Blink comparator of GISS USA temperature anomaly – h/t to Zapruder
The last time I checked, the earth does not retroactively change it’s near surface temperature.
True, all data sets go through some corrections, such as the recent change RSS made to improve the quality of the satellite record which consists of a number of satellite spliced together. However, in the case of the near surface temperature record, we have many long period stations than span the majority of the time period shown above, and they have already been adjusted for TOBS, SHAP, FILNET etc by NOAA prior to being distributed for use by organizations like GISS. These adjustments add mostly a positive bias.
In the recent data replication fiasco, GISS blames NOAA for providing flawed data rather than their failure to catch the repeated data from September to October. In that case they are correct that the issue arose with NOAA, but in business when you are the supplier of a product, most savvy businessmen take a “the buck stops here” approach when it comes to correcting a product flaw, rather than blaming the supplier. GISS provides a product for public consumption worldwide, so it seems to me that they should pony up to taking responsibility for errors that appear in their own product.
In the case above, what could be the explanation for the product changing?
Just what on earth is a ‘forcing’?
REPLY: Anything that drives the energy balance of earth one way or another. Solar, PDO, clouds, water vapor and other GHG’s, soot, land use, ground cover, albedo such as ice and snow. Forcings tend to be measured in watts/meter squared when used in modeling calculations that describe earth’s energy balance.
More here: http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/climate_change/older/Climate_Forcing.html
– Anthony
Some more references on aerosols; as warming agents
Jacobson, M., 2001: Strong radiative heating due to the mixing state of black carbon in atmospheric aerosols, Nature, 409:695-697; Sato, M. et al., 2003: Global atmospheric black carbon inferred from AERONET, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 100, no. 11: 6319-6324.
We found that atmospheric brown clouds enhanced lower atmospheric solar heating by about 50 per cent. Our general circulation model simulations, which take into account the recently observed widespread occurrence of vertically extended atmospheric brown clouds over the Indian Ocean and Asia, suggest that atmospheric brown clouds contribute as much as the recent increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases to regional lower atmospheric warming trends. We propose that the combined warming trend of 0.25 K per decade may be sufficient to account for the observed retreat of the Himalayan glaciers.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7153/abs/nature06019.html
Smokey,
You are correct sir. Let’s get back on point. Why can’t we look behind the curtain?? We paid for it, release everything, NASA, GISS,NCDC and any other group or agency that gathers data with taxpayer money.
Anyone have any objections to full transparency??
Mike the Plumber
Smokey (15:35:58) :
I’m sorry, but I can not take Beck’s graph showing past CO2 levels seriously. Those measurements were taken by different people, in different places, using different methods. The year to year variability he shows is WAY beyond the variability that is observed at Mauna Loa.
There are several 1-year periods (around 1830, 1890, and 1940), where Beck shows CO2 levels varying by over 100 ppm! That’s just not physically possible.
REPLY: I’ll have to agree with Chris V. on this one. Just the variability in the chemical reduction process alone imparts a significant error band. Plus a lot of the measurements were done in cities, which back then had scads of fireplaces, industrial furnaces, and wood fired cooking stoves.
I don’t think those measurements were capable of resolving the background CO2 from the noise of the in situ where it was done. Thus I don’t think the measurements are valid. – Anthony
Leif:
Now this:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
And at ICECAP.US:
This:
Nov 18, 2008
Evidence of Sunspot Involvement in Climate Change Compelling
Engineering News
Over the last few years, the evidence that sunspots on our sun are directly related to climate change on earth has been steadily increasing.
And this:
Nov 18, 2008
Obama Clueless on Climate Change Non-Threat, Impacts of Cap-and-Trade
Boston.com
“Few challenges facing America—and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change,” Obama says in this video. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.
Les Johnson (16:35:01) :
The sciencedaily link you provided is not about aerosols- it’s about heavy metals. They are not the same thing.
And yes, there are many uncertainties about aerosols in general.
Chris V: your
The sciencedaily link you provided is not about aerosols- it’s about heavy metals. They are not the same thing.
And how do you think that the heavy metals got to Greenland?
hint- as aerosols.
Anyone else having any trouble getting on NASA’s Climate Change Propaganda Page?
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/
Les Johnson (11:00:00) said:
” Inhibiting turbulence, increases IR radiation. But decreasing IR, lowers turbulence.
Increasing turbulence, reduces radiation. Increasing radiation, increases turbulence.
Which brings up one of the problems with CO2. It can actually have a direct net negative forcing, depending on the atmospheric lapse rate (or, the temperature gradient).
All models use 6.5 deg C/1000 meters as the lapse rate. CO2 is a warming agent at 6.5 deg C/1000 meters.
Change this to 6.4, and there is no net effect either way. Change the lapse to 6.0, and CO2 becomes a net cooling agent, through increased turbulence.
Measured lapse rates are between 4 and 10 deg C/1000 meters. ”
This isn’t right; it isn’t even wrong.
