike Dubrasich,
Not to beat a dead horse too much, but the IPCC projections are far from monotonic. See http://www.realclimate.org/images/runs.jpg for a reasonable assembly of specific model runs.
Bill Illis,
While I admire the aversion to cherrypicking, I’d be a bit wary of picking a single month for your endpoint given the scope of monthly variability. Comparing the mean 1979 temperature to the mean temperature over the last 12 months would be less noisy and yield 0.28 degrees warming in RSS and 0.19 warming in UAH.
Zeke,
Consider this: there is no other 10 or 11 year flat period from 1978 on, except for 1982-83 to 1992-93 because of the Pinatubo eruption. So, no matter what method you want to use, the flat/downward trend from 1997 or 1998 to 2008 is unique. No doubt you will say this is because of the extreme nature of the 1998 El Nino…but then also consider that when it comes to ENSO, the 2008 La Nina has cooled temperatures to the same point that the 1999 La Nina did 9 years earlier – and they were of comparable strength. No other La Nina during this 30 year period was as cool as the previous one…until 2008.
Basil,
Smoothing the curve to see the longer term effects is fine. And LOESS is a fine smoother, one of many. All smoothers work by replacing values by some average of values over a nearby interval. Generally, the bigger the interval, the smoother, but then you lose detail over a timescale that you really might want to see.
But it isn’t a magic way of getting a better estimate of a slope over a longer interval. To see this, consider why you don’t just work out the slope using the first and last value. That actually gives you an unbiased estimator. You’d be over as often as under. But it has high sensitivity to noise.
By taking the difference between smoothed values, in the right way, you preserve the unbiasedness, while reducing the noise sensitivity. And the more smoothing, the more you reduce it. Any good smoother works like this.
If you keep increasing the smoothing, you get to linear regression. It is the unbiased estimator which is (wrt sum of squares) least sensitive to noise.
Gary Plyler:
Thanks for the CR website.
Am I reading the following correctly? CR intensity is about 15% more than during the time around 2002?
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/Request.dll?Y1=2000&M1=Jan&D1=01&h1=00&m1=00&Y2=2008&M2=May&D2=01&h2=00&m2=00&YR=00&MR=00&DR=00&hR=00&mR=00&PD=1
Leif Svalgaard: Off topic. Have you posted, or do you know the wherabouts of, monthly TSI reconstruction values since 1850 or earlier? If so, please provide a link. I can only find annual figures.
Hey, did you catch the latest environmentalist hoax? Reported on none other than the Huffington Post…HA!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/22/hoax-the-lost-amazonian-t_n_108541.html
Make up whatever lies you like, after all, you are trying to save the world.
What’s the point of this “rebuttal” here or at realclimate?
No one has ever claimed the IPCC says the weather is monotonic. The IPCC graphs show the underying climate trend (ensemble average of weather) is expected to be monotonically increasing. That’s all anyone claims: climate is predicted to be monotonic.
The authors at realclimate need to stop rebutting all these strawmen that someone is claiming weather is monotonic. No one claims that. So, yes, if you keep repeating that rebuttal, you are not only beating a dead horse, but you are beating a dead straw horse that was concocted for the express purpose of making it easy to beat.
Meanwhile, the live kicking horse is still there snorting at you.
With regard to that link: The RC people also need stop trying to test models using model data and ignoring real honest to goodness earth data.
In that post, Gavin wants to claim the spread of model predictions for 8 year trend is due to “internal variablity (weather!)”
From a fundamental view point, that spread is not wheather noise. Weather noise conctributes to the spread– but so do the different parmeterizations in different models, and different treatments of forcing in the past (half with volcanic eruptions, half without). It is not even clear any individual model gives correct weather noise, and this could be affected by ocean treatments, parameterizations, etc.
So, clearly, one should at least do a quick reality check of the spread of those 8 year old trends to data. It’s easy to see it’s way to big to be due to weather only. If we are to believe Gavin, those weather noise during a period without volcanos produced a variability of 8 year trends that exceeds the measured variability in the full temperature record. That is to say: If we calculate the variability of all 8 year trends seen over all time, including contributions to volcanic eruptions, measurement noise (including things like the errors due to bucket-jet inlet transitions etc.) that “measured” variablity in 8 year OLS is distinctly smaller than his claimed “weather noise”!
