A Guest Post by Basil Copeland
Like many of Anthony’s readers here on WUWT, I’ve been riveted by all the revelations and ongoing discussion and analysis of the CRUtape Letters™ (with appropriate props to WUWT’s “ctm”). It might be hard to imagine that anyone could add to what has already been said, but I am going to try. It might also come as a surprise, to those who reckon me for a skeptic, that I do not think that anything was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data set maintained by CRU was irreparably damaged by these revelations. We’ve known all along that the data may be biased by poor siting issues, handling of station dropout, or inadequate treatment of UHI effects. But nothing was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data sets are completely bogus, or unreliable.
I will return to the figure at the top of this post below, but I want to introduce another figure to illustrate the previous assertion:
This figure plots smoothed seasonal differences (year to year differences in monthly anomalies) for the four major global temperature data sets: HadCRUT, GISS, UAH and RSS. With the exception of the starting months of the satellite era (UAH and RSS), and to a lesser degree the starting months of GISS, there is remarkable agreement between the four data sets – where they overlap – especially with respect to the cyclical pattern of natural climate variation. This coherence gives me confidence that while there may be problems with the land-sea data sets, they accurately reflect the general course of natural climate variation over the period for which we have instrumental data. While we need to continue to insist upon open access to the data and methods used to chronicle global and regional climate variation, and refine the process to remove the biases which may be present from trying to make the data fit the narrative of CO2 induced global warming, it would be wrong to conclude that the “CRUtape Letters” prove that global warming does not exist. That has never really been the issue. The issue has been the extent of warming (have the data been distorted in a way that would overstate the degree of warming?), the extent to which it is the result of natural climate variation (as opposed to human influences), and the extent to which it owes to human influences other than the burning of fossil fuels (such as land use/land cover changes, urban heat islands, etc.). And flowing from this, the issue has been whether we really know enough to justify the kind of massive government programs said to be necessary to forestall climate catastrophe.
Figure 2 plots the composite smooth against the backdrop of the monthly seasonal differences of the four global temperature data sets:
Many readers may recognize the familiar episodes of warming and cooling associated with ENSO and volcanic activity in the preceding figure. With a little more smoothing, we get a pattern like that depicted in Figure 3, which other readers may notice looks a lot like the cycles that Anthony and I have attributed to lunar and solar influences (they are the same):
In either case, the thing to note is that over time climate goes through repetitive episodes of warming and cooling. You have to look closely on Figures 2 and 3 – it is much clearer in Figure 1 – but episodes of warming exist when the smooth is above zero, and cooling episodes exist when the smooth is below zero. Remember, by design, the smooth is not a plot of the temperature itself, but of the trend in the temperature, i.e. the year to year change in monthly temperatures. The intent is to demonstrate and delineate the range of natural climate variation in global temperatures. It shows, in effect, the trend in the trend – up and down over time, with natural regularity, while perhaps also trending generally upward over time.
Which brings us to Figure 1. Here we are focusing in on the last 30 years, and a forecast to 2050 derived by a simple linear regression through the (composite) smooth of Figure 3. (Standard errors have been adjusted for serial correlation.) There has been an upward trend in the global temperature trend, and when this is projected out to 2050, the average is 0.114°C per decade ± 0.440°C per decade. Yes, you read that right: ± 0.440°C per decade. Broad enough to include both the worst imaginations of the IPCC and the CRU crowd, as well as negative growth rates, i.e. global cooling. Because if the truth be told, natural climate variation is so – well, variable – that no one can say with any kind of certainty what the future holds with respect to climate change. Be skeptical of any statistical claims to the contrary.
I think we can say, however, with reasonable certainty, that earth’s climate will remain variable, and that this will frustrate the effort to blame climate change on CO2 induced AGW. Noted on the image at the top of this post is a quote from Kevin Trenberth from the CRUtape Letters™: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warmth at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Trenberth betrays a subtle bias here – he cannot acknowledge the recent period of global cooling. It is, rather, “a lack of warmth.” But he is right that it is a “travesty” that we cannot fully account for the ebb and flow of earth’s energy balance, and ultimately, climate change. I think Trenberth just sees it as a lack of monitoring methods or devices. But I think there still remains a considerable lack of knowledge, or understanding, about the mechanics of natural climate variation. If you look carefully at Figure 1, you will notice that there seem to be upper and lower limits to the range of natural climate variability. On the scale depicted in Figure 1 (the scale is different with other degrees of smoothing), when warming reaches a limit of approximately 0.08-0.10°C per year, the warming slows down, and eventually a period of cooling takes place, always with the space of just a few years. Homeostasis, anyone? While phenomenon like ENSO are the effect of this regularity in natural climate variation, they are not the cause of it.
In my opinion, what is the real travesty of the global warming ideology is the hijacking of climate science in the service of a research agenda that has prevented science from investigating the full range of natural climate variation, because that would be an inconvenient truth. We see this, quite clearly, in the CRUtape Letters™ where the Medieval Warm Period is just “putative,” and a rather inconvenient truth that needs to be suppressed. Or the “1940’s blip” that implies that global temperatures increased just as rapidly in the early part of the 20th Century, as they did at the end of the 20th Century, an inconvenient truth at odds with the narrative preferred by the IPCC.
It is a truism that “climate varies on all time scales.” With respect to the variability demonstrated here, I’m convinced that someday it will be acknowledged that variability on this scale is dominated by lunar and solar influences. On longer scales, such as the ebb and flow from the Medieval Warm Period, through the Little Ice Age, and now into the “Modern Warm Period,” I do not think climate science yet has any real understanding of the underlying causes of such climate change. If we are, as seems possible, on the verge of a Dalton or Maunder type minimum in solar activity, we may eventually have an answer to whether solar activity can account for centennial scale changes in earth’s climate. And I do think it is reasonable to conclude, at the margin, that human activity has had some influence. It is hard to imagine population growing from one to six billion over the past one and a half centuries without some effect. Most likely, the effect is on local and regional scales, but this might add up to a discernible impact on global temperature. But until all of the forces that determine the full range of natural climate variability are understood better than they are now, there is no scientific justification for the massive overhaul of economic and government structures being promoted under the guise of climate change, or global warming.
jaypan (13:02:45) : Asked
“…Can’t we avoid confusion for the public by too many different graphs?
How if we use only one of such pictures, explain it in detail, show it over and over again, getting finally the stupid stick out of the public mind?”
This is the graph you are looking for it gives the “Value Added” fudge factor that causes the “official graphs” to show and increase in temperature. It plots final – raw tempreature data.
” jcl (13:05:48) :
You just aren’t applying the right “adjustments”, that’s all:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Thanks JCL just want to make sure no one misses this graph. It is a Large stake in the corpse of AGW.
In the uk, what do we know about climate change?
ermm not much
http://theweatheroutlook.com/
predicts colder than average winter whilst the Met office
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/winter.html
predicts a warmer than average winter
Hedge your bets!
George E. Smith (16:16:22) :
Thank you for your detailed outline for global temperature measurements procedure, with which I, as an experienced electronic engineer, now retired, agree. I do hope that some of those who profess to know what a global temperature is, may take a note. In my view best we can hope is a reasonable regional trend, which could be far more telling than a poor global estimate.
Paul Vaughan (22:59:40) :
“To be read with sarcasm:
Boy, it must be just pure coincidence that 1930 & 1976 feature prominently in dozens of terrestrial time series, eh?
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/3r.-.IOD.png”
Long before politics became a vital component of the climate science, British climatologist H. Lamb produced an estimate of a central England’s region (based on a 100 miles equilateral triangle with London-Bristol base) temperature trend.
As an exercise, I have compared his graph with intensity (reverse proportionality) to the geomagnetic field of one of the areas that may control Arctic Ocean currents flow.
Result is an apparent coincidence between two.
Taking a liberty and assuming that Lamb may have misjudged by some 25-40 years and the early sparse magnetic measurements were not sufficiently accurate, or most likely both, than the coincidence may produce a meaningful correlation.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/HL-GMF.gif
rbateman (14:04:57) : asks:
…”We know the PDO will stay where it’s at the next 30 yrs.
Do we know for sure what the Sun will do?
Do we know for sure that GCR background is constant in the Galaxy?
Do we know for sure what volcanism will do next?
Do we know for sure what the Sun will do?
We do know the sun is quiet and past history seems to indicate it MAY stay that way.
Do we know for sure that GCR background is constant in the Galaxy?
We know Magnetic Field is changing fast and “Rapid changes in the churning movement of Earth’s liquid outer core are weakening the magnetic field in some regions of the planet’s surface… The decline in the magnetic field also is opening Earth’s upper atmosphere to intense charged particle radiation…” this means the earth will see more CGRs. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/76158139.html
Do we know for sure what volcanism will do next?
“SOLAR-PLANETARY-CLIMATE STRESS, EARTHQUAKES AND VOLCANISM”
ABSTRACT
The largest volcanic eruptions since AD 1800 correlate with periods of enhanced seismicity , changes in the earth’ s spin rate, and the Chandler wobble. Furthermore, a marked increase in the number of major eruptions apparently occurred during the Maunder Sunspot Minimum (1645-1715) at a time when global temperatures were depressed. Solar activity might trigger volcanism through solar-induced climate change which could lead to variations in global spin rate and hence to increased crustal stresses and seismic and volcanic potential . Such solar activity may be modulated by planetary tidal effects which might additionally lead to enhanced crustal stress through direct influence on the earth’s axial tilt, wobble and rate of rotation…”
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19900066907_1990066907.pdf
There also seems to be an increase in tectonic activity, although that could be an artifact of better data gathering techniques. http://www.michaelmandeville.com/vortectonics/vortex_correlations2.htm
No one has all the answers but as the Chinese say “may you live in interesting times…” and it sure looks like interesting times may be here as far as changes in the earth and sun are concerned. With luck we will have honest scientist available to study all this.
JerryM (14:12:51) :
And ooh, wait! Dr. V. Ramanathan (the guy who launched all those UAV’s into China’s and India’s “brown cloud” and confirmed what other researchers were already quantifying – that black carbon (soot) is warming the planet big time) probably contributes about one half as much to global warming as CO2, a fact which the 2007 IPCC missed. Maybe as much or even more, thereby exceeding CO2’s contributions. And guess who produces more CO2 than the U.S. and 4 times as much soot, and those ratios are climbing? The answer is: China! And these guys are on an atmospheric polluting tear like never before seen in human history.
Yes and where is Maurice Strong, the father of “global Warming now living? – CHINA and WHAT is he doing? Working for a CONSTRUCTION Company! CH2M HILL is a ” multinational firm providing engineering, construction, operations and related services to public and private clients in numerous industries on six continents…”
Science has become very good at solving linear problems, but still struggles to deal with dynamic chaotic non-linear systems.
Chaotic problems are unsolvable. Why? Because any deviation from reality – coarse grid cells – Insufficient accuracy in the data – Errors in the data – can cause a divergence from reality. It is impossible to tell aprori in a real system how much divergence from reality is needed to switch to a different strange attractor or cause a period doubling. It could be one part in ten thousand. It could be one part in a billion billion.
In a word: Climate is not predictable.
Lorenz worked this out 40 or 50 years ago while – ta da – studying climate.
Paul Vaughan (23:26:22) :
[“Tenuc (21:56:27) “It has been known since the early 60’s that climate is driven by non-linear deterministic chaos”]
“There remain patterns that can be detected by simple multivariate conditioning. They are being overlooked because people think (and have been trained that) oversimplified statistical inference is a sufficient form of data analysis. At some point in the evolution of understanding there will be random measurement-related noise and confusing chaos left in the unmodeled stuff, but there remain plenty of [relatively] easy hits to be had for those with the patience to work out complex conditioning.”
Deterministic chaos does not preclude quasi-cyclical behaviour. For example, our climate system is in perpetual evolution as it responds to a range of factors which regulate the energy in and out. The Earth stays reasonably warm for 90% of the time, interspersed with a quasi-cyclic sequence of glaciation.
Deterministic chaos is not random, although to the casual observer this looks to be the case. Our climate is the non-linear product of a multitude of linked energy handling mechanisms – some of which are cyclical, some turbulent and some involving boundary change. It is a truly messy system, and this makes predicting it’s future direction impossible with the tools available today.
Peter Taylor wrote:
“…BUT – I do not argue that this then legitimises the current world development model with business as usual – NATURAL climate change can be dangerous and human support systems are very vulnerable to COOLING (Maunder Minimum effects are concentrated in the northern hemisphere which currently produces a surplus in food that feeds 67 countries in food deficit) – we need a big humanitarian effort to create resilient ecosystems – and that will cost perhaps $100 billion annually. This message gets lost (or deliberately suppressed).
What truly frightens me is what has recently been done to our ” human support systems” First the USA grain stores no longer exist and now Congressman Waxman of Cap and Trade fame is introducing a “Scorched Earth Farming Policy” http://farmwars.info/?p=1284
The history of the deliberate destruction of US farming can be found here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html
The same people who are behind the global warming scam are also behind the grab for control of the entire world food supply as well as the global banking fiasco. I would like to see ALL these shadow players in court for crimes against humanity.
Icarus (12:17:55) :
Clever manipulation of graphs but the reality is very different – the planet has been warming at about 0.2C per decade for several decades and it still is warming at 0.2C per decade:
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/yvtayto200
Nice job of cherry picking your starting point! What happened to the first half of the 20th Century?
You can take a handful of clay and kneed it any whichway you like, still won’t make bread.
What raw data are we talking about? the ones taken by Stevenson Boxes? the ones that are next to air con vents? the ones that have had freeways built next to them? the ones that are poorley maintained? the ones with fake records because the persons responsible forgot to read them from time to time or the ones read by tourism operators who “bumped up” the reading because warmer weather attracts more tourists? or the ones from the old soviet era where local mayors would “bump down” the reading so as to get more heating oil allocated for their town? (at the end of the soviet era this practice was no longer necessary, all of a sudden the readings were higher).
Or are we talking about SST data, the ones taken by teenage merchant sailors by dropping buckets over the side, or the ones taken by thermometres that were never recalibrated.
Or are we talking about satellite readings of SST’s? the ones that can’t account for strong winds or cloud cover etc etc etc
GIGO…until we have a system of reading temps. ACCURATELY, CONSISTENTLY for LONG periods of time, (many decades) there is no point relying on them, irregardless of what manipulations, adjustments or forcings are made.
I suggest a reading of John Dalys article on this subject, you know the bloke, the one who was a thorn in the side of Jones et al, the bloke they were “cheery” about when he passed away.
MarcH (15:23:31) : said
“OT-thought this article might interest:
Climate Dementors …
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2747744.htm
Do not miss in the comments section the work of SATAN – I am laughing so hard I can barely type…
SATAN :
01 Dec 2009 9:38:52pm
WOW!!!!
Mars is also experiencing global temperature rise,
does that mean humans are responsible for the loss of polar bears on Mars too??? We must be funneling co2 through an inter-dimensional worm-hole directly into Mars’ atmosphere and heating it up…COOOOOL!!!….
And he gets even funnier from there – ROTFLMAO
I really love sarcasm as a weapon
Rob R (12:57:57) :
Basil
Keep an eye on what EM Smith is doing with the GIStemp code and data. When the various regional temperature datasets are corrected for the drift in mean elevation, mean latitude and UHI I suspect that the warming trend in these indices will be reduced to about 1/3 of what GISS has previously been reporting. It is likely that many of the same issues infest the CRU global and regional temperature indices. The fact that the global anomaly products from these two organisations march in step does not constitute verification of either or both.
I agree, this bears watching. If this bears out, it would probably just affect the mean “drift” I show, not the pattern of variation. But, I think it should be noted how well the HadCRUT and GISS match up to the satellite data sets when we get to the last 30 years. Consider this: if you cool the HadCRUT and GISS records down too much, but match them up in the end with UAH and RSS, that makes the growth rate higher, not lower.
I do not know how this will all shake out. But I want to know. Free the data, free the code. I am not afraid of what it will show.
Denbo (12:59:32) :
“But nothing was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data sets are completely bogus, or unreliable”
So all the flub in the Harry Read Me file regarding the databases being in a sorry state of affairs means nothing?
Oh, Harry_Read_Me.txt means a lot. I didn’t say that there are not some problems with the data. What I think it means most of all is that Jones et al cannot completely replicate their earlier work. It shows evidence of sloppy science. And yet these are the people we are supposed to bow down to and accept their word as gospel? It exposes their feet of clay, and their hubris. It vindicates those who have been saying — “hey, let’s slow down here in this effort to overhaul modern industrial society. There are other voices out there, what do they have to say about this? Some are even saying that warming might be a good thing? What’s up with that?”
Harry_Read_Me.txt takes a lot of wind out of their sails. Thank God.
O/T
Perhaps instead of calling our benefactor “hacker” or “whistleblower” (s)he should be called the unofficial FOIA officer since (s)he responded correctly and legally to a FOI request.
Sort of takes the wind out of the sails of the selfrightous Climate Dementors.
M. Simon (05:54:42):
In a word: Climate is not predictable.
Surely it’s not *that* bad? After all, we can look at palaeoclimate and identify correlations between Milankovitch cycles and climate states –
…orbital variations remain the most thoroughly examined mechanism of climatic change on time scales of tens of thousands of years and are by far the clearest case of a direct effect of changing insolation on the lower atmosphere of Earth (National Research Council, 1982).
If there is a correlation between insolation and climate then it’s reasonable to assume that climate *can* be predicted to some degree – and indeed the climate models have made some fairly accurate predictions already about how the global climate would respond to volcanic forcing (e.g. Pinatubo) and enhanced greenhouse gases. Hansen’s models accurately projected current warming in a 1988 paper –
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1988/Hansen_etal.html
Quote from the London Daily Telegraph, -see Mary Riddell’s column today which states ‘ Unlike Lord Lawson they do not consider agnosticism a prudent stance when scientists (of whom he is not one) have produced overwhelming evidence of looming catastrophe’.
Have I missed something?
JonC (13:04:07) :
Would someone who understands these things please explain the difference between Mr Copeland’s graphs and those posted by Mr Icarus at 12:26.
I know others have already tried, but let me add my two cents. I’m plotting monthly “seasonal differences.” Icarus is plotting annual “actual values.”
When you “difference” a time trend, you take the trend out, and the “trend” is just the average of all the data, represented as a straight line through the data. There are various reasons for doing this — difference the data — and it is not an uncommon thing to do with time series. I do it, here, because smoothing the differences reveals the pattern of natural climate variation. Usually the latter is done with spectrum analysis, but that only reveals frequencies, not the the pattern of natural variation over time. I look upon the type of analysis I’m doing here as a cross between spectrum analysis and wavelet transforms, where I get the best of both in a more traditional method of presentation.
Another advantage to what I am is doing is that as a method of calculating the “trend” is not as strongly influenced by the starting point. Case in point:
Icarus starts his graph at a low point (though not the lowest) in the historical record. Using that starting point — 1945 — a linear trend through the data has a slope (annualized) of 0.010621692, or about 0.106 per decade. But the average seasonal difference is just 0.0047262, or about 0.047 per decade. Linear trends are all about where you chose to start and stop your data. Linear regression is unduly influenced by outliers, especially near the beginning and end of the trend line. The method I’m using does not have this sensitivity.
Now, before anybody else jumps on this, using differences to estimate the trend is correct, in an absolute sense, only if there is no trend in the differences. Well, I realize that, and I realize that there is a trend in the differences, and I’ve shown it (it is the black line in the figure at the top of the post). More on this in other replies to come.
David Holliday (13:04:49) :
As someone who read through a good portion of the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file I beg to differ with Mr. Copland’s statement “…I do not think that anything was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data set maintained by CRU was irreparably damaged by these revelations.” The validity of the datasets and code are seriously in question following the release of this information.
I’ll repeat here what I said to Denbo above, partly because I forgot to close of an italics tag, so my reply was not perhaps as clear as it could have been.
“Oh, Harry_Read_Me.txt means a lot. I didn’t say that there are not some problems with the data. What I think it means most of all is that Jones et al cannot completely replicate their earlier work. It shows evidence of sloppy science. And yet these are the people we are supposed to bow down to and accept their word as gospel? It exposes their feet of clay, and their hubris. It vindicates those who have been saying — “hey, let’s slow down here in this effort to overhaul modern industrial society. There are other voices out there, what do they have to say about this? Some are even saying that warming might be a good thing? What’s up with that?”
Harry_Read_Me.txt takes a lot of wind out of their sails. Thank God.”
Also, my reply to Rob, where I also left off a tag, is relevant here:
“I agree, this bears watching. If this bears out, it would probably just affect the mean “drift” I show, not the pattern of variation. But, I think it should be noted how well the HadCRUT and GISS match up to the satellite data sets when we get to the last 30 years. Consider this: if you cool the HadCRUT and GISS records down too much, but match them up in the end with UAH and RSS, that makes the growth rate higher, not lower.
I do not know how this will all shake out. But I want to know. Free the data, free the code. I am not afraid of what it will show.”
Why is it Standard deviation is never talked about with global temperatures? Using Excel and a webpage on descriptive statistics (and this is about statistics), I came up with the following:
Hadcrut(unadjusted): trend of .0044c/year +/- .0064c
GISS: trend of .0056c/year +/- .0068c
I just see a lot of noise. Or am I missing something here?
Basil (06:10:43):
Icarus (12:17:55) :
Clever manipulation of graphs but the reality is very different – the planet has been warming at about 0.2C per decade for several decades and it still is warming at 0.2C per decade:
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/yvtayto200
Nice job of cherry picking your starting point! What happened to the first half of the 20th Century?
We could certainly include that –
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1900/to
… and it still shows a warming trend, interrupted by 30 years of slight cooling, but my understanding is that the warming in the first half of the 20th Century was largely due to increasing solar irradiance –
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/sngtaco21870
Apologies for the crudeness of this graph but I think it does show a correlation of solar activity with warming which no longer holds after about 1960, so it doesn’t tell us much about *anthropogenic* warming in the last half century or so. If that’s what we’re discussing, what does the inclusion of the first half of the 20th Century add to the discussion, from your point of view?
hotrod (13:04:43) :
So with the error range being 4x the plotted trend, we have no statistically significant trend at all!
LarryWell, be careful here, because I think you do not understand something. I’ll have more to say about this in some other replies, so it is obviously something that bears repeating. The x4 is a prediction interval, not the confidence interval of the mean of the trend (of trends) itself. Now, as it happens, the mean of the trend (of trends) is not significantly different than zero, either, so your point perhaps remains.
Let me try to be clear about this. In the figure at the top of the post, there is a black “trend line.” This is a linear trend through the seasonal differences. The average seasonal difference, for all the data, is 0.0052823, or about 0.05°C per decade, since 1850. But it has been trending upward, from 0.000377 (0.004°C per decade) in 1851 to 0.010182 (0.10°C per decade) at the end of the historical data (October 2009), and a projection of this trend out to 2050 yields an average of 0.114°C through the forecast period.
Now, this trend (in the trend) may be overstated, somewhat, because of the way HadCRUT or GISS has mangled the historical data. We do not know that, but we need to know, one way or the other. We really do need to take a fresh look at the land and sea surface data, and the way it has been aggregated, to see whether the obvious biases of the CRU crew (or GISS) have inflated the trend.
But beyond that, I do not think we have any kind of true scientific understanding of the source of this trend. Even if HadCRUT and GISS were not biased, and the trends I show were spot on accurate representations of the historical record, what does it mean? Let me repeat something I said in the post:
“On longer scales, such as the ebb and flow from the Medieval Warm Period, through the Little Ice Age, and now into the “Modern Warm Period,” I do not think climate science yet has any real understanding of the underlying causes of such climate change.”
There is a trend. It is discernible, but against the backdrop of natural climate variation, it is difficult to conclude that it is statistically significant. And we do not know what has caused it. Until there is a “consensus” about what causes centennial swings in climate, we cannot be confident that we know what has caused the trend shown in the figure at the top of my post. That is the bottom line. We do not know what causes climate change on this scale. The truth is, we do not even know what causes climate change on decadal or bidecadal scales. It is not ENSO. That is, as I said, the effect, not the cause. Truth is, we really do not know a whole lot about the causes of natural climate variation.
rbateman (15:33:17) Said
“that’s the problem. a major cooling event is due anytime now. as usual smartsr^e thugocrats have exhibited their grasp of reality & left a trail of fraud/self interest that has zeroed humanities chance to respond to cold.
cold means less crops, more energy for heating, climate refugees moving to the equatorial zones etc. but then, considering the twisted minds of the thugocrats running this agenda maybe that’s the idea.
I think the elite are very well aware of a major cooling event being due any time. That is why the World Trade Organization put food/Ag on the trading table in 1995 and the World Bank/IMF SAPs are designed to grab all the farmland they can. Also in 1996 the VP of Cargill got rid of US grain stockpiling. That’s Dan Amstutz, the same VP who wrote the WTO agreement on Ag. these are the result so far:
1 million poles to be removed from their farms – EU Cairlady
60% of Portugal’s farmers removed
Mexico – 1992 to 2002, the number of farms fell 75% – from 2.3 million to 575, 000
And in India one farmer suicides every eight hours.
“The largest sustained waves of suicides in human history—is becoming apparent. And as Sainath emphasizes, these numbers still underestimate the disaster, since women farmers are excluded from the official statistics… It is important that the figure of 150,000 farm suicides is a bottom line estimate..” http://alternatives-international.net/article1394.html
This is the thugocrats response to possible famine:
“In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends…very attractive.” Food shortfalls predicted: 2008 http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/dancy/2008/0104.html
“Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept..Stock reserves have a documented depressing effect on prices… and resulted in less aggressive market bidding for the grains.” July 22, 2008 letter to President Bush http://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf
I wonder if Old Icarus is in favor of mass starvation worldwide because that is what I see being setup when I follow the World Food supply threads. Worldwide regulations and patents sponsored by WTO/UN that prevent the poor from growing their own food.
The Global Biodiversity Treaty is especially nasty. It is used to steal seed from third world farmers so Monsanto et alcan patent the genetics. Third world farmers then have to pay for the seed THEY developed.
Gary (13:06:18) :
Basil,
Would you specify the formula you use to get the “smoothed seasonal differences” that you plot and explain why it’s an appropriate transformation of the raw data?. Hodrick-Prescott smoothing. For Figures 1 and 2 the noise to signal ratio (smoothing parameter) is 14,440. For Figure 3 it is 129,000.
Why Hodrick-Prescott? Why not? In other words, if you think this produces an unrealistic pattern of the natural variation, then you are welcome to take the same data I took, apply your smoothing method of choice, and show it.
But for what it is worth, you can roughly approximate the pattern shown in Figures 1 and 2 with a simple 48 month centered moving average. HP is a bit more elegant, using least squares to smooth things out better than a simple moving average.
Icarus (07:22:19)
The problem with GISS/woodforthetrees is that it appears adjusted data, for no apparent reason, for if you look at raw data globally via john daly.com or raw data from various stations worldwide, they show a flat trend, which is then later processed to give it a warming trend of recent, and downtrended for older recordings, to give it a constant rise for the Industrial period.
So: Raw data or adjusted data?