Regular WUWT readers know of the issues related to Arctic Sea Ice that we have routinely followed here. The Arctic sea ice trend is regularly used as tool to hammer public opinion, often recklessly and without any merit to the claims. The most egregious of these claims was the April of 2008 pronouncement by National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Dr. Mark Serreze of an ice free north pole in 2008. It got very wide press. It also never came true.
To my knowledge, no retractions were printed by news outlets that carried his sensationally erroneous claim.
A few months later in August, when it was clear his first prediction would not come true, and apparently having learned nothing from his first incident (except maybe that the mainstream press is amazingly gullible when it comes to science) Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral” and” The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030″. In my opinion, Serreze uttered perhaps the most irresponsible news statements about climate second only to Jim Hansen’s “death trains” fiasco. I hope somebody at NSIDC will have the good sense to reel in their loose cannon for the coming year.
Not to be outdone, in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.
So it was with a bit of surprise that we witnessed the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a number of bloggers and news outlets when in his February 15th column, George Will, citing a Daily Tech column by Mike Asher, repeated a comparison of 1979 sea ice levels to present day. He wrote:
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
The outrage was immediate and widespread. Media Matters: George Will spreads falsehoods Discover Magazine: George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking Climate Progress: Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist? One Blue Marble Blog: Double Dumb Ass Award: George Will George Monbiot in the Guardian: George Will’s climate howlers and Huffington Post: Will-fully wrong
They rushed to stamp out the threat with an “anything goes” publishing mentality. There was lots of piling on by secondary bloggers and pundits.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I got interested in what was going on with odd downward jumps in the NSIDC Arctic sea ice graph, posting on Monday February 16th NSIDC makes a big sea ice extent jump – but why? Then when I was told in comments by NSIDC’s Walt Meier that the issue was “not worth blogging about” I countered with Errors in publicly presented data – Worth blogging about?
It soon became clear what had happened. There was a sensor failure, a big one, and both NSIDC and Cryosphere today missed it. The failure caused Arctic sea ice to be underestimated by 500,000 square kilometers by the time Will’s column was published. Ooops, that’s a Murphy Moment.
So it is with some pleasure that today I offer you George Will’s excellent rebuttal to the unapologetic trashing of his column . The question now is, will those same people take on Dr. Mark Serreze and Al Gore for their irresponsible proclamations this past year? Probably not. Will Serreze shoot his mouth off again this year when being asked by the press what the summer ice season will bring? Probably, but one can always hope he and others have learned something, anything, from this debacle.
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail.
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Friday, February 27, 2009; A17
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.
Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.
On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis” — a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news — accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.
Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing — sometimes a distinction without a difference — concerning today’s climate controversies.
Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts — how does he know this? — that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just “a pause in warming.” His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive — it concerned controversies already many days running — that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that “experts said” this columnist’s intervention in the climate debate was “riddled with” inaccuracies. Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.
As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.
So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying “we do not know where George Will is getting his information.” The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
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Joel Shore:
“… the author of that chart has chosen the relative scales used for the CO2 and the temperature. The questions is: Has he chosen them in a realistic way?”
We’ve all seen those scary, steeply rising Mauna Loa CO2 charts, going up at about a 45 degree angle. So let’s ask the same question: are they chosen in a realistic way? Or is this more realistic: click
Wow, Watts, thanks!
I have only been blogging for a bit more than a year, and I don’t invite controversy, I just mostly post the science (real science, that is).
Hmmm, if I had been blogging as long as you, who knows what the figure might show.
btw, this is just one more example of how you just don’t know how to look at data.
REPLY: “and I don’t invite controversy, I just mostly post the science” You mean like this uncontroversial piece?
Capitol Hill coal power plant targeted by environmentalists
I’ve been blogging since late Nov 2007, you started in May 2007 according to your blog. Only 6 months difference, yet you show no significant increase in traffic from that time. Now if I’m in error in interpreting the data feel free to explain it to me. – Anthony
Joel Shore (08:30:22) : I have also pointed out how Will has also cherry-picked his popular articles to support his point of view, quoting extensively from one N.Y. Times article on cooling but somehow neglecting to include any quotes from one three months later that focused on warming.
Nor did he mention the other quotes showing how the NYT seems to in the wind, which I think is what he was trying to say. Like these NYT headlines and titles :
Can’t help but notice the “WIDELY CONSIDERED” used in connection with “COOLING” in the 1975 heading.
