Reposted from Jennifer Marohasy’s website.
THERE are four official global temperature data sets and there has been much debate and discussion as to which best represents change in global temperature.
Tom Quirk has analysed variations within and between these data sets and concludes there is 1. Substantial general agreement between the data sets, 2. Substantial short-term variation in global temperature in all data sets and 3. No data set shows a significant measurable rise in global temperature over the twelve year period since 1997.
Global Temperature Revisited
Article by Tom Quirk
One of the most vexing things about climate change is the endless debate about temperatures. Did they rise, did they fall or were they pushed? At times it seems like a Monty Python sketch of either the Dead Parrot or the 5 or 10 Minute Argument.
However it is possible to see some of the issues by looking at the four temperature series that are advanced from:
GISS – Goddard Institute for Space Studies and home of James Hansen,
Hadley Centre – British Meteorological Office research centre
UAH – The University of Alabama, Huntsville, home of Roy Spencer with his colleagues including John Christy of NASA and
RSS – Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, California, a company supported by NASA for the analysis of satellite data.
The first two groups use ground based data where possible with a degree of commonality. However since 70% of the surface of the earth is ocean and it is not monitored in a detailed manner, various procedures with possibly heroic assumptions and computer modelling, are followed to fill the ocean gap.
The last two groups use satellite data to probe the atmosphere and with the exception of the Polar Regions which are less than 10% of the globe, they get comprehensive coverage.
One question is of course are the two groups measuring the same temperature? After all the satellite looks down through the atmosphere, while the ground stations are exactly that.
There is an important distinction to be made between measuring the temperature and measuring the change in the temperature. Since the interest is in changing temperatures then what is called the global temperature anomaly is the starting point. The issue of measuring absolute temperatures should be put to one side.
Data from 1997 to 2009 was drawn from the four group websites on the 28 April 2009. When data for 1997 to early 2008 was compared to data acquired in early 2008 differences were found as shown in the first table.
This is evidence of substantial reprocessing and re-evaluation of data. This is not unusual with complicated analysis systems but there is so much interest in the results that adjustments are regarded with great suspicion. This is the fault of those publishing the temperature data as they fail to make the point that monthly and even yearly measurements are about weather and not climate.
The latest series of temperature anomalies are shown in the graph where the monthly data has been averaged into quarters. All statistical analysis that follows is on the monthly data unless stated otherwise.
From inspection, there is substantial agreement over the years 1997 to 2008. This can be statistically measured through correlations. This is a measure of how closely related the series may be. A value of 0 implies independent series while a value of 1 implies complete agreement. The correlation in turn indicates the degree of commonality in the comparison.
This is remarkable agreement given the two very different techniques used.
It is important to note that the two satellite analysis groups draw measurements from the same satellites. So the differences in temperatures are a result of analysis procedures that are not simple. In fact corrections to the data have been the subject of exchanges between the two groups.
The ground based measurements also have a common data base but it is clear and acknowledged that the two groups have different analysis procedures. While the satellite analysis procedures have converged to reduce their differences over the last thirty years, this has not been the case for the ground based procedures.
It is also clear looking at the measurements that there are substantial short-term, say less than 2 years, variations over the period 1997 to 2009. In fact, while the overall monthly variations show a scatter with standard deviation of 0.20C, the month to month variations are 0.10C. This is a measure of features that are clear in the data. The short run sequences of temperature movement are a reflection of variability in the atmosphere from events such as El Ninos (1997-98) and La Ninas.
Looking for a simple trend by fitting curves through a highly variable series is both a problem and a courageous exercise. The results on an annual rather than a monthly basis are given in the third table. The problem of dealing with real short term variations was resolved by ignoring them. 
So for twelve years there has been a rise 0.10C with a 140% error, in other words, no significant measureable temperature rise. You can play with the data. If you omit 1998 then you can double the change. But 1998 was an El Nino year followed in 1999 by a La Nina. If we omit both years then the results are unchanged.
However the lesson from this is to look at the detail.
There is so much variability within the 12 year period that seeking a trend that might raise the temperature by 20C over 100 years would not be detectable. On the other hand there are clearly fluctuations on a monthly and yearly scale that will have nothing to do with the predicted effects of anthropogenic CO2.