Taking out the bucket noise and the periods with volcano eruptions, the actual variability of OLS trends during periods without volcanic eruptions is noticably smaller than the variability I estimate from residuals of an OLS fit– and between 1/2 and 1/3rd the side of the variabilty Gavin concocts by assembling all his model predictions for a periods without “weather noise”.
It seems to me that the colling observed recently follows the solar flare levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar-cycle-data.png
This would just be a coincidence, I guess, if it weren’t for how well it jibes with the cosmic ray idea, since solar flares clear the heliosphere of cosmic rays, and less of them mean more cosmic rays.
As the peaceful 99.98% of human history is not widely known yet (Raymond Kelly: Warless societies, Douglas Fry:Beyond War-The Human Potential for Peace), because of the cortisol addicted aggressives’ propaganda, the reconciliating decentralized Autarky of our peaceable ancestors is usually not proposed as the best, tested solution for ANY climate change.
The hushed-up Swiss system of collective control of fear and guided overpopulation through mutual-aid traditions, reforestations, autarky farms and unified list for elections, may help rescuers prepare kids for the future.
What this excercise really shows is that our climate is too complex to represent by any single measure. An El Nino here, a volcano there causes any trend to be called into question. When we look only at temperature, I think there is a tendency for we skeptics to be disappointed by any upward trend or encouraged by any flat or downward trend. Since we aren’t in a period of glaciation we should expect an upward or flat trend. The rise in CO2 fits a linear positive trend much more easily than temperature. So how do temperatures prove CO2 driven warming?
This is obviously a flawed perspective. Given that Loess Curves will appear different whenever the period is different, then the only acceptable period is the longest possible one, and we cannot really appreciate the end slope seriously, because it is constantly changing between the graphs presented.
This is cherry picking at its peak, and I expect more seriousness from you.
REPLY: I grow so tired of this argument about “cherry picking”, particularly since its becoming the standard complaint for ANYTHING that somebody doesn’t like about a time series analysis.
The period is a period of interest. The near present is far more interesting than 50 years ago because it gives clues to the near future. We analyse it, we present the results, we talk about the results. It is an opinion with supporting evidence, just as James Hansen’s GISTEMP work or Roy Spencer’s UAH is an opinion with supporting evidence.
Everybody, everyday, in every endeavor “cherry picks” something. Choosing things that interest you and not engaging in things you don’t. Which is probably why you read THIS blog as opposed to blogs on Paris fashion trends or fantasy football.
I expect more insight from you. -Anthony
xanthippa: I’ve heard of Thatcher’s AGW work, but haven’t found documentation. What study was the one you mention?
Nick,
That’s a very good exposition which, in sense, brings us back to the problem of choosing when and what data we look at. My overall preference is to look at all the data and I’ve grown fond of Hodrick-Prescott for smoothing because it reveals periodic oscillations that can be corroborated with spectrum analysis. Since we’re focusing in here on GISS, and I happen to have this data handy, here is a chart that reinforces my belief that we’re in a period of natural cooling, and that even GISS can be used to show this:
http://s3.tinypic.com/2efozys.jpg
The grey lines are the raw GISS anomalies, the blue line is a smoothing with HP, and the red lines are the first differences of the blue line. The first differences reveal decadal and bidecadal changes in the rate of warming. We’re in a particularly strong cooling phase right, and even GISS shows a downturn since 2006 in this depiction. Now it may be nothing more than a downturn like that you can see around 1990 — brief, and then followed by a steady march upward. Or, it may be like the downturn we see in the early 1940’s, which was followed by a long period of cooling.
I honestly do not know which is more likely. I do know that the current downturn is inconsistent with the power frequently attributed to AGW. I also know that a big chunk of the warming trend in recent decades owes increases in reported temperatures over the northern hemispheric land masses, and that the trend is much less in the tropics, something else hard to reconcile with CO2 induced AGW (but not so hard to reconcile with UHI induced AGW). Then we have the matter of whether any of the decadal or bidecadal variation can be attributed to solar, and if so how much.
In the end, the trick is to not be so vested in a particular way of looking at things that you cannot see other things that matter.