That looks pretty significant to me Joel, that’s a 25% increase.
Brendan H at 02 51 57 said to Smokey;
“As for William Connolly, the paper he co-authored on the myth of the 1970s cooling consensus presents a persuasive and well-supported argument. I think you should give it another chance.
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf “
I have seen this article before in another form- the three authors are interesting, including William Connelly-on whom I did a long and thorough piece about his personal agenda as a member of the UK Green party and as gatekeeper of wikipedia climate section (my 01 14 54 earlier today addressed to Joel and Smokey)
The second author was Thomas Peterson, who Anthony has met;
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:xpjH07lfElgJ:wattsupwiththat.com/2007/06/30/+thomas+peterson+noaa+politics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk
Thomas Peterson is the keeper of weather records including weather stations at NOAA Anthony records being co interviewed with him
When trying to continue his surface stations project shortly after this meeting he found;
“You are not authorized to view this information. Your IP address has been logged”
When it came back up Monday afternoon, the “managing parties” field identifying the location of the weather station was gone. I would note that I shared a radio interview with Dr. Thomas Peterson of NCDC last week, so I am certain NCDC is aware of the effort. No notification was given, nor even a professional courtesy to advise of the change, nor any notice on the website.”
The Row over access was repeated in more detail here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1879848/posts
The third author of the piece you cite is John Fleck who is a competent science writer on the Albuquerque journal- he reported his own involvement in the article here;
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/1897180018opinionguestcolumns02-18-09.htm
His politics are left wing -which is his own business- but the reports he co authors need to be seen against that background.
The original report you cite is rebutted here
http://www.openmarket.org/2008/12/09/the-new-ice-age-continued/
For my part I had an involvement, in as much back in the 70’s I was asked to write a piece on climate change and being unsure at that time what was being referred to, collected material from both ‘sides’. There were undoubtedly far more scienctific studies citing cooling rather than warming-whether they survived as digital copies anywhere –and therefore are still being cited-depends on who the record keeper was at the time. I threw away my files years ago and recall the flimsy folder with warming material and the very thick bunch of folders on cooling.
The article you cite makes some interesting comments including;
“Scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s temperatures found it (cooling) was not necessarily a global phenomenon.”
Mitchell had based his calculations on 200 weather stations for his 1963 treatise. Interestingly this was the same number (and appears to be the same ones) that G S Callendar based his work on when he came up with the seminal document on AGW being caused by rising co2 levels back in 1938. He had based his own work by backtracking to 1850 to show rising temperatures and found only 100 weather stations, of which some 50 were flawed and unreliable. Interestingly Charles Keeling admitted to being influenced by Callendars work so based his own hypotheses on the basis that temperatures were rising and so was co2-this latter supposition based on Callendars cherry picking of historical co2 data.
It is certainly untrue to rewrite history and claim global cooling was a myth. It wasn’t. To base a new world order on a tiny number of historical temperature records- many of which were known to be flawed then and are flawed to this day- is clearly absurd.
Sorry Brendan, but the report you cite could easily be rewritten to show a diametrically opposite view and if anyone here would like to fund it I shall be happy to oblige 🙂
TonyB
Joel Shore (08:04:10) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
This page has been edited countless times by our friend William Conolly. 14 times on february 1st this year alone. You and he are flogging a dead horse by appealling to wikipedia as an authority on climate change. It is hopelessly biased in this section. Give it up.
hareynolds: Loved the post on hunting in the snow, more please. 🙂
Joel Shore:
“Also, with evolution you have a broad array of scientific organizations like the NAS, AAAS, and the various scientific societies endorsing the theory, just as is true for AGW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change ”
Why cite Wikipedia for this? Wikipedia is not a peer reviewed journal. It is highly biased and under the thumb of William Connolley for all things on climate.
As for your statement regarding scientific societies endorsing AGW; how
many of these societies actually polled their members on the issue? The AGU Council adopted a position statement without polling their members and then had to revise it because of member objections. They have still never polled their membership and I doubt that the rest of the societies have either.
“First of all, the one quote that I selected was the ONLY one of the quotes that was actually from a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which is kind of important if you want to actually show what the scientific experts were saying.”