The twelve year temperature changes from the data of the four analysis centres reveal some possible differences. Since there is a high degree of commonality amongst the results, any differences may be systematic. Both the GISS and Hadley series show a larger temperature increase then the satellite measurements. This may be due to urban heat island effects.
Finally, if you are looking for temperature increases from CO2 in the atmosphere, then you should choose the satellite approach of measuring temperatures in the atmosphere!
Short term, less than thirty years, temperature series are not the place to seek evidence of human induced global warming.
**************************
Tom Quirk lives in Melbourne, Australia.
To read more from Dr Quirk click here http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/author/tom-quirk/
The photograph is from Anthony Watt’s website that details his program of photographically surveying every one of the 1221 USHCN weather stations in the USA which are used as a “high quality network” to determine near surface temperature trends in the USA, read more here http://wattsupwiththat.com/test/
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Smokey says:
First of all, perhaps you have missed it, but I think I’ve been pretty clear on the fact that I am not a climate scientist; I am a physicist and my peer-reviewed work has nothing direcly to do with climate science and thus what the referees views are on climate science wouldn’t be relevant to their predisposition toward my papers.
I can also tell you that while science may tend to be a bit cliquish sometimes, I think your views on how peer review works are pretty cynical compared to the reality. I personally have never “schmoozed to get published.”
As for you guys, well, I think there is some pretty good give-and-take here but I think your statement that your “skeptics of the CO2=AGW hypothesis” describes something that I have found to be true…which is that many of the folks here (although not all of them) seem to have a sort of one-way skepticism. I.e., there is great skepticism about anything supporting AGW but very little skepticism about supposed evidence pointing in the other direction. Your embrace of the Joanne Nova’s rather silly talking points is one example. Another example is the fact that Roy Spencer posted a data analysis here over a year ago about the origin of the current rise in CO2 and that noone seemed to notice that the data analysis contained a very significant problem that rendered the result he showed essentially meaningless … even though the fortuitously exact agreement between two linear regressions should have been an immediate clue that what was claimed to be a significant physical result was in fact just a mathematical tautology!
I’ve had plenty of experience with that posting comments on this website. And, I have suggested that you might want to try commenting at other, less sympathetic, websites in order to experience this.
Smokey says:
You say this so often that I think it is quite disturbing how little responsibility you put on yourself and those who share your view. In fact, I find this a rather lame attempt to avoid any responsibility whatsover. You seem to think that all you need to do with a scientific theory that you don’t like is to throw a lot of mud on it and hope that it sticks. You have seem to acknowledge no level of responsibility to try to make sure your own arguments are good.
And, as a practical matter, I hate to tell you but while the situation may be like you describe in your own head, it is not that way in the real world. In the real world, the scientific community has already found the evidence of AGW quite compelling and has told the policymakers this and, for the most part, the policymakers seem to be accepting the scientific conclusions. So, in fact, it is now your responsibility to come up with compelling scientific arguments as to why this conclusion that has been reached is incorrect.
And, as piece of advice, I would tell you that you make it a lot easier for the scientific community and the policymakers to dismiss you when you cling onto the sort of poor arguments that Joanne Nova presents (or Beck, or Gerlich and Tscheunscher, or Miskolczi). These arguments may find some traction here but they won’t out there.
I have recently read a quote by an atmospheric scientist (and someone who is actually probably closer to the skeptic…or agnostic…camp overall on AGW than anything else) who noted “To those who snort that 340ppm of anything must surely be of no consequence, I recommend 340ppm of arsenic in their coffee.” One of the reasons why a trace gas makes so much difference is that the diatomic molecules that make up 99% of our atmosphere are essentially transparent to infrared radiation. Another is in fact the logarithmic dependence of radiative forcing on concentrations over a large range of concentration, which essentially means that rather small concentrations can have a disproportionately large effect.
As for the “it’s never happened before” claim, I suppose if you define “catastrophe” stringently enough, you could make that claim. Sea levels have in fact been tens of meters higher and places that are now quite temperate have been tropical. And, going in the other direction, places here like Rochester that are now fairly temperate have been buried under a couple miles of glacier. And, probably at least in large part due to such climatic changes, there have been several large-scale extinctions of flora and fauna on the planet. Perhaps these things don’t qualify as catastrophes to you, but they sure as heck seem to be significant to me.