– Wolfgang Pauli
1) Jason sea levels not up to date. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
2) Spaceweather not up to date. http://www.spaceweather.com/
3) GISS really messed up. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/14/the-evolution-of-the-giss-temperature-product/
4) Argo data screwed up (fixed now? who knows) http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/apologies-to-josh-willis-correcting-ocean-cooling-part-3/
5) Surfacestations, little maintenance, little adherence to procedures. http://www.surfacestations.org/
6)Mauna Loa CO2. Old computers, procedures adequate? Now a big jump up, anyone remember the big drop?(it, of course was changed along with many historic values) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/06/post-mortem-on-the-mauna-loa-co2-data-eruption/
7) Karl, not really a doctor, but he plays one at the NCDC. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/more-flubs-at-the-top-of-the-climate-food-chain-this-time-ncdcs-karl/
8) CT Sea Ice graph change downward never fully explained. http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/2918/anomalykm3.gif
9) Mann’s hockey stick graph falsified. http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
10) IPCC Temperature projections “very low confidence”. http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/giss-temp-2ccentury-projection-remains-in-very-low-confindence-range/
This, I am sure, is only a very short list. Anyone have a complete list?
Does anyone anywhere in our government or anywhere else know what the (self-snip) is going on?
An Inquirer (21:37:06) :
Steve McIntyre links to it in this post.
It looks like Gavin Schmidt only used the main CFCs in his reconstruction.
One of the readers (LadyGray in comment 48 of the CA post) links to a 2004 Hansen paper where he reports forcings for other trace gases, which include HFCs (and which I don’t think were included in Scenario B in 1988). Looks like they could add a couple of tenths of a W/m^2 forcing to the Montreal protocol CFCs, but not enough to drastically alter things. May be enough to put the “observed” forcings curves smack on Scenario B in terms of total forcings, but still way off in terms of observed temperatures.
Les Johnson (17:14:43) said:
“And how do you think that the heavy metals got to Greenland?
hint- as aerosols.”
That doesn’t mean there were more aerosols, just that had more heavy metals in them.
Les Johnson (14:57:43) : Said:
Ron: Jennifer Marohasy gives a good explanation of the ARGO changes. There is a link to NASA as well.
Thanks Les.
Ron de Haan (14:54:18) :
Is it possible to make a listing of accepted science?
Working scientists have such a list more or less in their head. Science is very much a collaborative effort. There are always new ideas that have not reached the status of ‘accepted’ yet [and most do not]. And there are also crackpot ideas, that can be dismissed at a glance [a very, very, very small percentage of these turn out to have merit after all].
It’s really difficult to get the “sound science” out of the heap of reports and publications.
I disagree, I never have a problem with this. The BS test takes about five seconds.
There is doubt about everything
Not really. I’m often wrong, but never in doubt. It simply means that there is an ‘uncertainty’ cloak around everything, but scientists are trained to deal with this. Lay persons often do not appreciate this and take things at face value for more than they are worth.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
Nobody I know doubts this.
ICECAP.US: Evidence of Sunspot Involvement in Climate Change Compelling
When somebody says ‘compelling’ my BS-filter goes up a notch.
Especially when the report is factually false, like:
“The earth’s magnetic field, which acts as a shielding, is altered by the sun’s activity, which, in turn, is indicated by means of the number of sunspots. As the earth’s magnetic shield varies, so the cloud cover varies. Few sunspots mean a weaker earth shield, which means more cosmic rays, which mean more clouds, which mean a cooling earth. ”
The earth’s magnetic field that shield us from cosmic rays varies because of [get this] internal causes resulting from fluctuations of the internal dynamo that sustains the field. The sun has no effect on this. In fact, the Sun’s dynamo varies also from internal fluctuations [unless you believe in the planets driving the solar cycle and check your horoscope daily]. Why should the earth’s climate be any different from these other natural and self-regulating cyclic phenomena?
IMHO, the reason the solar connection is so emphasized is that people need a simple, direct, and ‘obvious’ alternative to AGW. If you are anti-AGW and arguing against an avid AGWer, he has a clear mechanism. If your only mechanism is an appeal to unknown, random, interval, chaotic fluctuations, he eats your lunch, hence your strong support for a solar cause. Curiously, the AGWer also needs a solar connection to explain variations that occurred before ~1970, so we have a ‘perfect storm’ here, with everyone agreeing that the sun is important, but for the wrong reasons [namely as support for the CO2-related arguments – pro or con, as the case may be].
If one, like me, dares to question the solar connection, one, obviously, gets flak from both camps. You asked how to know something is valid science? A tongue-in-cheek answer [but with some truth] might be that the validity is inversely proportional to the number of blogs, websites, and postings discussing the item in question.
Chris V wrote: “No, it is not based on the models- the sensitivity numbers come from multiple, independent analyses- paleoclimate, modern climate, and models.
The models don’t “suppose” positive feedbacks. Positive feedbacks in the models are emergent qualities- they arise out of the basic physics used by the model.”
Perhaps in ModelWorld, but here in the Real World it those things don’t seem to be happening.
From the NASA article on water vapor and warming:
Leif wrote: “The earth’s magnetic field that shield us from cosmic rays varies because of [get this] internal causes resulting from fluctuations of the internal dynamo that sustains the field.”
The earth’s internal dynamo is in essence a dipole yes? It flip-flops from negative to positive in a cyclical fashion. Are you saying that the polarity of our planet does not march in step with the cycles of the sun? I am not trying to be argumentative, I just thought I had that part figured out.
hengav (19:55:43) :
The earth’s internal dynamo is in essence a dipole yes? It flip-flops from negative to positive in a cyclical fashion. Are you saying that the polarity of our planet does not march in step with the cycles of the sun?
It does flip, but more or less randomly on a time scale from thousands to millions of years, completely independently from the Sun. The next flip might come relatively soon [in a few hundred years time] as the field is decreasing now. It has decreased 10% in the last century or so, and the decrease seems to be accelerating…
Jeff Alberts (18:47:35) said:
Perhaps in ModelWorld, but here in the Real World it those things (positive feedbacks) don’t seem to be happening.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
This research confirms the positive water-vapor feedback, just as predicted by models.
It’s a consequence of basic physics.
Chris V: your
That doesn’t mean there were more aerosols, just that had more heavy metals in them.
Really? So the chemistry of coal combustion has changed in the last 100 years? That coal has less cadmium and mercury in 1970, than at the turn of the 20th century?
Nope. Heavy metal content of coal is relatively constant. If there are more metals in Greenland’s ice at the year 1900 level, it means that there was more aerosols to carry them when they were deposited.
But, I would love to hear your explanation of how heavy metal ratios in aerosols decreased over time, while aerosols, according to you and the IPCC, increased during the same time frame.
Should be fascinating.
Mike Bryant,
Mike, this list is far from complete, but I hope it fills in some lacunae:
Les Johnson (20:40:26) said:
“But, I would love to hear your explanation of how heavy metal ratios in aerosols decreased over time, while aerosols, according to you and the IPCC, increased during the same time frame.
Should be fascinating.”
Well, the link you posted says this:
“But it turns out pollution in southern Greenland was higher 100 years ago when North American and European economies ran on coal, before the advent of cleaner, more efficient coal burning technologies and the switch to oil and gas-based economies,” McConnell said.
It turns out that coal use peaked around 1945, then declined until the 70’s, when it started increasing again:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/eh/frame.html (see figure 1)
Of course, with pollution controls, modern coal use is a lot cleaner than it was early in the century.
Early in the century we had lots of dirty coal, with lots of heavy metals in the emissions. Later in the century we had cleaner coal, plus other energy sources, with less heavy metals in the emissions.
This IS fascinating! 😉
From crosspatch (09:15:04) :
“One explanation I have heard is that many stations lack a value for one or more months. These values are filled by using an average over time. This average is recalculated every month. So the temperature of a station (or nearby stations) reported this month can change the average value that is used to “fill” missing values in the past.
Therefore, if we are alledgedly warming, and those warmer values are used to skew the past missing data, then the previous data would be rounded up by this “adjustment”.”
Doesn’t this lead to a positive feedback loop? One new warm data point raises all past blanks that gives a new higher average that raises all past blanks?…
Leif:
Once again you have rocked my world, so thank you. Way back when I asked you about the IPCC report and it’s estimates of solar forcing you introduced me to the concept of the northern hemisphere receiving more energy than the southern. Then, with the sun as a constant- which I subscribe to whole heartedly now- I began to look at why, if it is a constant, there would be such a difference. The barycenter argument be damned, there is still an argument over the sensitivity of the earth relative to the distance from the sun through it’s orbital cycle. My damage was to assume that the ENSO evolution was related to the sun… less a few missing direct correlations. I have assumed that because of the lack of sunspot activity (the quick extra energy) that we were headed for a big cool. Coincidentally, NASA has found that the sun has dropped roughly 10% in it’s output since the beginning of cycle 23 using fly-by measurements. I assumed that the linkage was direct. You are telling me it is wrong, and I believe you. What I became alarmed at were graphs like: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/GEOMAG/image/aastar07.jpg
and:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/GEOMAG/image/aassn07.jpg
My question is this: Are these readings partially related to the earth’s influence, or are the observations completely uncoupled.
I need to go back to school…
From Oldjim (09:23:38) :
@Katherine
i used this link for the data on CO2 annual increase
end quote
Whoa! How can one claim that CO2 is causing a steady increase in temps when it has huge year to year variations? If we put into the air far less than volcanoes, and the annual variation is far more than we put in, then something must be able to take out all we put in AND THEN SOME over the scale of a couple of years, for this chart to be possible(!)
1998 2.93
1999 0.94
So did the world economy shrink by 2/3 in 1999? Did we all stop driving from May to December that year? If 1998 was a big volcano year, then we are less than 1/3 of a ‘typical’ volcano year even if every other source is ignored, and at least 2 times that much can be sucked out of the air in a year so we can’t move the system…