Which is why your comprehension of the article is confused. Mr. Will used the entire paragraph not to show what scientific experts were saying – but to demonstrate that the prediction of Global Cooling by reputable publications and their experts – joins a long list of planetary calamities that have failed to occur.
“You point out that there was another article on cooling that he didn’t quote from either but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Will’s study is selective…and in no way a rigorous review of what was out there.”
Your choice of words indicates a reason for your confusion. George Will writes a newspaper column for the Washington Post. His role is that of a particularly articulate journalist observing and commenting on current events. He does not do “studies.” Nor need he do “rigorous review” of all media to support his observations. He has clearly pointed out that the climate hue and cry of the 1970s was impending doom by ice and cold. (FYI there are hundreds of articles on Global Cooling from that time.)
“I would say that [Shakleton] rather undercuts Will’s argument that scientists can’t be trusted because they were previously warning us just as vociferously about something that they no longer believe to be true.”
Again, your own words confound your claim. Mr. Will never makes an argument that “scientists can’t be trusted.” He simply uses the 1970s climate cooling fiasco and other failed predictions to arrive at Montaigne’s axiom: “Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.” In other words Mr. Shore, those who cry loudest and most often are likely to be wrong.
The previous in reference to Joel Shore (08:30:22) :
Re the Global Cooling in the 70’s
This illustrates just how pervasive and convincing the impending doom of Global Cooling was in those days. I was there. It affected me (but in a good way).
Apart from the hysteria from the media, there was ample proof for the average Joe / Jane just by looking at the outside thermometer.
For example, the winter of 1972-73 was notable in Texas, where I was a freshman in undergrad in Austin. Just after New Year’s, the entire state grew very cold for a prolonged period, such that there was not enough natural gas to keep everyone warm (hard to believe in Texas, but it was true).
The extreme cold and natural gas shortage led to natural gas rationing, and non-essential users were cut off, including colleges. The University of Texas made an unprecedented move to remain closed after the Christmas holiday (we were still allowed to call it that, back then). The administration delayed the start of classes for a week as I recall, but it may have been two weeks. Classes were extended into June to make up the lost hours, with much disruption to graduation plans and starting dates for new jobs, as one can imagine.
Lawsuits were filed all around, of course, against Oscar Wyatt and his Coastal corporation. One allegation was that Oscar had over-sold his natural gas delivery capabilities, with the expectation that the entire state would not freeze at the same time. Usually, that strategy worked, but not that winter. (The same Oscar Wyatt who got in rather more trouble recently).
In response to the natural gas shortage, the University dug a big hole in the ground under the south steps leading to the main building, and installed two giant fuel storage tanks. The idea was that they would have their very own little Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and burn fuel oil in the University’s central utility system when a severe cold snap happened again. Classes would not be delayed ever again.
Now, if the Global Warming side was convincing in those days, why would a rather large and sophisticated University go to all that trouble and expense to install their own private SPR?
There was also a really nice (and rare) snowfall in January 1973 in Austin, I remember it being about 6 to 8 inches on the Austin campus. It was much more fun to play in the snow, than go to classes! We loved it. Ahh, to be 19 again!!!
Hey, Al “The Bore” Gore!! Where were you when Rio De Janeiro recorded its first snowfall in 75 years in 2008? Oh, I see. You were busy investing all your oil money in businesses that have to do with alternative energy. How many wind mills do you now own; how many solar panel factories have you invested you Shell Oil holdings in? And have you talked to John “The Erstwhile French President” Kerry about wind mills off the coast of Mass.?
Please, don’t visit the Antarctic. The hot air spewing from your “Alec Baldwin Bloviated Mouth” might set off an avalanche.
All arguments of actual weather that most probably will take place, as US west and midwest droughts caused by PDO an Nina, will be interpreted as caused by “Global Warming”.
Other issue: Have you noticed the similarity between Ap index curve and RealClimate.org? It seems they are going straight to a “Maunder minimum”:)
Tenney Naumer:
Watts, you are such a joke. You never print anything that shows how wrong you have been in the past. What a hypocrit you are!
Here’s a thought: how about instead of hurling insults and baseless accusations you give an example of something you consider to have been “wrong”? Or, just go back to Trolls R’ Us, tail tucked neatly between your legs. Whatever.
Who let the trolls out? Woof!