And, of course, if one applies your sort of long-term geological point-of-view to other problems, they don’t seem to be very catastrophic either. So, terrorists fly a few airplanes into a few buildings and kill a few thousand people, is that such a big deal? It is hardly a blip to the global environment and is dwarfed by the number of people who die each year due to other causes (even car accidents, which similarly kill U.S. citizens in the prime of their life) So, would you propose not spending any money to fight terrorism either?
Joel Shore – you point out that “skeptics” tend to have one-way skepticism. I would argue that this is in large part to counteract the one-way gullibility of others, and that on the whole they do a lot better at being open-minded than the proponents of AGW. When you say “In the real world, the scientific community has already found the evidence of AGW quite compelling and has told the policymakers this and, for the most part, the policymakers seem to be accepting the scientific conclusions. So, in fact, it is now your responsibility to come up with compelling scientific arguments as to why this conclusion that has been reached is incorrect.” there is one absolutely glaring error – the AGW hypothesis has never been substantiated by testing, and has been elevated to the status of scientific law by a political process.
When I said that the AGW hypothesis has never been substantiated by testing, I was badly understating the case. It has been tested many times, but has failed all or virtually all of those tests (for a hypothesis to be elevated to the status of a theory, it must pass all tests).
I would like you to address the issue of testing. You could start with
1. my post of 23 May 01:36:04, about clouds,
and continue by explaining
2. why the tropical troposphere has barely warmed at all since around 1985, and has certainly warmed by a lot less than the surface. This is relevant, because the AGW hypothesis places the main location of CO2-caused warming firmly in the tropical troposphere, and shows much more warming there than at the surface. In other words, the “warming” part of AGW is observed not to be happening.
3. why the oceans are cooling. The computer models, that are the basis of the AGW hypothesis, calculate that (barring any disruptive events such as major volcanoes) the oceans cannot show an absence of warming for a period of more than about 4 years. We are now well into the 6th year of no net ocean warming, and the oceans have in fact been cooling since 2006. In other words, the AGW hypothesis, as expressed by the computer models, is falsified.
These three (clouds, troposphere, oceans) are not the only tests that the AGW hypothesis has failed. Each one is sufficient to show that the hypothesis is false. Yet still there is a one-way gullibility.
Let’s stop worrying about who said what, and give more weight to the real world than to computer models. Let’s test the AGW hypothesis against real-world observations. That is how science is supposed to progress.
Joel
You will notice that in my post comparing the IPCC report to The Da Vinci code I did say that some of the material (in both) is undeniably factual. There is a lot of good science in AR4 but a lot of material that is overstated or conjectural and little distinction is made when threading together the overall narrative.
I remember posting a pile of historic references to the MWP and Roman optimum and your saying you weren’t very up on history. Well neither is MIchael Mann. As Al Gore admitted, the MWP was much more widespread than is claimed, but Mann tries to minimise it for the simple reason it does tend to spoil the ‘story.’ The hockey stick smooths out history, reducing the widespread impact of both the MWP and LIA. When making comparisons to ‘unprecedented’ events I refer to human history scales, and in that respect the MWP ended around 1300, so we are now likely warmer than any period in the last 700 years, but even that is now not as certain as I once thought, as certainly there have been some periods since then that about rivalled todays values.
Temperatures have barely warmed since the 1730’s, hardly indicating a runaway climate and perhaps indicating that we are rather closer to the climate of the LIA than the MWP.
As regards anomalies-to derive these you need to start off with accurate figures. With James Hansen admitting the global mean temperature could be incorrect by 2degrees F, plus the convoluted and unlikely method of calculating temperatures back to 1850 or whenever, plus UHI, plus changing locations and numbers of stations, plus surface station inconsistencies, I dont think we have any sort of reliable global data set to base anomalies on in the first place, never mind to fractions of a degree back to 1850.
Still no doubt you can explain all this in your article. I gave the plot lines as these are the recurring themes, but no doubt you can home in on one or two as required. The purpose was really to demonstrate that there is a difference between sceptics who study the subject and ‘Deniers’ who probably just pick up the odd ‘fact.’ they want to believe
We are rational perople and as I said before, if someone could prove the hypotheses (without overusing the word ‘unprecedented’; we would be crazy to refute the need to do someting to prevent a temp rise of up to 6.2C, now apparently increased to up to 9C (note the ‘up to’ caveat)
Hope you will find the time to put together an article putting over your point of view.