Thanks for the observations. I thought you described well the benefits and pitfalls of smoothing, and especially the issue of how if you smooth over too long of a period, you may miss something you want to see. On that, with HP, I’m using a level of smoothing that basically smooths out cycles of less than 6 or 7 years, leaving the decadal and bidecadal oscillations, because these are what I want to see. Based on the pattern I see in the image linked to above, I’d say there is slightly greater chance that in the decades ahead we’re in for a repeat of the mid 20th century than the late 20th century.
We shall see. 🙂
Basil
So, I finally got around to plotting trend lines from 1997 to present and, low and behold, all the series show a slight warming based on a linear regression over the entire period.
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/1997-2008temps.jpg
Now, can anyone spot the difference between my graph and Tilo’s (other than the normalization of the data to a common baseline, which has no effect on the trend)? I’m rather perplexed how we could obtain different results from the same dataset, unless he is starting from some point other than January 1997.
Great post.
I have a somewhat off-topic question for everyone/anyone..
Does anyone know how I can get my hands on a plans and guidelines for building a weather station? Dimensions, requirements? Any help would be great and keep up the good work!!
Zeke,
You wrote “The one take-away seems to be that we shouldn’t place too much weight on the anomalous first few months in 2008 unless they continue.” If you look at the chart I just linked to in my reply to Nick, the first few months of 2008 are not particularly anomalous when looking at the longer pattern. Downturns like this occur with roughly bidecadal frequency. This has already proven, though, to be a deeper downturn than any experienced since 1964 (look at the troughs of the red line in the following figure), and so if this continues, we’re getting into territory not seen since the mid 20th century cooling.
Here’s the link again, for convenience:
http://s3.tinypic.com/2efozys.jpg
Basil
james: And if one *wants* a poor fit, one is bound to find proxies that will deliver. I guess that works the other way too: And if one *wants* a good fit, one is bound to find proxies that will deliver.
crosspatch: I expressed that poorly. The better way is: The cosmic ray intensity has been the same at each minimum since 1954.
If Ninas and Ninos cycle into and out of phase with cyclic ocean temperatures, and these ocean temperature phases cycle into and out of phase with sun cycles, and sun activity cycles into and out of busy and quiet cycles, and cosmic ray bombardment has its own cycles from the sun and outer universe sources, it stands to reason that periodically, all things come together to create very hot temperature decades and very cold temperature decades. I keep going back to the pattern created by school bus windshield wipers. They never track together all the time. They cycle into and out of phase with each other. I believe we have experienced true warming, and I believe we are experiencing true cooling. Every farmer in Wallowa County hopes that the warming trend will return, and quickly. But the signs they see are causing concern that cold will once again invade our quiet little corner of Oregon. I will let you know if the bats begin abandoning their babies. If they do, we need to stock up on heating fuel. It will be a mighty cold winter.
Thanks, Basil, for the “Statistics without Tears”. Even the internecine skirmishing (and discussion) is amusing. Looking forward to anything to be teased from the delta in CO2 with Temperature relation from Spencer, Briggs and others. The non-linear complexities are not promising, however. Even more so with any solar relation.
Its such an eclectic mix of commenters here its hard to single any one out for praise but crosspatch‘s Hansen knee-mining might yield profit as a statistical intrigue.
Zeke,
I think Tilo started at 1997:06, not 1997:01, so as to have exactly 11 years of data (132 months) through 2008:05.
Basil
Here’s something that no one can dispute, no matter what method of trend line they use: the 2000s have (at the very least) not warmed progressively like both the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s did. Every one of those decades got warmer as it went along, from beginning to end…not a straight linear progression upwards, but still going up cyclically. This same warming progression has NOT been seen in the 2000s, indicating a much flatter trend. And since 2001, yes, all of the metrics show either a flat or declining trend.
So I think for anyone to think that there is nothing significant about the change in temperature trends over the past decade would be to ignore the facts.
Why can’t we just look at the raw numbers and forget the smoothing and regressions and all the other statistical analysis. Temperature goes up and it goes down. Right now its cooler than it has been for at least a decade, the numbers are there. Applying the smooting, we can, by picking a starting date (convenient temperature to prove our point) show that it is still warming or is cooling slightly. People don’t need to be confused with statistics, most people don’t get the nuances and frankly, both sides can apply analytical tricks to show that their argument is correct. Just in this thread alone, one can look at graphs that prove that it is getting warmer and cooler at the same time.
Imagine the charts above as cold, hard cash, replace the degrees with dollar signs. Then imagine trying to convince your banker that you are not really losing money or conversely convining your tax auditor that you are indeed losing money. Loess lines, linear regression, Markov Chains, T Test, Chi-Squares aren’t going to convince them, only the raw numbers will. Any average person, looking at the red line in Figure 1 would get the impression that it was warm in 1998, it didn’t get any warmer for 9 years and its cooler this last year. No competing trend lines needed, just present the facts.
Leif,
Torture the data until it confesses. Then we will know the truth.
Basil:
That would explain it.
Lucia:
I was responding to the statement that “The IPCC predictions (or scenarios, if you will) are for linear temp increases”, which is only an accurate statement over a reasonably long timeframe (and even than, its not entirely linear). I’ll grant you that we are approaching the point at which we can say that we have diverged significantly from the projected trend, and I admire the analysis you have done on the subject. As I’ve said before, I think that temperature trends over the past six or so years merit a bit of rethinking of the magnitude of modeled natural forcings, though I’m far from convinced that we need to throw the GHG forcing baby out with the bathwater. Regardless, I’m an interested amateur observer on this debate, so forgive any ignorance on my part. It will be interesting to see how everything plays out in the next few years.
Leif, I am not convinced that changes in cosmic rays due to regular solar cycles are themselves enough to cause cool downs of the magnitude we saw with the little ice age though I believe they could be a contributing factor. Solar magnetics would only work to the extent of the cosmic ray density the solar system itself is embedded in. What I mean is that it might play a bigger role when the solar system is crossing the galactic plane and there are more cosmic rays to allow in. An open door doesn’t do much of there is nothing to go through it.
My gut instinct is that the sun is more variable than we think but on long times frames. Something else interesting: I happened look at a graph showing various glaciations yesterday and it seemed to me that the general trend over time was longer glacial periods and shorter interglacial periods. I didn’t measure it, that’s just how it looked to my eye.
John Nicklin,
Any average person, looking at the red line in Figure 1 would get the impression that it was warm in 1998, it didn’t get any warmer for 9 years and its cooler this last year.
Let’s not confuse the issue with common sense, okay? 🙂
Seriously, those are the “facts.” But what can you say, from just those “facts” alone about next year? The next few years? That’s where the “data analysis” comes in. It is messy, inconvenient, and fraught with pitfalls from the ease with with we can torture the data to get it to confess, even to crimes it did not commit. It is a dirty task, but somebody’s got to do it. Or at least be prepared to respond to those who do it, and do it poorly.
I’m the first to admit that these are matters on which reasonable minds can disagree. I have a personal epistemology that borrows from the language of jurisprudence to describe how certain we can be about what we claim to know:
1) Absolutely certain
2) Very likely (“beyond reasonable doubt” )
3) Maybe, maybe not — reasonable minds can differ.
4) Very unlikely (the negative is “beyond reasonable doubt” ).
5) Not a shred (“scintilla” ) of evidence.
Much of what we are debating doesn’t even rise to 2) on my scale of epistemological knowledge, yet we hear all the time that the evidence for CO2 induced AGW is not just “beyond reasonable doubt” but “absolutely certain” (though the words may vary, that’s the sense we’re left with). I get very put off by those who claim to be scientists who say these matters are settled, whether by that they mean “beyond reasonable doubt” or “absolutely certain.” The only credible position to hold is one which acknowledges that these are matters on which reasonable minds may disagree. Only those who are unreasonable deny this.
Basil
Those snarky smileys in 2) and 5) were supposed to be closing parentheses.
Fixed, how to avoid:
(“comment with accidental snark”)
(“comment with extra space at end between close parenthesis” )
“It looks to me like more evidence of global cooling. Will it continue?”
A lot of data (and anecdotes) indicate it will continue to cool. Clearly the 20 years or so of temp stagnation normally would put any unpoliticised scientific theory in a coffin. CO2 as the main driver looks doubtful.
If the solar theory is correct and sunspots remain absent, then it most very likely will get cooler. Otherwise in about 5 years we’ll have to put the solar theory in a coffin too.
What frustrates me as an “interested observer” who doesn’t have a strong statistical background is that, whenever raw data is presented, it seems to me that the long-term trend is that there is no long-term trend. The figures are highly variable and the trend keeps changing – which makes sense, at least from my limited knowledge of weather and climate.
It seems that most of the words bandied about are trying to establish one trend or another, am I off-base to think that there really is no predictable trend and instead we should concentrate mainly on our immediate environment and being prepared for whatever changes might occur, rather than trying to lock ourselves into major changes for somebody or another’s prediction?
I just saw crosspatch’s 9:29 – there’s a lot of talk about crossing the galactic plane, lately. It’s a “thing,” I guess.
The galactic plane is circa 50-60 LY away. That’s kind of close, but it will take a while to get there, 30 million years or so. Obviously we’re not talking a bright dividing line but a gradual change, but in relative terms we’re moving awfully slow and have plenty of time to worry about it.
“What frustrates me as an “interested observer” who doesn’t have a strong statistical background is that, whenever raw data is presented, it seems to me that the long-term trend is that there is no long-term trend.”
Which brings us back to the beginning. Once you strip the entire debate of Climate Change to its essientials one questions arise:
Is the warming of the last 40 years unprecedented?
Would could also ask, “Has it really warmed that much since 1970?”
Since so much of the debate comes down to data sets, trends, the reliability of the data, etc… the debate can be relegated to statistics and statistical analysis. The issues of Climate Models, theoretical physics, solar theory, atmospheric teleconnections can be put aside until we can agree on what the climate of the recent past. If we cannot get the recent trends correct the rest of the debate is futile.
The problem is, in statistics -like other fields- there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Yes, I think waiting to measure all the metrics is a good, conservative approach. Best not to rush ahead and judge this hiatus too quickly, as the data seems somewhat elusive. I doubt that global warming is a relentless march upwards, as you say, but over hundreds of years I don’t think it can be disputed that the earth will warm unremittingly unless we do something to stop this trend. And to check out my CARTOONS click on my name link.
John Nicklin (08:37:55) :
“Imagine the charts above as cold, hard cash, replace the degrees with dollar signs. Then imagine trying to convince your banker that you are not really losing money or conversely convining your tax auditor that you are indeed losing money.”
You mean just like how financial sites usually have things like 30 and 60 day trend lines in stock price charts?
The real answer is that science is more than pretty pictures, it’s all about numbers. Pictures, like anecdotal evidence, can provide good guidance about what to study, but ultimately what we compare are numbers, e.g. average temperature, rate of change, etc. While that opens up a pandora’s box packed with doubt, finger pointing, etc, it has served science better than reading the tea leaves in the raw data.
“Loess lines, linear regression, Markov Chains, T Test, Chi-Squares aren’t going to convince them, only the raw numbers will. Any average person, ”
Sorry, average people don’t come here, only people with a stronger than average interest in climate do. The discussion here is not about what to put on the front page of USA Today, its about what the climate has done and is doing and that requires numerical analysis to pull the signal out of the noise within the raw data. That it comes up with pretty pictures is partly a bonus.
Basil,
What does the raw data tell us about next year or the next 5 or 10 years? Nothing at all. The analyzed, data shown by the trend lines, has no predictive value either.
If the trends, be they Loess or Regression or Rolling Average or what ever, were predictive, they would have predicted the 2008 cooling. All the trend analysis does is tell us what happened in nice smooth lines instead of jagged peaks and troughs.
I know why we apply the tools of analysis but I’m less certain than ever that those tools are useful in conveying a clear picture to average people, the ones without advanced degrees in statistics.
I would also like to see temperature lines represented as real degrees of C rather than anomolies based on a chosen year. I think if people could see that temperatures have gone up or down by a few tenths of a degree in real terms it would be far less scary than seeing a graph that makes a 0.6 degree anomoly look like a massive increase or decrease. All the manipulation tends to obsfucate the real story. Its like making successive photocopies of photocopies of the Mona Lisa.
The more we massage the data, the less clear it is to just plain folks. So Gore and Hansen can trot out their charts and Anthony and Steve Mc. can trot out theirs, both sets of charts can be statistically valid and both could be wrong, at the same time.
moptop:
“how well it jibes with the cosmic ray idea”.
Not just another catchy sign on, ‘eh. Comparing 5/1996-9/1996 minimum at swpc with today’s one must be struck by the ongoing abscence of flares.
Not only part of a solar indictment in Arctic warming; also 85% of TSI, but for increased albedo, falls between the tropics.
Interview Request
Hello Dear and Respected,
I hope you are fine and carrying on the great work you have been doing for the Internet surfers. I am Ghazala Khan from The Pakistani Spectator (TPS), We at TPS throw a candid look on everything happening in and for Pakistan in the world. We are trying to contribute our humble share in the webosphere. Our aim is to foster peace, progress and harmony with passion.
We at TPS are carrying out a new series of interviews with the notable passionate bloggers, writers, and webmasters. In that regard, we would like to interview you, if you don’t mind. Please send us your approval for your interview at my email address “ghazala.khi at gmail.com”, so that I could send you the Interview questions. We would be extremely grateful.
regards.
Ghazala Khan
The Pakistani Spectator
http://www.pakspectator.com
Ric,
I know that average people don’t come here, maybe they should though. My point is that its the average people who have to be convinced one way or another so they won’t support stupid ideas like carbon cap and trade schemes and biofuels, etc.
Ric,
“You mean just like how financial sites usually have things like 30 and 60 day trend lines in stock price charts?”
What did the market trends look like just before the market crash in 1929? Just before the crash, Irving Fisher said, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
All I’m saying is that while data analysis can help us understand what is happening or, more appropriately, has happened, that same analysis is a blunt tool for predicting the future, immediate or long term.
[…] individual bloggers have expressed a strong preference for one particular data set or another. Like Atmoz, I prefer not […]
Ghazala Khan from The Pakistani Spectator (TPS)?
Why not Anthony? Seems legit.
AGW alarmists are only going to make life for poor Pakistanis even more difficult.
In the last 80 years there has been an almost straight line rise in CO2 (and esentially the same for the square root of CO2 concentration). If CO2 is the major cause of temperature rise then you would expect the temperature rise to be a straight line rise proportianal to the square root of the CO2 rise. This is not what has occured. This means that other factors are much larger over a 10 to 20 year period and as a result it will probably require another 40 to 60 years before the temperature data will tell us whether CO2 rise is a signifigent concern.
As it stands now I would say CO2 rise may have a small effect on temperature and it is most likely to be less than 2 F (this small change will be mostly benificial)
Zeke–
Fair enough.
I read the bit you quoted as referring to the climate trend, as it’s my policy to read casual blog comment in a way that makes them correct if at all possible. (Mostly because I know I dash off blog comments quickly, and I figure everyone else does too!)
The link to RC threw me, as, it seems to me, Gavin sets out to rebut some idea that that the IPCC claimed weather itself will increase monotonically. The individual scenarios are like “weather”, but I don’t think the IPCC is ever understood by anyone to project any individual weather trajectory.
Still, I do see how someone might intepret the person you quoted as thinking the IPCC predicts monotonic weather. The IPCC doesn’t do that, partly because they don’t predict weather. (Partly because weather can’t do that.)
I like long-term trend lines, they speak volumes:
Hadley CRUT temperatures plotted against CO2 levels. Note how the two trend lines start to diverge in the 1980’s – temperature is less and less correlated to CO2 levels, which is to be expected. This is because additional CO2 introduced to the atmosphere has less and less warming effect:
http://i32.tinypic.com/28h3dqh.jpg
Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now:
http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg
Unless it can be shown the oceans are absorbing ever more heat – and evidently the Argo data show far lower heat content than expected (as per Kevin Trenberth of NCAR) – the AGWers don’t have a case for dangerous AGW. Less than ideal, perhaps. Dangerous, that remains to be seen.
The higher latitudes are far more responsive to changes. The greatest damage to Greenland’s ice has been caused by snow-warming heat absorbent soot, the effect is greatest at the peripheral glaciers where the sooty runoff accumulates and compounds the effect. Arctic sea ice has suffered from sootfall similarly and wind dynamics have been causing a great deal of recent ice thinning. So the Arctic soot situation – which constitutes something like 20 percent of all warming since the mid 19th century – can be ameliorated.
The Antarctic is not under any grave threat of melt-off, it has been shown to be much drier than modeled (like the ice ages) and less prone to warming.
The same goes for the Earth’s middle troposphere, also drier than expected by the AGW climat models.
This is the problem with using linear regression on a time series:
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/05/telling-tall-tales-with-trends.html
Regardless, there are a number of approaches to a “best fit” line that will give you significantly different end points. For example, on the graph of local temperatures this winter/spring, I used a polynomial 3rd order expression and it shows a slightly declining trend at the end. The same data with a 4th order results in a somewhat different line.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/06/cold-start-to-2008.html
Part of the problem is that the data itself is longer term oscillating more than trending and 10 years may be just the beginning of the down leg of an oscillation.
Hadley CRUT temperatures plotted against CO2 levels:
Note how the two trend lines start to diverge in the 1980’s – temperature is less and less correlated to CO2 levels, which is to be expected. This is because additional CO2 introduced to the atmosphere has less and less warming effect:
(http://i32.tinypic.com/28h3dqh.jpg)
Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now:
(http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg)
The oft-cited paleo record may not be as conclusive as it first appears. There are instances where water vapor unlocked during interglacial periods rises and falls in a pattern unrelated to CO2 levels. Both water vapor and CO2 levels lag temperature increases, and other interesting dyssynchronies appear in the paleo data: (http://i30.tinypic.com/izon5h.jpg)
[…] individual bloggers have expressed a strong preference for one particular data set or another. Like Atmoz, I prefer not […]
Basil,
The Hodrick-Prescott analysis just smokes! It is so much more revealing than the loess. Major kudos for your discoveries! When is the paper to be published?
Now all the algorian prius driving knee sock and sandals carbon footprint crowd can say “see working together we can overcome global warming, just look at the temperatures since we, the new patriots, took control of mother nature!” Its the next play from the liberal play book! By the way, check out what the libs are doing for the DNC in Denver. WOA!!! More planet saving ahead for us thank gore!
Amid the universal clamour for maximum sample periods, may I ask for an inclusion of unadjusted surface data in the mix? I understand this is a problem for the software with lacunae and all, but otherwise I see no accomodation for my plurality of concern: The absence of justification for ‘enlightened’ data modification. I feel ignored, “Reason not the need!”
REPLY: The only “unadjusted” surface data in existence in on the B91 forms stored in the basement of NCDC and online as PDF files. Yeah, I’ll get right on that.
Ooops, wrong thread. My sincere apology.
[…] Has Global Warming Become Religion? July 2, 2008 Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Religion, Science & Technology. Tags: Global Cooling, Global Warming trackback Global View – WSJ.com But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris. A discussion of the various measurement models. […]
The danger to the planet is an optical illusion. The cost/benefit of controlling CO2 is just not worth it. There are serious heating issues with heating in the cities, but this is urban. Many more lives are lost from winter weather, and urban heating actually saves lives. There is serious trouble in HIV/Aids, drinkable water, and wasting energy, but critical thinking is required to solve the world’s issues. CO2 is de minimis. Prosperity, however, is being seriously threatened by NGO lobby groups with tunnel vision. Go to the Copenhagen Convention web site to get an update about what needs to be done. It is not heavy industry at fault. It is politically correct politicians fishing for politically correct constituencies using politically correct red herring for bait.
Eric Hoffer, 1951 – “The True Believer – Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”
P.11
“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors , shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the actions that follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And p.12
“People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement…Their innermost craving is for a new life – a rebirth – or failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both…”
and P. 13
“ It is true that in the early adherents of a mass movement there are also adventurers who join in the hope that that the movement will give a spin to their wheel of fortune and whirl them to fame and power.”
And
Eric Hoffer, 1979 – “Before the Sabbath”
p. 7
“ I am curious about Pechorin, a Russian intellectual of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote a poem on “How sweet it is to hate one’s native land and eagerly await its annihilation.”