Smokey says:
Nice try…But this is not at all analogous. There is good reason to plot the Mauna Loa chart in a way that allows one to see the details. And, there is no rule that says that bottom of the chart has to start from 0. Furthermore, anyone with any understanding of graphs can look at the scale on the lefthand-side of the plot and immediately see how much rise there has been.
By contrast, the relative scales thing that I am pointing out has the potential to be much more deceptive (and that potential indeed seems to have been realized). It unfortunately does not seem obvious to many people how to deconvolve from that plot at what rate it would be expected for the temperature to rise if the IPCC estimates of the transient climate response are correct and to realize that the expected rate means that the temperature should rise with a much lower slope than the CO2 rises.
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5. Once you do that, the whole point that you draw from that plot vanishes because it becomes clear that, within the noisiness of the temperature measurement, one cannot really determine from so short a period that the temperature is not behaving as it is expected to. In fact, the temperature behavior seems perfectly compatible with expectations (particularly if one expands the period of time looked at so that it covers more than 10 years).
A question to everybody: How does anybody trust CO2 measures taken at the biggest volcano on earth, the Mauna Loa? I think this observatory was originally intended to check the volcano´s activity.
I think Smokey´s CO2 corrected Mauna Loa CO2 graph should be kept constantly as a banner in WUWT web page, as a demonstration of GWrs´ “will to deceive”
@ice-age and global warming hysteria
the science then was as bad as it is now,
the picture of the future drawn just as catastrophic as now and
consens was falsly claimed by some just as it is now.
but the main difference is, that then, there was much less political interference on top like today, the UN was split and not the monster it is today.
fighting an ice-age would have meant pumping resources into the rich industrialized north to deal with it – what completely contradicts the hidden socialist agenda of today. no way to blame an american suv driver for flooding in the third world. the story was just not sexy enough to mobilze the socialist mob.
Joel Shore – Thank you, now I can bear that in mind when looking at the presentation of such data from any source.
In regard to the debate regarding a “scientific consensus” on global cooling in the 1970’s, I think a couple issues need to be pointed out.
There is a disconnect in the debate in that the AGW supporters generally focus on the peer reviewed and cited literature of the time, and the skeptic view tends to focus on the appearance of a consensus in the publicly available media. Which of these view points is more appropriate?
These are two very different domains and should not be compared directly, as they are in that period, almost totally divorced from each other. The current Global warming main stream media presentation should be compared to the main stream media presentation of the time if you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges. The public perception of the prevailing science in any period is driven by their access to information. If they cannot reasonably access info, for all intents and purposes it does not exist!
In the 1970’s the technical sources that the general public had ready access to, were not peer reviewed papers! That level of access was in a practical sense impossible in the 1970’s for Joe or Jane citizen.
To get access to it you would have to spend weeks digging through manual card catalog indexes and walking the stacks in the major college libraries. At that time documents available were only indexed by 100’s of thousands of 3×5 index cards that listed the documents title, and catalog index. You had to then physically chase the document down. In that time period, the functional equivalent to the modern internet was the specialty publications like Science Digest, The Scientific American, and the since articles in publications like News Week and Time, special features in the major newspapers, spiced with a few special TV features on educational public broad cast TV, and the best selling books of the period, and looking through indexes of periodical literature, or digging through stacks of physical magazines.
For those of us who lived through this era, there was absolutely no doubt that the general impression in all the commonly available sources was that global cooling was a viable theory and under active debate. Based on recent history of very severe winters and media presentations, the “public consensus” was that the scientific community thought global cooling was a real threat to our way of life.
It was sufficiently well recognized, that high profile figures like Stephen Schneider on several occasions both in print and TV explicitly addressed the current “consensus” on global cooling. If you dig through his writings it is clear that personally he was in the long term more worried about CO2, but in the short term cooling due to aerosols was a real concern, as was heating or cooling due to changes in ozone, the atmospheric haze that might result from the flight of the SST, the effect of CFC’s, severe drought in Africa and Asia.
His book Genesis Strategy was not a book on “global cooling” or “global warming” per se, it was a book that pointed out how vulnerable the world was to climatic shifts of all sorts and all causes. Like any good politician he covered his bets and addressed all causes in his book and did not go out of his way to dissuade those who thought global cooling was the most worrisome issue.
I say that both based on his public writings and broadcast media interviews but based on a personal discussion with him. After reading his book, I took advantage of the fact that I lived only a few miles away from NCAR and scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the conclusions of his book.