With best wishes
TonyB
Joel Shore: First of all your lines “the real world, the scientific community has already found the evidence of AGW quite compelling and has told the policymakers this and, for the most part, the policymakers seem to be accepting the scientific conclusions.” lack concensus.
Further more. IF we are to use the words ‘real world’ we better talk of the real world of science where a thesis never ever is allowed to be an unproven argument. Using an unproven argument as if it’s a fact to test against other hypotethical arguments has been called circle proof proving nothing since the days of the Ancient Greeks! Those who calls themselves scholars using circle proof as well as Ad Hominem ( ” hate to tell you but while the situation may be like you describe in your own head, it is not that way in the real world” = Ad Hominem)
By the way your assumption regarding ‘real world’ and scholars of science aren’t true: Neither Göran Ahlgren, Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry, Lars Bern, former Director of the Retailer and the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, formerly chairman of The Natural Step environmental research
Peter STILBENE, professor of physical chemistry
CG Ribbing, Professor of Solid State Physics
Gösta Walin, professor emeritus of oceanography
Sten Kaijser, professor emeritus of mathematics
Wibjörn Karlén, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography
If you have any knowledge at all of the needed science fields and the scholars who knows them best, you would know them all by name. Anyhow this is what they said:
“Our view is:
• The fact that it could not show a significant causal link between elevated carbon dioxide content and potential climate change.
• The fact that the observed warming during the 1900s does not give cause for concern, whatever the causes.
• That the climate scares based on low forecast value.
• The claim of consensus on the issue do not support.
• That a climate policy based on the IPCC scenarios is likely to lead to a devastating waste of human and financial resources that primarily affects the poor in the world.
Before society makes far-reaching decisions on climate policy, we should ensure to use on a sounder scientific basis than we have today. The Government should therefore initiate a hearing with a broad spectrum of representatives of the scientific community with different views on the climate issue.” 2nd March 2009, SvD
Thus the only thing you achived is proving that you either don’t accept normally used and by every scholar of science studied to use Theories of Science, or lack knowledge of how to present a solid hypotes which can be tested. Do you honestly believe that such behavior helps your case?
Joel Shore:
Your understanding of the role of skepticism in the scientific method leaves a lot to be desired.
It is not the duty of skeptics to assist the purveyors of the CO2=AGW hypothesis in proving their case. But with the evidence behind AGW so sadly lacking, it’s not surprising that you’d reach out to skeptics for help.
And regarding your comment:
“I have suggested that you might want to try commenting at other, less sympathetic, websites…”
That’s been tried, many times. Maybe you could persuade your buds over at Real Climate to stop their censorship of comments that disprove AGW.
Mike Jonas:
Well, I don’t have a whole lot to say about your post. I don’t disagree that clouds are a source of considerable uncertainty and if you want to believe that the cloud feedback is neither positive nor negative, I think that is probably a defensible position (although certainly not convincingly-demonstrated as being correct)…but I think it would still give you a climate sensitivity in the low end of the IPCC range, albeit on the lower end of that range.
See my post of 25 May 17:39:13. In short, you are incorrect in attributing this magnification in the tropical troposphere specifically to the mechanism of CO2-caused warming. It is independent of the warming mechanism and essentially a prediction that results from the basic physical understanding of the tropical atmosphere. It has been verified for temperature fluctuations over, say, yearly timescales (such as El Nino – La Nina); the observational data in regards to whether it is obeyed at multidecadal timescales is the subject of ongoing analysis as both the satellite and radiosonde data sets have significant artifacts regarding such long term trends that makes it difficult to draw conclusions.
See here for a good discussion of this data and what it shows: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Does-ocean-cooling-disprove-global-warming.html I don’t think it is clear that there really is any significant disagreement between the ocean behavior and what the models predict.
Also, as a general note on how science proceeds in the real world: I know that the scientific method is often simplistically described as meaning that any piece of data that is contrary to a theory falsifies it. However, if that was really applied in the modern world, we wouldn’t have any theories because there isn’t a theory out there for which there hasn’t been some data published that appears to contradict its predictions and, at any given time, there are usually several outstanding puzzles between theory and data.
The actual process of science is that, over time, people will continue re-examining both the data and the theory (and its expression in terms of the models) and will eventually come to some sort of resolution. We have seen this occur in the past already. While you now cite just the tropical troposphere as a source of disagreement between models and observations, there used to be disagreement even for the global temperatures…with the data showing much less warming aloft than at the surface. Over time, a longer data set and the correction of various artifacts in the UAH dataset, as well as independent analyses of the satellite data by RSS and others, resolved this controversy…i.e., it turned out that the observational data was wrong or inadequate.
These differences between the ideal view of science and the actual reality of science is one of the reasons why for sociologically-controversial theories like AGW or evolution, scientists can reach conclusions at odds with what seems to doubters of these theories to be the correct conclusion.
Smokey says:
They let through plenty of comments that challenge AGW. What they seem to tire of is comments that just repeat the same bogus arguments again and again and thus decrease the signal-to-noise ratio.
However, you don’t have to go to such a site that has an opposing view. I would recommend posting at a messageboard that does not have its own strong point of view and moderates only for form (e.g., not flaming other people) and not for content. An example is this messageboard: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=7 I think you would be surprised to find how unconvincing many of your arguments and graphs are to people who do not already share your point-of-view.
TonyB:
There is a reason that this occurs that you don’t seem to be understanding: Saying that the MWP was widespread may be true but apparently only if you define the period of the warmth broadly enough. I.e., if you say, “Did many regions of the world experience some period of considerable warmth between, say, 800 and 1300AD?” then the answer might well be YES. However, the point is that the warm periods tended to be asynchronous at different places, so indeed when you look on a hemispherical or global scale, then yes, the warmth is smoothed out. That is not an artifact of the method used; it is simply the reality of computing the temperature on a hemispherical or global scale.
Here’s an analogy: Say that I tell you that “Last week, was a period of record heat all across the U.S.” However, let’s say when you actually look, you find that it was very hot in the West on Monday and Tuesday, in the Central Part of the nation on Wednesday and Thursday, and along the East Coast on Friday and Saturday but otherwise the temperatures were fairly normal. Then, what you will find when you average over the entire country is a week of a little above average temperatures but not the sort of dramatic warmth that you expected when we just focused on the fact that there was record warmth in certain periods of that whole time in certain different areas.
Well, others disagree with you and all data analyses of the surface temperature record and of things like the retreat of glaciers have come to the same conclusion. One thing that you need to understand is why anomalies tend to be much better behaved than absolute measurements. For that, read here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ under the heading “Anomalies and Absolute Temperatures.
You seem to be confusing various numbers here. I think the 6.2 C number was an upper bound for an estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 from one particular study (you can correct me if I am wrong about where you got this number from). By contrast, the 9C number that you are quoting is, I believe, an upper bound estimate from the MIT study of how high temperatures might rise by the end of the century given some rise in our emissions. Presumably, it is for a scenario where our emissions continue to increase quite rapidly (as they have been over the last decade) and thus the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere go considerably beyond double the pre-industrial levels.
At any rate, it is you who are quoting these high-end numbers, not I. For example, I prefer to quote the full IPCC likely range for the equilibrium climate sensitivity of 2 to 4.5 C. (I don’t even mention the 6.2 C, which I believe was the upper bound from one particular study.)
Joel Shore,
never have I seen so much [snip] in all the 41 one (yes fortyone!) years I have participated in the debate regarding changing of world weather! New Ice Age or Warming up.
Mind you the fact that we would and should have a warming up from 1930’s to 1995/2000 was known in 1920’s and published works about in 1931!
Please present VALID arguments as well as non circular proofs for your opinion.
Joel
This thread is about to drop pff the edge of the world (which is flat as you well know) so I will see you on another thread.
All the best
Tony
Ps Get writing
PPS of course I understand-I just don’t agree
Joel Shore (14:02:03) :
Clouds :
“.. I don’t disagree that clouds are a source of considerable uncertainty [..] if you want to believe that the cloud feedback is neither positive nor negative, I think that is probably a defensible position [..] but I think it would still give you a climate sensitivity in the low end of the IPCC range”
from IPCC Report AR4 8.6.2.3 : “[..] in the absence of cloud feedbacks, current GCMs would predict a climate sensitivity [..] of roughly 1.9°C ± 0.15°C [..]. The mean and standard deviation of climate sensitivity estimates derived from current GCMs are larger (3.2°C ± 0.7°C) essentially because the GCMs all predict a positive cloud feedback [..].”
So removing cloud feedback reduces climate sensitivity to 1.9 +- 0.15, well below the bottom end 3.2-0.7 of the range used by the IPCC.
Troposphere
You referred me to your post 25 May 17:39:13 : “[..] she is presumably talking about the idea that the temperature trends (and fluctuations) should be magnified as you go up in the tropical atmosphere [..] However, she is absolutely incorrect in saying that this is a signature of greenhouse gases[..]”
Take a look at the IPCC Report, chapter 9, figure 9.1, panels (c) and (f). Panel (f) shows total forcings, and the tropical troposphere forcing clearly comes from panel (c) “Zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 (°C per century) as simulated by the PCM model from [..] (c) wellmixed greenhouse gases”
Yet the global temperature measurements clearly show that this has not happened in the real climate since maybe 1981 – which is even well within the time period supposedly covered by the IPCC’s fig.9.1.
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/TropicsTroposphereGraph_LowRes.jpg
That “hotspot” in the IPCC’s fig.9.1 IS the global warming (apart from a small area near the N Pole). It doesn’t exist in the real world outside the computer models.
Ocean cooling
I read your linked item. It claims that Leuliette found ocean warming. That is incorrect. That paper was able to state that the ocean warmed over the period 2003-2007 only by finding a lower temperature in 2003 than other papers. There was no warming from 2004 onwards.
Finding periods of non-warming in the past does not alter the fact that the computer models are seriously embarrassed if the ocean temperature fails to rise for 4 years or more. See the Pielke Sr article that I linked to before.
Science
You say “the scientific method is often simplistically described as meaning that any piece of data that is contrary to a theory falsifies it”
If such data is at the fringes of a hypothesis then that is relevant. But the three issues that I highlighted – clouds / ECS, troposphere where greenhouse gases do their warming, and ocean cooling, are absolutely central to the AGW hypothesis. Without any one of these three the hypothesis of dangerous man-made global warming is absolutely dead. yet all three tests have now failed.
Mike Jonas says:
The 3.2 +- 0.7 C may be the range of the equilibrium climate sensitivity in the current climate models but the IPCC likely range for the ECS (based more on observational evidence than models) is between 2 and 4.5 C. So, the 1.9 +- 0.15 C is right at the bottom of that range.
Panel (c) dominates the total forcing simply because the IPCC estimates of the contributions to the total forcing have the anthropogenic greenhouse effect dominating. However, other forcings have the same pattern of magnification of the trend as you go up in the tropical troposphere (for the case of aerosols, this trend is a cooling one), although it isn’t as obvious because the contour interval makes it more difficult to resolve the structure of the weaker forcings. But presented here is a plot of what the structure of the warming would look like due to the solar forcing, which is very similar to the GHG forcing until you get into the stratosphere: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ (And, the observations agree with the GHG forcing, not the solar forcing, structure in the stratosphere.)
As for the graph that you showed, there are several problems with it: The mid-troposphere values are essentially meaningless because the microwave channels are quite broad so that the mid-troposphere one has a tail into the stratosphere and is thus contaminated by the strong cooling there. (In fact, even the lower troposphere values may be a little bit contaminated by this, as Fu et al have argued.) Furthermore, you have selectively shown the UAH analysis whereas the RSS analysis shows considerably more warming in the tropical lower troposphere. And, the fact that these two analyses disagree so strongly in the tropics shows that the trends are in fact quite uncertain there due to data artifacts.
These three issues are absolutely central only because you have made them so, choosing three points where there is some limited disagreement and ignoring all the rest. And, as I have noted above, you have misinterpreted these things quite a bit:
(1) While clouds are important, you haven’t really presented any compelling evidence to show that there is a zero cloud feedback and, at any rate, the absence of a cloud feedback would still give warming essentially right at the lower boundary of the IPCC likely range.
(2) The expected magnification of trends in the upper troposphere has nothing to do with “where greenhouse gases do their warming”, rather it has to do with the fact that the temperature structure of the tropical atmosphere is expected to be governed by moist adiabatic lapse rate theory, independent of the mechanism causing temperature trends or fluctuations. It is the warming in the troposphere with cooling in the stratosphere that is a fingerprint of the warming being due to greenhouse gases. Furthermore, you have cherrypicked the data set used to support your point, ignoring the fact that other data sets give different results.
(3) While ocean warming is important, the trends have to be looked at over a longer time period than a few years. This is true both because variability is expected over a few years and because the data sets don’t seem to give very robust trends over such short time periods (e.g, they disagree with one another).
TonyB says:
Okay, Tony. It has been nice as always talking with you.
Cheers,
Joel
Joel Shore – well, we probably shouldn’t argue for ever, we’ve both made our points. Time and the real climate will show who was right. I find your arguments very weak, but then you probably think the same of mine, so I’ll leave that to others to judge.
On the issue of cherry-picking – to put it politely : codswallop. I picked UAH and Hadley as the representatives of LT and surface respectively. These are each lower than the other teams – RSS and GISS – in their domain. Had I picked the other two the result would have been the same.
And when you say “These three issues are absolutely central only because you have made them so, choosing three points where there is some limited disagreement and ignoring all the rest.” that is equally codswallop. Those were three remarkably important tests, central to the whole “dangerous AGW” hypothesis. The fact that other tests were possible is irrelevant. A hypothesis has to pass all relevant tests. It is not in any way cherry-picking to find three (three!!) absolutely major tests that fail, when other tests were possible. To falsify a hypothesis it is sufficient for ONE test to fail, and “defenders” of the hypothesis are not at liberty to decide which test that should be.
Mike,
Indeed we probably could argue forever. While your statement about a falsifying a hypothesis is technically true, the point is that the hypothesis has to be definitively falsified. And, your examples don’t even come close for the reasons that I noted. Also, in reality, a theory often gets modified…not completely falsified…in response to some data that disagrees with what it predicts. For example, Let’s say it does turn out to be true that the trend in the ocean heat content data is incompatible with what climate models predict to be possible in the presence of greenhouse gas forcings (and the absence of a volcanic eruption) [and at this point, this is very very hypothetical because I haven’t seen anything definitive enough in either the data or analysis of the models to show this]. This would not mean that AGW is falsified. What it would mean is that there is an incompatibility between the theory as currently expressed by the models and the data, and would prompt scientists work hard to understand it better. But, it could turn out, for example, that the current climate models do systematically tend to underestimate the variability in global ocean heat content trends in the presence of increasing greenhouse gases without the fundamental theory of AGW being incorrect.
Science is not the simple cut-and-dried process that it is often simplified to in elementary discussions of the scientific method. There ain’t a theory in the world for which you could not find some data in the peer-reviewed literature that appears to be in contradiction with it.
As I noted, I think the difference between the sort of naive, simplistic view of science and the actual practice of science in the real world is one reason why the scientific community as a whole can reach one conclusion on controversial issues (such as AGW or the origins of life), while laypeople motivated by this issue to investigate the science arrive at a different conclusion.
Joel Shore:
You are arguing more for the validity of post-normal science, than normal science.
And of course, the famous Guardian article about same.
jeez: I don’t really think it is a new kind of science that needs a new term. I think that all of modern science works in a similar way. The simple fact is that by the time a theory becomes reasonably well-established in science, there are lots of independent lines of evidence supporting it. And, if we abandoned such a theory every time we found a piece of data that seemed to contradict it, we would never get anywhere.
People may want theories to be falsifiable and indeed they should be but it does not follow that the proper approach to a few pieces of evidence that seem to be in contradiction with the theory is to conclude that the theory is falsified. First, one tries to better understand the contradiction and see whether either there is a problem with the data (and there are indeed some very serious concerns with the data in the above-cited cases) or a way that the theory can be modified to accommodate the data. It is only when there are enough contradictions between theory and data that do not seem like they can be reconciled…and / or some competing hypothesis that does a better job explaining this data and also explains a large part of the data that the original theory explained…that the theory will be completely abandoned.
This is the way science has worked and the way I think it should work. And, indeed, AGW has itself paid its due and spent a long time in the “scientific wilderness” since Arrhenius first did his calculations before it earned the title of being an accepted theory.
Joel Shore – I’m off overseas for a couple of months so will bow out of this forum. I think our interchange had run its course, anyway. I applaud you for entering the “lion’s den” (and the lion’s den for being open) and hopefully everyone has learned something. And hopefully the real climate will finally resolve this issue before we all go mad or bankrupt.
Mike,
Thanks. Have a good trip!
Joel Shore:
Yep. They were. http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
The truth hurts.