The meeting left me quite underwhelmed, because he would not discuss the science or even place bounds on which position he thought was most likely. He did not point me at any useful resources, did not give me any copies of study documents to look over, did not give me a bibliography of useful documents to look into, nor did he help sharpen my understanding of the issues or limits of the science. He was basically covering his butt in all regards and throwing out observations that would support all possible conclusions. In short even when you made an attempt to go directly to the sources of the period, you got stonewalled if you were not another Phd scientist, or a media contact that would be able to be exploited for more exposure.
In that sense, the existence of peer reviewed studies in that period that were beginning to shift away from cooling toward warming is irrelevant with respect to the public view of the issue. They were literally unavailable in any meaningful context to the public at large.
For those who have grown up in the internet generation, it is probably impossible to even imagine a situation where it might take you an entire day in a library to even find a title for a document that “might” be worth reading. Then you tried to determine if it was even available in that library’s collection. With the exception of only a few of the largest college libraries, the answer was usually no. You then went to the person responsible for inter-library loans and tried to get the document ordered in.
At that point, you might wait weeks to get access to the document, only to find it was a restricted document and available only in the reference section where you could read it on site taking manual notes of what was in it or pay 10 cents a sheet to copy it and perhaps the better part of a day to xerox it while sharing the xerox machine with a dozen other folks that also wanted to copy documents.
At the time I had just finished engineering courses at the University of Colorado and remember well entire days lost looking for information in Norlin Library, which being a Federal Depository Library, had many government documents that would not be locally available to most of the general public. Even if the document was supposedly on site, it might be lost to the user because it was somewhere in the reshelving process after use by another person and might not re-appear on the shelves for days or longer.
What you can do today on google in 10 seconds might have taken you 3 months in the 1970’s.
The only thing relevant to the public at the time, was the public media articles often quoted. Be they right or wrong with regard to their conclusions, that was the information that was generally available, (not the source documents) and since at the time most folks still trusted the media, it was accepted as a true account of the science of the time.
Larry
Joel Shore (07:13:47) :
Parse Error says:
” Even more importantly, what are the flaws in the actual charts? I do not claim to know enough to accurately evaluate such things myself, but it seems dangerous to dismiss something just because you don’t care for the source.”
Well, let’s take this one for example: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2MSU.jpg It may look dramatic how the CO2 is rapidly rising on that graph while the temperature is not. However, the author of that chart has chosen the relative scales used for the CO2 and the temperature. The questions is: Has he chosen them in a realistic way?
Maybe it would be good if you had a look at the http://www.ipcc.ch “summary for policy makers” , Figure SPM.1., where there are catastrophically rising CO2 curves and other effects. Or maybe you have already conveyed to them your disapproval of such rapid artificial rises in the plotting and how badly it reflects on the sensitivity issue?
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5.
You are talking of transforming CO2 to Watts/m**2 to temperature. It is still instructive to look at the SPm1. figure of the summary for policy makers. The watts are right there with CO2 and methane and everything, rising like the best hockey stick.
The temperatures of the last ten years have stalled, to say the least, and as Lucia has shown at her blackboard, are outside the “statistical” error limits proposed by the IPCC models. The plot you quote is fair enough to show the point, not to write a research paper on.
Joel Shore
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5.
You are talking of transforming CO2 to Watts/m**2 to temperature. It is still instructive to look at the SPm1. figure of the summary for policy makers. The watts are right there with CO2 and methane and everything, rising like the best hockey stick.
The temperatures of the last ten years have stalled, to say the least, and as Lucia has shown at her blackboard, are outside the “statistical” error limits proposed by the IPCC models. The plot you quote is fair enough to show the point, not to write a research paper on.
How long has the sensor been failing, it appears there were two sharp downward shifts in November and December when it was expected ice extent would be increasing. If they are now using a different sensor the data should start at least from the END of the last melt season.
How does anyone know that George Will is actually wrong?
Nobody has the data to prove it one way or the other …
… (except for the NSIDC, William Chapman and potentially Jeff Id)
… (and even then, the data is apparently changed every few months sometimes by huge amounts going by the charts they produce – with no data to back them up that is).
If anyone has a source for sea ice extent and area data going back to 1979, please pass it on.
hotrod
So true. Back then one could, and often did, waste weeks of a perfectly good life searching a library for sources for a research paper.
Adolfo Giurfa says: