The December 2009 and year 2009 University of Alabama at Huntsville lower tropospheric MSU temperature data is available. Thanks to Phillip Gentry and John Christy for alerting us to these figures]. I have several comments following the figures.
This data shows why the focus needs to be on the regional scale and that a global average is not of much use in describing weather that all of us experience.
The news media seem to continue to avoid this perspective. For example, in the article Snow, ice and the bigger picture
excerpts read
“Rather than seeking vindication or catastrophe in this cold snap, now is a good time to remind ourselves that weather, like death and taxes, will always be with us. Spectacular regional swings in temperature and precipitation, sometimes lasting for months, often emerge from the natural jostlings of atmosphere and ocean. By themselves, none of these prove or disprove a human role in climate change.”
“What’s different now is that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters. The latter aren’t impossible; they’re just harder to get, like scoring a straight flush on one trip to Vegas and a royal flush the next.”
“If you’re craving a scapegoat for this winter, consider the Arctic oscillation. The AO is a measure of north-south differences in air pressure between the northern midlatitudes and polar regions. When the AO is positive, pressures are unusually high to the south and low to the north. This helps shuttle weather systems quickly across the Atlantic, often bringing warm, wet conditions to Europe. In the past month, however, the AO has dipped to astoundingly low levels – among the lowest observed in the past 60 years. This has gummed up the hemisphere’s usual west-to-east flow with huge “blocking highs” that route frigid air southward.”
“Handy as it is, the AO describes more than it explains. Forecasters still don’t know exactly what sends the AO into one mode or the other, just as the birth of an El Niño is easier to spot than to predict.”
See also the post at Dot Earth by Andy Revkin titled Cold Arctic Pressure Pattern Nearly Off Chart
The obvious response to these claims is that if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings? The short answer is that they cannot.
The article concludes with the text
“If this winter tells us anything, it’s that we’ll have to remain on guard for familiar weather risks as well as the evolving ones brought by climate change.”
This admission implicitly recognizes the focus on the reduction of vulnerability that we wrote about in our paper
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.
The media, policymakers and others should recognize this evidence of our incomplete understanding of the climate system. We will continue to have surprises such as we have seen this winter.
“The media, policymakers and others should recognize this evidence of our incomplete understanding of the climate system. We will continue to have surprises such as we have seen this winter.”
Piers Corbyn is not in the least surprised…
The concept of global climate and globally averaged temperatures appears to have no practical use whatsoever in this day and age.
But maybe I’m just ignorant. Is there anything about climate change theory that’s resulted in practical useful results yet?
Even if global average temperatures continue to rise in the coming century, what will the weather in the UK be like? Will it be wetter and milder, or will there be more extreme variations? If you’re designing buildings, that’s a huge difference. How much insulation? How steep should the roof be? What wind gusts do you expect? Will energy be available continuously or intermittently? Do you have to worry about cooling the thing? Or can it be kept warm passively?
Really, please let them start talking about “climate chaos”. That’ll be the final nail in this as far as the majority of the public are concerned. We have the common sense to know that once it’s “chaos”, that means nobody knows.
This is another interesting article:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/07/the-truth-is-out-there-somewhere/print/
“It is grotesque to lump nuanced skeptics like Freeman Dyson, perhaps the most celebrated physicist alive, in with creationists and 9/11 “truthers.””
Simply breaking the TLT anomaly data down into subsets (tropics and mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere) can reveal the underlying causes of much of the rise in TLT anomalies:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
And this excerpt from the same Guardian article:
In any given year, there could be a season as shocking as Britain’s epic winter of 1962-63 – when snowdrifts were measured in metres, and temperatures stayed below freezing for most of January – or the summer of 2003, when tens of thousands died in some of the worst heat ever recorded in Europe.
Obviously nobody died in 62-63 and for some reason the Heatwave of 76 has disappeared from history.
As it happens I remember 63 as the coldest and 76 as the hottest. In 63 I walked across the frozen Avon river at Christchurch (UK), and the ice was thick. In 76 we had almost daily forest fires in the New Forest that in some case raged for days.
If we measure heat waves by deaths while we have an increasing elderly population it can look like the heat waves are getting worse.
Lot of snow in the past – sign of virgin state of climate, undamaged by human influence.
Lot of snow today – sign of climate change, warming atmosphere holding more humidity. Even the atmosphere is not getting warmer, it does not diprove global warming a tall.
These guys are schizophrenics.
Do you know Stephen that I was thinking the same thing about 1976 when the Met Office announced that 2009 is going to be the hottest year on record. It doesn’t seem credible, I believe the Met Office is so entrenched in the business of proving AGW that it has lost all sense of integrity. Hadley should be closed down.
why are mercator style projections used in these maps – would an equal area projection not be better?
Surely the proper conclusion to be drawn is that natural variability is way bigger than previously accepted by AGW proponents.
If the current regional cold is mere weather and it follows a 10 year pause in warming (and possibly the start of a new long term cooling trend) then the previous 30 year warming spell with it’s regional heat waves is just as likely to have been mere weather.
Even if one were to accept a warming effect from more CO2 the apparent size of natural variability reduces the significance of any CO2 effect such that at worst we have hundreds of years to solve our energy problems before any of the scare stories come to pass.
And there remains the possibility that with negative climate feedbacks the CO2 effect could be zero.
“This data shows why the focus needs to be on the regional scale and that a global average is not of much use in describing weather that all of us experience.”
Absolutely right. Global temperatures on the ground level do not make much sense. I have put number of posts in past suggesting exactly that: focus needs to be on the regional scale.
CET has one of the longest and probably most scrutinised local records. Even then there are frequently opposite long term trends between winter and summer trends, which can last up to 50 years, e.g. 1900 – 1950 summer and winter temps were moving in opposite directions, 1950 – 2000 there’s very close tracking between two. Climate not ‘the weather’!
More details on CET summer/winter trends on :
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETt.htm
charts for N Atlantic islands and S Greenland:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
look for appropriate link.
The one surprise that will shock every AGW believer will be when the global temperatures fail to rise as predicted by even the mildest IPCC computer models. What then? Will they continue to sing the same tune and claim the models are “on target” when clearly they are not even now? If they do they will only make themselves look even more stupid than they already do. I can’t wait for that to happen as it will most certainly will. In fact we should help them. We should re-publish the IPCC predictions far and wide to make it clear to everyone how wrong they are.
I got a hot flash for Revkin: That gummed up hemisphere flow started in the Spring of ’08. It has grown, and is now 1.75 yrs long. And, there is reported evidence of it doing the same thing in the late 1880’s onwards into the 1890’s.
Yes, it does disprove the global warming hypothesis on 2 accounts:
#1 – AGW has not proven it’s case that it is forcing or overwhelming these cycles
#2 – AGW did not predict that this cycle would overwhelm the modeled warming, which it surely has, and on a massive scale.
It’s time to get noses out of the failed models and start focusing on where this leads to. Refer to the dusty volumes of the past.
You’re exactly right Peter. Let their own words hang them.
al (03:51:41) :
why are mercator style projections used in these maps – would an equal area projection not be better?
An excellent point: We need to see this projected on to a North Polar sphere and South Polar sphere. I’m willing to bet the picture would show the true nature of just how cold it is this winter, and what the overall year has been like.
The chosen projection is a serious distortion.
what are all of these global warming enthusiasts going to do when the earth keeps dropping in temps?
I asked on this site for a reason why effectively the whole of the northern hemisphere should suddenly be experiencing exceptional cold. I wondered if there was any possible connection with the current quiet sun, but a lady named kate answered as follows.
See http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/patterns/arctic_oscillation.html
Now the obvious question is ‘what causes THAT?’ If a connection can be made to some forcing or forcings, surely that is a far better method of predicting
weather (and maybe climate) than what our ignoble climatologists are using at the moment.
Suppose further, that it is actually a chaotic bi-stable oscillation with no discernable cause. If I were a Government Science advisor, I would be puring money into research to answer exactly that question, not into a totally unfounded and oppressive tax. It has surely FAR more relevant to the next few decades to understand this oscillation and it’s causes.
Re Peter: “We should re-publish the IPCC predictions far and wide”
Is this discussion good enough: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
Hey your paper is in the American Geophysical Union, does this mean you are peer reviewed? Make a nice addition to the global warming article in wikipedia 🙂
@Cim
Do I understand that the 95% range on that graph means that, for all their modelling, there’s still a 1 in 20 chance the climate in 2010 could be 0.2C cooler or 0.8C warmer? Sorry for such a basic question but IANAS.
Cim:
“Is this discussion good enough”
No. Anyone can do “updates”. Let’s look at the original IPCC predictions:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
Got plenty more if you’re interested.
The comments after the guardian article depress me more than the weather. Full of basically well-educated, reasonably bright people who are behaving like braying sheep. Absolutely nothing will overturn their dogma of doom. You’d think that once they see just how much climate can change naturally that they’d get a bit more skeptical of anyones ability to separate out a human contribution.
They forget that the “experts” had already stated that cold winters were a thing of the past. They ignore that the “experts” link every single hot weather event to global warming but say every cold weather event is natural. And they ignore that most “expert” predictions turn out utterly and abjectly wrong. They even reject the stone cold evidence that the IPCC are making things up as they go along and adjusting the data to fit the story – condemned even by their own words. It’s not even as if we haven’t had ample previous examples of such widespread hubris. In fact it is all too common. The public at large get it but the chattering classes just continue to believe exactly what they want to believe and reject all conflicting facts.
For those trendies clamoring to repeat that weather isn’t climate – please try to hold onto that thought until the next drought, flood or heatwave and don’t listen to any “scientist” that says this event proves that global warming makes this that or the next natural weather event more likely. You need to look at long term trends for that and those who have done so have noticed that there is absolutely nothing unusual happening yet. Any speculation that it will happen is therefore not grounded in the facts.
“Peter of Syndey (04:12:04) :
The one surprise that will shock every AGW believer will be when the global temperatures fail to rise as predicted by even the mildest IPCC computer models. What then? Will they continue to sing the same tune and claim the models are “on target” when clearly they are not even now? If they do they will only make themselves look even more stupid than they already do. I can’t wait for that to happen as it will most certainly will. In fact we should help them. We should re-publish the IPCC predictions far and wide to make it clear to everyone how wrong they are.”
The decline will be hidden. Not sure how they will stop millions of people rioting…interesting times ahead.
A more active sun allows faster energy loss from upper atmosphere to space which cools the stratosphere and increases the flow of energy from troposphere to stratosphere and from stratosphere to space thus giving a positive AO with lower pressure over the poles and a faster energy flow from equator to poles. That involves a poleward shift of the air circulation systems and less north/south variation in surface air flows
A less active sun allows slower energy loss from upper atmosphere to space that warms the stratosphere and decreases the flow of energy from stratosphere to space thus giving us a negative AO with higher pressure over the poles and a slower energy flow from equator to pole. That involves an equatorward shift in the air circulation systems and more north/south variation in surface air flows (winter 2009 / 2010)
Note however that over time during a negative AO the larger high pressure systems will themselves migrate equatorward to some degree and allow a low pressure system to develop at the poles themselves.
In contrast over time during a positive AO the smaller high pressure systems at the poles will contract to the extent that they increase the size of the dry regions between the mid latitude depression tracks and the equatorial air masses (much of the period 1975 to 2000).
Quote Cim (04:42:34) :
Re Peter: “We should re-publish the IPCC predictions far and wide”
Is this discussion good enough: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
Smokey (05:01:00) :
Cim:
“Is this discussion good enough”
No. Anyone can do “updates”. Let’s look at the original IPCC predictions:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
Got plenty more if you’re interested. Unquote
As an interested layman I am very interested in the question of the accuracy of the IPCC 2001 computer model predictions of temperature response to CO2 emissions. I seem to get two entirely different interpretations here. I wonder if WUWT could devote an entire article to interpreting the RealClimate version versus the original 2001 predictions (not updated) compared to global temperatures up to the end of 2009. I think this is a very important topic.
From the blog entry:
“This data shows why the focus needs to be on the regional scale and that a global average is not of much use in describing weather that all of us experience.”
Stephen Wilde (03:59:52) :
“Surely the proper conclusion to be drawn is that natural variability is way bigger than previously accepted by AGW proponents.”
From the perspective of policy, these two observations have a very important implication. They both add to the argument that trying to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere is likely to be a very ineffective, if extremely costly, way of reducing any adverse effects of such emissions on climate. There likely will still be lots of costly weather events in many regions in many years regardless of what we do with CO2. That raises the benefits of devising methods of reducing the costs of extreme weather, no matter what the source.
Add to this the observation that, due to the aerial fertilizer effect, extra CO2 in the atmosphere is likely to also bring substantial benefits for agriculture not to mention natural ecosystems. According to the IPCC models, even some of the effects of CO2 on weather in some regions are likely to be beneficial.
The case for investing in actions that reduce the costs of extreme weather while reaping the benefits of extra CO2 becomes overwhelming.
In summary, having the IPCC crowd admit that “natural weather events” are very significant and can overwhelm the effects of CO2 on weather actually strongly weakens their policy claim that the best response to a non-negligible effect of CO2 on weather is to limit CO2 emissions.
OT, The rss data for Dec is out now too. They dropped from 0.328 for November to 0.243 for December.
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_2.txt
John M Reynolds
I don’t know if this has already been posted. If you have not seen it this is John Hirst the head of the UK Met Office being given hell by Andrew Neil on the BBC. Great fun. The guy is hopeless, has no credibility and is to say the least not at all convincing when claiming that the Met Office predicted the lack of warming since 1998.
John Peter (05:23:23):
clickA
clickB
clickC
clickD
clickE
Got plenty more if you’re still interested.
Smokey (05:49:08) :
Your plots are rather old. Here’s the up-to-date comparison:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
The IPCC record of prediction is considerably more accurate than yours.
“In any given year, …”
It’s not that random.
Even if they wish to continue believing in AGW, at a minimum-MINIMUM-the Warmists have to admit that things have not gone nearly the way they had predicted even a few years ago.
Even Jones and his cronies have admitted this. They just didn’t intent to do it publicly.
“The obvious response to these claims is that if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate”
Solar eclipses at low latitudes usually produce El-Nino so we will ‘very likely’ see La-Nina conditions in 2011 and 2012.
http://virakkraft.com/enso-solar-eclipse.png
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/5MCSE/5MCSE-Maps-10.pdf (20 MB)
@Stefan
>”But maybe I’m just ignorant. Is there anything about climate change theory that’s resulted in practical useful results yet?”
Yes, the Green goal of making energy so expensive that only the rich can afford it is almost within our grasp.
I love that Cim’s post got approved while 3 others were waiting. World-class moderation. The graphs are much appreciated Smokey.
[sorry, Ferg, the wordpress moderation tools gives me a list starting with newest first… -mikelorrey]
Bob Tisdale (03:14:03) :
Simply breaking the TLT anomaly data down into subsets (tropics and mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere) can reveal the underlying causes of much of the rise in TLT anomalies:…
Great analysis Bob.
Peter of Syndey (04:12:04) :
The one surprise that will shock every AGW believer will be when the global temperatures fail to rise as predicted by even the mildest IPCC computer models. What then? …”
Patrick Davis (05:06:04) :
The decline will be hidden. Not sure how they will stop millions of people rioting…interesting times ahead.”
I just realized as I commented on another article here at WUWT, that they are not worried about hiding the future decline in world temperatures because another very real crisis is being orchestrated. This one is going to get everyone’s attention. It is rising food costs and famine. Worldwide “harmonized” regulations for farming (HACCP) will push independent farmers off their land causing increasing food riots, starvation and will spread to food shortages in first world countries. Of course it means mega profits for the food cartels too. Who the heck is going to care about “Global Warming” and the weather when they can not feed their families or get a job?
To date there have been six bills introduced to the US Congress for implementing this idiocy. The USA 20 years ago was responsible for over 50% of the global grain trade. Since 1990 the U.S. share has fluctuated between 25 and 30 percent. As a farmer I would grow crops for bio-fuel only to evade all those regulations and I am sure I am not alone.
For more info see the last comment at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/08/high-fire-danger-in-south-australia-as-temperatures-soar/
The biggest thing that I note when I see a map with the warm at the poles is the projection. There was a long post about this a year or two ago either here or at CA. Flat projections make the poles look huge, even though they are quite small.
Tom P (05:57:44) :
Smokey (05:49:08) :
Your plots are rather old. Here’s the up-to-date comparison:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
The IPCC record of prediction is considerably more accurate than yours.
REPLY:
Of course the UPDATED IPCC “predictions” are going to be better. If I line fit to the current data and then fudge the new data I can do great “predictions” too.
http://i31.tinypic.com/2149sg0.gif
Arctic warming in a little bit of perspective
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_hadsst2_0-360E_66-90N_na.png
Check as it is going down again. Remember, that Arctic should show most warming because of CO2 because low humidity there. There is barely any rise compared to 40ties, temperature following AMO.
Tom P (05:57:44) :
Smokey (05:49:08) :
Your plots are rather old. Here’s the up-to-date comparison:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
The IPCC record of prediction is considerably more accurate than yours.
Eurasia is our friend. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
OT In the Times [UK] today there is a classic warming rant..even revisiting the reversal of the gulfstream …this ‘comment’ is ludicrous..the MSM has a long way to go unfortunately!
And this from today’s Columbus Dispatch (by AP reporter Malcom Ritter)…When questioned about the unusually cold weather the northern hemisphere is experiencing lately, scientist (and AGW supporter) Gerald Meehl provided the old It’s-not-climate-it’s-weather response:
“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”
Is Mr. Meehl not aware of the number of record cold temperatures that have popped up recently? I’d hazard a guess and say we’ve been experiencing many MORE record cold temperatures than fewer (and I don’t have an advanced degree in meteorology).
I think it will be awhile before any real comparison of IPCC projections is meaningful. Look at June and July 2009. In a single month we went from way below to very near the projections. When month to month variation is this large I don’t see any practical sense in making comparisons. It can always be cherry picked to show whatever one wants.
“This has gummed up the hemisphere’s usual west-to-east flow with huge “blocking highs” that route frigid air southward.”
The large high pressure regions should also allow the surface of the Artic to view deep space and with no Solar input, this will cause accelerated cooling.
TerrySkinner:
Thank you for the BBC video post! I believe Andrew Neil is my new favorite television interviewer!
Made the same mistake 3 years ago.
This is NOT a Mercator projection. This is a “Latitude/Longitude”
plot. Note the size of Greenland compared to Africa. It is about 1/5 the size of Africa, which is abbout right.
Made the same mistake when I did the Out Going Long Wave analysis, having to convert colored pixels to numerical values, 3 years ago. (Before NEO put out the convinient Java analyzers.)
Note that the cooling occurs over the large northern hemisphere landmasses. This would be the expected pattern as the oceans take much longer to change temperature.
Note the size of Greenland compared to Africa. It is about 1/5 the size of Africa, which is abbout right.
Greenland = 2.2 million sq km
Africa – 30.2 million sq km = 14 x Greenland
Apparently it’s presently colder in America than both poles, according to this http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread533082/pg1
“Spectacular regional swings in temperature and precipitation, sometimes lasting for months, often emerge from the natural jostlings of atmosphere and ocean. By themselves, none of these prove or disprove a human role in climate change.”
What is the likelihood that they would make this statement if we had an extremely hot summer?
geronimo (03:47:06) :
Do you know Stephen that I was thinking the same thing about 1976 when the Met Office announced that 2009 is going to be the hottest year on record. It doesn’t seem credible, I believe the Met Office is so entrenched in the business of proving AGW that it has lost all sense of integrity. Hadley should be closed down.
According to the BBC, the Met Office’s predictions have been correct — the public has merely misinterpreted them.
“…Susan Watts, BBC Science Editor, on Newsnight, as she attempted to explain why the abysmal failure of climate “scientists” to predict current weather conditions does not in any way reduce their credibility in predicting global warming: ‘In fact that seasonal forecast predicting a mild winter wasn’t actually wrong, but it left people with the wrong impression.’ ”
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4839
Gentleman: “What are you doing with that herring?”
Met Office: “Just holding it. I am *not* going to whap you in the face with it.”
*whap*
Gentleman: “Ow! You snippety-snip-snipping-snip, why the snip did you do that?”
Met Office: “I *told* you I was going to whap you in the face with it — you misunderstood!”
Smokey (05:01:00) :
Cim:
“Is this discussion good enough”
No. Anyone can do “updates”. Let’s look at the original IPCC predictions:
Tom P (05:57:44) :
Your plots are rather old. Here’s the up-to-date comparison:
Tom P what part of “Anyone can do “updates” didn’t you understand?
BBC news channel just interviewed a member of the MET Office. Being very defensive he stated that their seasonal forecasting is not to be taken too seriously, and that it is the malicious media that keep finding them on their web site and making a big deal about them.
WELL STOP MAKING THEM THEN!
Dan Lee (06:12:29)
“Yes, the Green goal of making energy so expensive that only the rich can afford it is almost within our grasp.”
I agree with that statement but, I have another take on it that has probably beeen posted by someone else but , I have yet to see it. My thought is that Al Gore and his friends aren’t making any money off of oil so they come up with a scenerio where they can tax the emmisions. Creating panic and coming up with rediculous targets for emmisions that no one will be able to adhere to and taxing those emmisions will reap billions in profits for those involved. It has been widely reported already how much Gore has made from this already. THEY DON’T WANT US TO STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS!
By the way, has anyone seen the Samsung commercial with some pencil necked geek talking about how the ice is melting and we must take action or else? I’ve seen it several times on my Samsung tv! Had I known that they helduch a position I would have bought a different brand. No more Samsung for me.
Media bias aside, as I look at the chart of temperatures, the question comes to mind “Why was 1998 so darn warm?”. Yes we had a strong El Nino but we had similarly strong El Nino’s before will much less effect. I have seen the suggestion that the Earth was hit with a gamma ray burst in late ’97 and that this is the true driver of the exceptional warmth in ’98. Anyone know any more about this theory?
I have been following Svensmark’s research. This cold is no surprise to me at all. It is roughly three years since the sun went quiet and cosmic rays are reaching all time highs for the satellite era. A cooling is exactly what Svensmark’s research predicts…
SandyInDerby (08:34:01) :
None of Smokey’s plots included the last eighteen months of temperature data – they were hardly “updates”.
I notice Revkin uncritically repeats the “balance” fallacy: “When it’s freezing where you sit, it’s hard to keep in mind that it may be extraordinarily warm elsewhere, as Joe Romm pointed out today.”
It is absolutely untrue that cold weather is created by or creates warm weather elsewhere. In fact people who read this blog know that the global average temperature measured by satellite bounces up and down all the time. The current cold weather here is global cooling for as long as it lasts. If the predicted El Nino heats up, then we will have global warming for a while. Since El Nino can last for many months, we can have global warming for months unbalanced by any global cooling. Some people call that “climate change” (euphemism for global warming) but it’s just weather and corresponding climate change.
Tom P (09:08:20) :
SandyInDerby (08:34:01) :
None of Smokey’s plots included the last eighteen months of temperature data – they were hardly “updates”
That’s the point Tom. Smokey tells us how it was.
They predicted. They got it wrong.
Afterwards they changed their prediction. No prizes.
Does this esteemed international audience know about the musical play “The Music Man”? In this play, a con artist comes to town, creates a problem that doesn’t exist, sells the solution to the non-existent problem, Fails miserably, and still walks away with the girl because he’s so darned irresistible and he plays to people’s egos. This is what we’re up against.
Shifting the discussion to regional vs. global is irrelevant to the dynamic of the discussion. This is yet another con like the dot.com bubble, the stock swap bubble, the real estate bubble, etc.
“The obvious response to these claims is that if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings? The short answer is that they cannot.
Here is a thought experiment –
You have a bucket half full of water. It is sitting under a faucet that drips. There is a hole in the bucket. In the water in the bucket are small bits of solid material – lots of them of different sizes, contours and smoothness. You have an agitator that keeps the water in the bucket moving around slowly.
To start out you have the rate of water dripping into the bucket equaling the net rate leaving through the hole. Because there are bits of material floating around, the hole can be partially blocked from time to time to varying degrees, so the water level will rise at unpredictable intervals (short term) and fall (when completely unblocked) at unpredictable intervals. But because this bucket has existed for as long as anyone can remember (and prior to our own observations), and we can see traces of different water levels on the side, there is generally agreed consensus that the net inflow and the net outflow are the same.
There are two ways to alter the balance – one is to increase/decrease the flow out of the faucet. The other is to introduce/remove the bits of matter suspended in the water.
If you change either variable, you will not improve your ability to predict when water rises will occur or falls. But you can be reasonably confident (in the long run) that (in the case of adding matter and/or increasing the drip rate) that you will get a continuous rise in the water level.
Will it over flow? We don’t know that because the change in water pressure will become a variable and may or may not affect the efficacy of matter obstructing the hole (assumed to be at the bottom of the bucket).
Point is that AGW can defend claims of general long term net effects (given properly stated assumptions) without having to be predictive in the short term.
That is one thing that makes debating AGW claims very difficult. It also undermines a great deal of the extreme alarmist claims (claims that I, as a luke warmer, find indefensible and counterproductive).
Midwest Mark (07:34:31) :
And this from today’s Columbus Dispatch (by AP reporter Malcom Ritter)…When questioned about the unusually cold weather the northern hemisphere is experiencing lately, scientist (and AGW supporter) Gerald Meehl provided the old It’s-not-climate-it’s-weather response:
“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”
If the UK and northern Europe were suffering from a heat wave in the middle of winter, Meehl would be singing a different tune. Meehl is an idiot.
Tom P (09:08:20) :
SandyInDerby (08:34:01) :
None of Smokey’s plots included the last eighteen months of temperature data – they were hardly “updates”.
That’s the point now you understand.
Richard deSousa (09:52:01) :
If AGW is happening as represented, then you would see a diminishing frequency of record lows, as he has stated. But you must also have an increasing frequency of record highs (something he doesn’t state but should – if he is a scientist then there is no need to be defensive and paint only half of the picture).
Anyway, the data have yet to bear that out the “more highs, fewer lows” scenario, IMO, but maybe someone has data to prove me wrong.
“What’s different now is that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters. The latter aren’t impossible; they’re just harder to get, like scoring a straight flush on one trip to Vegas and a royal flush the next.”
As always long on metaphors with no substance to substantiate the claims being made.
How the heck could they possibly know “that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters”? That’s quite the potent claim especially in light of a record-cold winter! How do they know the “odds” have “shifted”? That’s incredible! What magical science gives them that ability? Please do tell.
Again it looks like all too much soothsaying from climate model entrails. http://pathstoknowledge.net/?s=soothsaying
pwl
Phil’s Dad (09:33:02) :
“That’s the point Tom. Smokey tells us how it was.
They predicted. They got it wrong.
Afterwards they changed their prediction. No prizes.”
None of the predictions were made in the last 18 months. Current temperatures are close to IPCC predictions made 3, 9 and 15 years ago.
One thing that I’m not understanding (actually there’s a lot that I don’t understand) is how the rate of energy transfer from the CO2 molecule is affected by cold weather? I have assumed that that CO2 was storing energy over long periods – say on the order of weeks or months. This stored energy was then released slowly, on average, when the surrounding environment has a lower average energy causing an average and gradual increase in temps. Thinking about this a bit more this morning, now I wonder if this energy transfer is a more instantaneous phenomenon where the periodicity of energy gain and loss of the CO2 molecule is on the order of seconds. Anyone have insight on this question?
Here is the BBC playing the “weather isn’t climate” game again:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8447262.stm
Well, for members of the general public, some of their other reports will chime better with their experience:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8449755.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2010/frozen_britain/default.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8449133.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8447989.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8443684.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8447873.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8446942.stm
(compares 1963 with 2010)
Yes, I too remember the UK winter(s) of 62 & 63 and the “long hot summer” of 1976.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8448399.stm
pwl (10:25:05) :
“That’s quite the potent claim especially in light of a record-cold winter!”
Hardly record-cold globally:
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/9207/7jan10uahlt.png
Stefan (03:11:09) :
“The concept of global climate and globally averaged temperatures appears to have no practical use whatsoever in this day and age.
But maybe I’m just ignorant. Is there anything about climate change theory that’s resulted in practical useful results yet?
Even if global average temperatures continue to rise in the coming century, what will the weather in the UK be like? Will it be wetter and milder, or will there be more extreme variations? If you’re designing buildings, that’s a huge difference. How much insulation? How steep should the roof be? What wind gusts do you expect? Will energy be available continuously or intermittently? Do you have to worry about cooling the thing? Or can it be kept warm passively?
Really, please let them start talking about “climate chaos”. That’ll be the final nail in this as far as the majority of the public are concerned. We have the common sense to know that once it’s “chaos”, that means nobody knows.”
I agree with you, the concept of climate is a strange abstract construct. Climate/weather can only be experienced by an observer at a specific location on Earth, at the ever moving instant of time which we call now.
We can look at the history of events which when averaged, make Global Average Climate, but because of deterministic chaos, our climate system cannot be forecast with any degree of certainty beyond a few days. Linear trens provide no information and the whole debate tends to degenerate to a ‘cherry picking’ debacle, where both sides can prove they are ‘right’ by picking the right time periods for comparison.
Until a full understanding of the different processes which comprise our climate system is achieved, along with the knowledge of how the effect each other, little progress will be made. We also need to improve the data granularity for all climate metrics in all four dimensions, rather than sticking a finger in the air to try and extrapolate the data as happens currently. This is especially important for the polar regions and the equator, at it is from here that climate is driven – along with, of course. the sun.
Tom P (10:39:52),
There is something fishy about throwing out 3, 9 and 15 years without giving the citation.
Let’s look at the accuracy of the IPCC, and similar global warming predictions that turned out to be flat wrong:
clickA
clickB
clickC
clickD
Notice a pattern?
First, all of the predictions assume a steadily warming planet. Not one of them allows for the possibility of flat or cooling temperatures. They are all saying there is no possibility of that happening.
The IPCC’s predictions are based on computer climate models — not one of which was able to predict the flat to declining temperatures over most of the past decade. All the models failed. Every one of them.
The best evidence that a new hypothesis is correct is its ability to accurately predict future events. Einstein’s hypothesis, for example, accurately predicted the orbit of Mercury; something previous hypotheses were unable to do.
The IPCC’s predictions have failed miserably. That means their models are wrong. But since the IPCC is composed of 100% political appointees, whose highly paid jobs depend on their predicting catastrophic global warming, then that is the prediction they will make. As we see from all the evidence, the IPCC is not permitted to predict that global temperatures will fall. And it is a travesty.
Stephen Wilde: ‘In contrast over time during a positive AO the smaller high pressure systems at the poles will contract to the extent that they increase the size of the dry regions between the mid latitude depression tracks and the equatorial air masses (much of the period 1975 to 2000).’
Is this the cause of the current ‘greening’ of the Sahara do you think, Stephen.
Also, can you explain why an inactive sun allows slower heat loss from the upper atmosphere? Sorry, I’m sure you’ve done so ad nauseam, but I missed it.
And somehow it’s more interesting now my normally mild and green Normandy countryside is an Arctic tundra-like wasteland, sub-zero for a week and snowing hard again as I write.
Just a little stat remainder. The probability of being in the lower half of a prediction for 10 consecutive years is: 0.5 power 10 = 0.001.
There is only a 0.1% chance of being in the lower half for 10 consecutive years!!!!
Wake up.
MET Office Games with Temperature
6 January 2010 In most winters, and certainly those in the last 20 years or so, our winds normally come from the south-west. This means air travels over the relatively warm Atlantic and we get mild conditions in the UK. However, over the past three weeks the Atlantic air has been ‘blocked’ and cold air has been flowing down from the Arctic or the cold winter landmass of Europe.
Why the cold weather?
The low temperatures in the UK have also been accompanied by snow. This is because areas of low pressure have been running in from the north-east, tracking across the North Sea and picking up moisture along the way, which falls as snow. However, it is not cold everywhere in the world. North-east America, Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and south-west Asia have all seen temperatures above normal – in many places by more than 5 °C, and in parts of northern Canada, by more than 10 °C.
Fig 1. The map shows that while it has been cold in Northern Europe, other parts of the world have seen above average temperatures.
Is it colder than average?
What does this say about climate change?
Source:MET Office UK
Comment
MET Office UK pretends the Cold is just a UK anomaly. The MET Office temperature map is entirely disingenuous when the US temperature data and a recent new record map are viewed. The MET Office shows North East US temperatures above normal while the the US National Weather Service is reporting record new minimum daily low temperatures and record new minimum daily high temperatures! Many new minimum lows (coldest nights) and many new minimum highs (coldest days) in the US have been set in the last few weeks.
The MET Office is very clever in their use of a non-linear temperature scale to exaggerate their invented temperature anomalies.
Record Events for Sat Jan 2, 2010 through Fri Jan 8, 2010
Total Records:
2450
Rainfall:
304
Snowfall:
761
High Temperatures:
27
Low Temperatures:
528
Lowest Max Temperatures:
751
Highest Min Temperatures:
79
Why the cold weather? Why the MET Office Invention?
Tom P (10:39:52) :
Phil’s Dad (09:33:02) :
“That’s the point Tom. Smokey tells us how it was.
They predicted. They got it wrong.
Afterwards they changed their prediction. No prizes.”
None of the predictions were made in the last 18 months. Current temperatures are close to IPCC predictions made 3, 9 and 15 years ago.
Tom P are you being deliberably obtuse?
What Smokey is saying is that the original predictions were way off the mark. So they cannot predict 3, 9 and 15 years into the future (the Met Office can’t predict 6 months into the future as they have been at pains to point out during the recent cold spell).
“!Doug S (10:43:27) :
One thing that I’m not understanding (actually there’s a lot that I don’t understand) is how the rate of energy transfer from the CO2 molecule is affected by cold weather? I have assumed that that CO2 was storing energy over long periods – say on the order of weeks or months.”
Try this http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/16/nasa-says-airs-satellite-data-shows-positive-water-vapor-feedback/
Max CO2 distribution on the Northern hemisphere is where we’re having the current cold weather.
Stephen Wilde,
Your discussion of sun activity as a cause of AO is interesting. Can you offer a mechansim as to why an inactive sun allows a slower energy loss from the upper atmosphere?
Smokey (11:10:42) :
“There is something fishy about throwing out 3, 9 and 15 years without giving the citation.”
Nothing fishy at all. That’s when the IPCC predictions were made: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf
“The IPCC’s predictions have failed miserably.”
That’s a little difficult to square with the actual data:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
Mann O Mann 09:50:40
Thought experiments are a nice way of simplifying systems to gain insight, but need treating with caution. If your bucket with a hole in it is set up with the mean water level slightly below the top of the bucket, the system works as you describe until a random blockage of the hole allows some of the water to spill over the edge and carry some of the blocking material with it. This is a crude analogy for increased albedo due to cloud formation reducing the effect of steadily increasing material input and effectively limiting its impact on water height. I strongly suspect that the earth has an in-built limiting mechanism for temperature, dominated by the remarkable properties of H2O in all its physical states and salinities. Of course my mod. of your analogy is also just another analogy and equally capable of being over-simple.:-)
“Tom P (10:50:00) :
Hardly record-cold globally:”
Tom, I find that impossible for me to agree with, no matter what they say.
Since global temps are an average, the amount of heat it would take to “average”
this amount of cold out, would have been disastrous.
And would be all over the news about people literally baking to death.
al (03:51:41) :
why are mercator style projections used in these maps – would an equal area projection not be better?
I like the Dymaxion Projection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
Vincent (11:46:22)
An extract from an article of mine should answer your query. In that article I considered this SABER report:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/AGU-SABER.html
“Sunspots unleash solar flares that create a ripple effect well beyond Earth.
But when that energy flow does reach Earth the atmosphere reciprocates by
ejecting radiation as a cooling effect to maintain the planet’s energy balance.
That cooling response creates the expansion and contraction of the upper
atmosphere.”
The article refers to ripples. That
reminds me of ripples caused by wind across an ocean surface. The
stronger the wind the larger the ripples and they can become large
waves. The presence of waves increases the ocean surface area so
that loss of energy to the air via evaporation and radiation increases. If
a more disturbed flow of energy from the sun causes ripples or even
waves in the boundaries between the layers of the upper atmosphere
then it will provoke a larger surface area at each boundary and
increase the rate of radiation to space.
I have assumed that that CO2 was storing energy over long periods – say on the order of weeks or months.”
CO2 storage is at best minutes and may in fact be as little as milliseconds.
Energy storage on our planet is water and earth. The theory being that CO2 acts like the silvering in a thermos bottle retarding the radiative flow of heat.
The theory understates convection. Or what I like to call:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/08/big-heat-pipe-in-sky.html
Steve Fox (11:14:34)
Yes it would explain more rainfall in the north of the Sahara. Instead of the Mediterranean climate moving north as suggested by AGW the mid latitude jets are now targeting the Mediterranean and their effects flowing over into North Africa.
The same latitudinal shift has occurred in the southern hemisphere as witness the drought problems for some Peruvian farmers. The rain bearing systems have moved away to the north of them.
With regard to the mechanism see my reply to Vincent and if you can stomach the full detail please see this article here:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/The%20Missing%20Climate%20Link.pdf
Marc77 wrote: “MET Office UK pretends the Cold is just a UK anomaly…”
They must think we don’t have an internet or news programmes. There is also the record snow in Korea and China. People have died of the cold in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. (These are above average on the Met office map!).
Also cold in Colombia:
http://www.colombianews.tv/news/1810-saturday-early-morning-newscast
And in Spain:
http://www.thinkspain.com/news-spain/17513/temperatures-fall-to-2c-on-the-coast
And in Turkey:
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-197443-101-cold-weather-strong-winds-batter-turkey.html
son of mulder, M. Simon, thanks for the responses – very helpful. Anxious to read your heat pipe analysis M.
Mann O Mann (09:50:40) : Bucket Thought Experiment
Ronaldo (11:58:45) :
How about adding a natural unknown factor?
Rust, enlarging the hole = GCR’s?
What we seem to be seeing is a large redistribution of tropospheric heat energy with mid latitude regions cooling but equatorial regions remaining warm.
In the process of that redistribution the air circulation patterns have shifted substantially equatorward but that in itself is merely an extension of the changes that should have been apparent to all observers of weather and climate since 2000.
Applying my general climate description I would say that the following is the likely explanation:
i) Generally a latitudinal shift in the air circulation patterns is ocean driven and since about 2000 the PDO has been trending to the negative phase so that gives a basic background cooling effect.
ii) In contrast the Arctic Oscillation that controls the size and position of the polar high pressure systems is driven by a combination of the speed of the hydrological cycle as dictated by the rate of ocean energy release and the speed at which the stratosphere can radiate energy to space which is driven by variations in the turbulence of the flow of energy from the sun. The SABER satellite results appear to show that the rate of loss of energy to space is greater when the sun is active and less when the sun is less active.
iii) At present the quiet sun is reducing the rate of energy loss to space and the stratosphere is warming. At the same time the 2009 El Nino has been pumping energy faster to the stratosphere. The combined effects have both been supplementing one another to increase the flows of energy up into and downward out of the stratosphere to enhance the size of the polar high pressure cells and push them equatorward against the counter pressure from the El Nino.
iv) The result is cooling mid latitudes but warming equatorial and more polar latitudes.
If this setup continues then the cooler mid latitudes will progressively cut off the flow of warmer air to the poles and cooling will become more general.
If you have a look here you will notice that the ice from Greenland has nearly reached Iceland.
If this pattern keeps up, one might, in theory, be able to walk from Iceland to Greenland in a couple of weeks.
It’s obvious our “climate experts” need to get over GHGs. The keys to forecasting this winter were out there as early as last summer. I heard a few private forecasters say last August that the European forecast models for Dec through Feb resembled the analogs from 1975-1978. While, they didn’t publish thier actual seasonal forecast, it was apparent that those people who actually get paid for accuracy were considering a snowy, cold NH winter. What compelled the European models to predict a situation where the AO plunged in December is anyone’s guess.
I for one would like to see what those models have for this summer. If the analogs remain close to 1975-1978, than we could see a rather scorching summer (If my memory serves me correctly, the UK had a record 1976 drought, and the summer of 1977 saw many heatwave induced brown outs).
It appears that ENSO passed its zenith in December. With ENSO go neutral, the positive AMO on the wane, and a persistent negative AO/NAO, 2010 should be quite interesting weather wise.
Thanks for posting, but it would be more useful if you also said what was on the map and the vertical axis of the diagram. It’s something about deviation of something from some kind of average temperature, but what? (I don’t actually mean to be snarky, but how else do I note that the diagrams need labelling?)
An elegant way of proposing that no matter under how much snow or ice we are, the Al Baby´s Gospel won´t be defeated!.
wedding photographers in Orlando, Florida (04:35:21) : “what are all of these global warming enthusiasts going to do when the earth keeps dropping in temps?”
a) shout louder
b) spew more spittle when they rant
c) tell more and bigger lies
d) ask for more government money
e) blame everything on Big Oil
f) resort to violence
There is a basic flaw in the Gurdian article referenced and it is in this one statement, namely,
“What’s different now is that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters. ”
If the source of their data for this statement is only the last 20-30 years, when the natural planetary cycles were in the warm mode , then the statement may have some merit. However if one goes back 30 years further back and includes the cooler years of 1950’s to 1970’s when the planetary cycles were in the cool mode and when we had many more colder winters then an entirely different picture emerges . To assume that the next 30 years will be like the past 30 years is at the heart of what is wrong with the AGW science . That is why the current cold spell is a complete surprise[ or a black swan as some would call it] to the global warming movement but entirely predictable and actually predicted by people like Professor Don Easter brook and Professor William Gray and others on this web page . There will be many more such cooler winters over the next 30 years . Even the current cool winter is far from over for Europe, Northern Asia and the UK where the cold winter will likey extend to spring in my opinion . Past climate history shows that a strongly negative AO in December is often an indication of and extended or continued relatively high negative AO well into spring [ April ]and some times as late as May and even to June although at a less negative value ] If the AGW supportes do not learn from this winter about how flawed their science is , then there will be many more such cool winters in the coming decades to learn from.
JP (13:01:20)
You are correct in noting that the UK can get hot dry summers when the jet stream is well north or well south of the UK.
The present setup however is that the jets are over or close to the UK during the summer months and to the south during the winter months.
There is always a basic seasonal component to the latitudinal position of the jets.
If the El Nino fades and the sun gets a little more active as it recovers from a low minimum then both those changes should serve to make the AO less negative because it is the quietness of the sun and the current El Nino that are responsible for the strongly negative AO.
However the less negative change to the AO will not be accompanied by much of a warming effect globally because it will be accompanied by La Nina type oceanic conditions.
The strong ‘blocking’ pattern should remain because the East / West vigour of the jets is usually a feature of El Nino plus a positive AO which permits acceleration of energy through the whole system from sea surface to stratosphere and thence to space.
If such a blocking pattern continues into next summer then the large north / south movement of air masses will continue with parts of the northern continents favoured by persistent winds from the south becoming anomalously warm or hot.
That will not be a sign of a resumption of warming overall. If the oceans are generally negative and the jets are not forced into a more poleward path then the background global trend will still be slow cooling.
Just for the record this was my prediction for this winter as issued last August:
“The jets are still well south of us and if that persists into autumn and winter then of course there will be greater influence from cold high pressure over Europe and Greenland.
The matter of precipitation amounts depends on where the main battleground is between cold and warm air. No two years are the same and last winter was unusual. The cold spells were very immobile. Large chunks of cold air were dumped on us for weeks at a time with little movement and relatively little snow despite a couple of notable falls.
For the coming winter I think that, instead, we will get more occasions when the battleground is over southern UK or northern France and Germany with more snow over wider areas than we have had for many years. However so much depends on day to day variability of the precise positions of all the weather systems that I realise I am a bit out on a limb there. Nevertheless I think it a higher likelihood than for many years past.
I’m also unsure what the balance will be between northerly and easterly flows which give very different weather types. The chance of a return to prolonged south westerlies is low but it could happen depending on the synoptic situation over USA.
Last winter also showed a change from the previous two winters when cold plunges over the USA distorted the jets and gave us persistent warm wet south westerlies so we did not then share in the general slow cooling trend.
I think that the overall global trend is still moving towards a colder regime but only slowly. The position of the jets in both hemispheres still indicates overall cooling. We seem to be getting increasing cold weather reports in winter in both hemispheres despite the current absence of a strong La Nina so the effect of the previous one seems to be persisting.
Meanwhile ENSO is less negative than it was but the anticipated EL Nino seems to be stuttering. I would say that overall the rate of cooling in the air will slow down a bit thanks to the extra energy flow into the air from the less negative ENSO but remember that if the sun is weak it will not fully replace the energy lost from ocean to air via the warmer SSTs so there remains a general background loss of energy for the system as a whole.
So, (gulp!) UK coming winter cooler than recently and likely to further reduce the warming trend of the 1975 to 2000 period. Not necessarily back down to the longer term average but well on the way with an outside chance of a memorable winter.
More snow than we have been used to but generally drier than average in the north and wetter than average in the south.”
Thus far that gives me a 2 – 0 score against the Met Office because I called the previous winter correctly as well.
Harold Blue Tooth (15:29:08) :
“There is also lower activity in the earth’s own magnetic field. A band going over Brazil and out over the Atlantic toward Africa of earth’s magnetic field is weak, and weakening.”
There are some indications that there may be a loose correlation between geomagnetic field and climate change. South Atlantic magnetic anomaly is well known to navigators. Having few minutes to spare, I have constricted diagram of evolution of the SA anomaly during the last 400 years.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SA%20mag%20anomaly.gif
Some other magnetic anomalies can be found here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
just look for appropriate link.
Re: Tom P (Jan 9 11:53),
“Nothing fishy at all. That’s when the IPCC predictions were made:” LinkToColoradoEduHere
And:
“That’s a little difficult to square with the actual data:”
However:
The Colorado link is to “Correspondence” as a “To The Editor” (perhaps to Roger A. Pielke, Jr) by © 2008 Nature Publishing Group, with reference to nature geoscience | VOL 1 | APRIL 2008 | http://www.nature.com/naturegeoscience.
Although no data is given on the linked Correspondence, there are citations of individual articles in IPCC Working Group I reports in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. There are also links to what I assume is data. These include GISS and Met Office as well as UAH and MSU.
Finally, the Correspondence originates from the Nature Publishing Group. I must consider the source despite the risk of being accused of an Ad Hominum attack.
Tom P (10:39:52),
“The IPCC’s predictions have failed miserably. That means their models are wrong. But since the IPCC is composed of 100% political appointees, whose highly paid jobs depend on their predicting catastrophic global warming, then that is the prediction they will make. As we see from all the evidence, the IPCC is not permitted to predict that global temperatures will fall. And it is a travesty.”
Not only are the models wrong, but the Climategate document and the ‘Harry’ code shows there is a strong possibility they ‘bent’ the data to fit the prediction better. Perhaps the only honest one out of the bunch was Tom Wigley, who admitted in the email that he couldn’t understand why climate observation didn’t match predictions, “Where’s the warming?”
I just checked the pattern of summer temperatures in North America as further evidence that the referenced article was wrong in stating that the trend is to warmer summers
Both in Canada and Contiguous US the summers are not getting warmer, in fact they are getting cooler since 2006 as more of the colder natural cycles kick into the cool mode [PDO, AMO,NAO, AO]
Canada ‘s summers have cooled almost 1 degree [0.9] C since 2006 and 2009 summer was 27 th warmest in the last 61
Contiguous US summers have cooled 2.48 degree F since 2006 and 2009 was 44 th warmest in the last 114 years
I am fed up with the cold.
Climate is made up of weather, so if we get the normal sort of weather variability, then I contend climate is the same
The weather in UK consists of mild wet winters and warm damp summers with the occasional dry hot summer and cold winter. Nothing has changed in my life time, the weather continues to disappoint.
The Guardian article is a joke!
The MET Office sold its soul to the IPCC/AGW/ climate change lobby long ago. Through CRU and Hadley it provides the temperature regimes that the IPCC relies upon. In July 2006 Robert Napier was appointed as its chairman – his previous post was head of WWF-UK: ’nuff said!
Vukcevic (13:30:16) :
Alternative link for the South Atlantic Anomaly:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC.htm
since original appears unstable
Until a full understanding of the different processes which comprise our climate system is achieved, along with the knowledge of how the effect each other
And predicting what humans will do is not a very exact science.
Stephen Skinner (03:25:03) :
Obviously nobody died in 62-63 and for some reason the Heatwave of 76 has disappeared from history.
************************************************
geronimo (03:47:06) :
Do you know Stephen that I was thinking the same thing about 1976 when the Met Office announced that 2009 is going to be the hottest year on record. It doesn’t seem credible.
*************************************************
Gentlemen, I have been – for some time – thinking exactly the same thing.
I have very strong memories of the UK summer of 1976 (and 1975 was nearly as hot as 76) with droughts for – what was it – 6 weeks plus? The appointment of a Minister for Drought made me chuckle at the time. Have a look at film/video of many sporting events during that summer (e.g. Wimbledon) to see the grass burnt brown practically everywhere.
The only other summer I can recall that came close to these 2 was 1983, with 1998 in 4th place.
2007/2008/2009 were the most dismal summers I can recall, yet the decade was “the warmest ever, blah blah”. Whilst I would agree that we have had numerous mild winters in the last 15 years, they have generallly been accompanied by cool summers.
Frankly, the numbers, conclusions and predictions being published by the Met Office have ceased to have any credibility. Someone posted somewhere (maybe in another thread here?) that the MO’s statements around “warmest” winters are based on the average of the 15 highest daily temperatures in the period (or something similarly bizarre – does anyone have a reference to this?). Why bother with so many – just take the single highest daily temperature. It would be just as ridiculous.
And I find it so depressing and alarming that – Andrew Neil excepted – no current heavyweight journalist in the UK is prepared to question the mantra. The BBC should be shut down for their outrageous behaviour in all of this.
It is going to take rioting in the streets before the MSM (and maybe the politicians) start to wake up to reality. AGW? Nobody with a brain believes it any more.
” Tom P (10:39:52) :
Phil’s Dad (09:33:02) :
“That’s the point Tom. Smokey tells us how it was.
They predicted. They got it wrong.
Afterwards they changed their prediction. No prizes.”
None of the predictions were made in the last 18 months. Current temperatures are close to IPCC predictions made 3, 9 and 15 years ago.”
Tom, Coming out of the cold period in the late seventies it was a pretty safe bet that we were going to have warming and it would continue for at least 30 years thanks to the PDO cycle and the 70 -90 Gleissberg cycle ( published 1944) All you needed to do was plot the temperatures for the last couple hundred years to see the cycles. Heck William Herschel figured that out back in 1801. That is why the big push to finish the con and get the carbon taxes into law NOW before the con collapses. Then on to the next con which will be famine and high food prices.
The whole blasted thing is about making money out of conning people into boom and bust cycles, this is just one more con job and the peons get poorer and lose a little more of their freedom.
Tenuc (10:55:47) “[…] because of deterministic chaos, our climate system cannot be forecast with any degree of certainty beyond a few days.”
The assumption upon which this statement is based does not extend across all spatiotemporal scales. Via conditional analyses, we can identify the boundaries of hard constraints and substantially improve medium- & long-term forecasting probabilities. The lame, old “it’s ALL chaos” paradigm is holding back progress. It’s not all chaos – it is richly patterned if one looks with phase-aware methods. Eventually we may get down to residual chaos & measurement-noise, but we are nowhere near exhausting opportunities to learn from phase-conditioned analyses — quite the contrary – misguided paradigms have SHUT DOWN such pursuits, so little progress has been made despite tremendous effort (on largely unproductive fronts).
Following up on Tony B’s comment – isn’t this the second cold winter in a row in Europe (it certainly is in Ireland)? And isn’t this the third severe winter in a row in North America? Maybe in order to work for the Met UK you have to have your temporal lobes resected. Then you can keep up the “weather isn’t climate” routine with a straight face no matter how many successive years of cold there are.
rw
2010/01/09 at 3:45pm
“Following up on Tony B’s comment – isn’t this the second cold winter in a row in Europe (it certainly is in Ireland)? And isn’t this the third severe winter in a row in North America? Maybe in order to work for the Met UK you have to have your temporal lobes resected. Then you can keep up the “weather isn’t climate” routine with a straight face no matter how many successive years of cold there are.”
Having lived through the northeast ice storm last christmas, I can say that “natural disaster isn’t climate, it just seems like your whole world has changed.”
matt v. (13:25:57) “To assume that the next 30 years will be like the past 30 years is at the heart of what is wrong with the AGW science”
Good way of putting it in nutshell matt.
“… a global average is not of much use …”
What happened to
“…the global average is down since 2002…”
“…the global average is down since 1998…”
“…warmer global averages will be good for crops…”
“…global averages are increasing because of the sun…”
“…carbon dioxide isn’t increasing the global averages…”
“…global averages aren’t increasing…”
???
Have you all thrown in the towel on climatology, and decided to play weatherman instead?
Vukcevic (13:30:16) “[…] evolution of the SA anomaly during the last 400 years. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SA%20mag%20anomaly.gif “
Interesting evolution at the constriction between South America & Antarctica – fits nicely with concepts laid out by Barkin.
Ronaldo (11:58:45) :
Tom in Texas (12:50:11) :
Regarding the Bucket Thought Experiment.
The intent was not to replicate the climate system which is vastly more complex.
The intention (as with most such though experiments) was to isolate a few variables to discuss a particular point or phenomenon.
In this case I was simply trying to illustrate a system where a long term effect could be reliably forecast while the short term could not. Whether that is precisely applicable to climate forecasting is another matter – we just shouldn’t infer outright that a system that is hard to pin down with short term predictions makes it hard to pin down long term.
Same goes for casinos. If I walk into a Las Vegas casino and start playing slot machines, an outcome prediction for the very next “pull” will be less likely to be correct than the long term prediction that, if I play long enough, I will lose money.
Re: matt v. (14:05:04)
Careful with your analysis – there has been pronounced spatial anti-phase across the great divide since ENSO & QBO switched phase ~mid-2009. (Continental averages can seriously mask regional differences, depending on spatial phase-relations.)
Mann O Mann (09:50:40)
Thinking about your thought experiment, you say the bucket is in equilibrium until the hole gets partially blocked, then the level in the bucket rises. How can the water level then fall, without the hole getting bigger (we assume as the IPCC does that the flow from the fawcett does not vary)? Once the partial blockage is removed, the water stops rising but stays at the new high level.
The bucket needs “added” particles, whereas the earths climate already has (almost) limitless particles on the bottom waiting to be stirred up, called the oceans. Hence my problem with AGW and the operation of the Greenhouse effect.
The planet DIDN’T HAVE TO wait millions of years for man to “add” particles to the atmosphere, those particles were available all the time in the form of oceans, water vapour.
So my question is: What makes anyone think the planet was “short” of GHG’s? It’s always had as much as it has needed in the form of the oceans. Surely it didn’t have to wait millions of years for H Sapiens to arrive and provide it with an extra 0.001% in GHG’s?
Paul Vaughan
Can you expand or clarify in simpler terms?
What is the point of “projections” “predictions” “scenarios” if they can’t predict “extremes” of weather?
Afterall, it’s not climate per se that will do damage, it’s the resultant weather (droughts, floods, cyclones etc). So even if we can predict future climate, that prediction is near useless unless we can also predict the resultant extremes of weather.
The IPCC gets around this by saying “more” of all extremes. Well so far after 20 years of projections, they have been wrong, there has been NO documented increases in extremes nor any weather this planet hasn’t already experienced many many times over.
I don’t have the figures for 2009, but European annual summer anomalies started to decline after 2006 and annual winter anomalies started to drop after 2007. Looking at 10 year moving averages, both started to rise after about the late 1980’s .
While the winter anomalies levelled of in the late 1990’s , the summer anomlaies continued to rise until 2006 . The10 year moving historical pattern[1900- 2008] for European winters is quite different [fluctuates more] from the summer pattern since about 1950.
Bill Nye, the science guy?
Correct – they’re wedded to straight-line thinking, billiard-ball modeling.
lgl (06:11:29) “Solar eclipses at low latitudes usually produce El-Nino […] http://virakkraft.com/enso-solar-eclipse.png “
Thanks for pointing this out lgl.
I would suggest (based on piles upon piles of analyses I’ve run on a variety of interannual terrestrial oscillations) that the particularly-good El Nino matches of (at least) ’73, ’83, ’87, & ’98 are nonrandom. This is coming together coherently with some of what we’ve been hearing from Piers Corbyn & Ian Wilson – it’s a matter of pulling clues together to discover what multivariate conditions are associated with partial-residual phase-deviations. Soon the alarmists, caught red-handed making untenable assumptions of randomness, may have to resort to spouting ‘chaos’ propaganda in an attempt to obfuscate insights arising from conditional analyses.
Interesting. A question about the basic science. Of what is the the lower tropospheric temperature supposed to be indicative? Just from what I’ve seen here (in the post and in the comments) the lower tropospheric temperature anomaly (from satellite) does seem to correlate well with the global mean surface temperature (again from satellite) since 2001, and perhaps since 1998.
I thought Stephen Wilde’s explanation was interesting, and it comports with Roger Pielke’s conclusion that GMT is not a good indicator of what regional weather will be like:
Stephen Wilde (12:51:50) :
What we seem to be seeing is a large redistribution of tropospheric heat energy with mid latitude regions cooling but equatorial regions remaining warm.
In the process of that redistribution the air circulation patterns have shifted substantially equatorward but that in itself is merely an extension of the changes that should have been apparent to all observers of weather and climate since 2000.
Applying my general climate description I would say that the following is the likely explanation:
i) Generally a latitudinal shift in the air circulation patterns is ocean driven and since about 2000 the PDO has been trending to the negative phase so that gives a basic background cooling effect.
ii) In contrast the Arctic Oscillation that controls the size and position of the polar high pressure systems is driven by a combination of the speed of the hydrological cycle as dictated by the rate of ocean energy release and the speed at which the stratosphere can radiate energy to space which is driven by variations in the turbulence of the flow of energy from the sun. The SABER satellite results appear to show that the rate of loss of energy to space is greater when the sun is active and less when the sun is less active.
iii) At present the quiet sun is reducing the rate of energy loss to space and the stratosphere is warming. At the same time the 2009 El Nino has been pumping energy faster to the stratosphere. The combined effects have both been supplementing one another to increase the flows of energy up into and downward out of the stratosphere to enhance the size of the polar high pressure cells and push them equatorward against the counter pressure from the El Nino.
iv) The result is cooling mid latitudes but warming equatorial and more polar latitudes.
If this setup continues then the cooler mid latitudes will progressively cut off the flow of warmer air to the poles and cooling will become more general.
As for a “tipping point” that doesn’t seem to be in the cards either at the moment.
I’m reminded of a presentation that Bob Carter did a few years ago, where he said that the 1998 El Nino represented a kind of “dividing line” in lower tropospheric temperature, that it produced a “step shift” in the GMT, but that otherwise there was no trend either before or after that point in terms of greenhouse warming.
Here is part 2 of his presentation where he talks about this:
matt v. (17:10:28) “Can you expand or clarify in simpler terms?”
On average cool air has been ‘ponded’ (simplifying here) east of the mountains, while warm air has been ‘ponded’ on the Pacific coast since ~mid-2009 (hot summer, balmy-warm winter here on the Pacific coast – in BC, Canada). Averaging across the continent will ‘confuse’ the strong regional difference, under such circumstances. Sometimes we have ‘north-south’ flow & a loopy jet stream; other times we have strong east-west flow with a straighter jet-stream. Averaging across the jet-stream (or other spatial discontinuities) can ‘confuse’ important signals. As per your request, I’m not trying to be precise here – just giving a gist of the hazards of averaging across different places that may sometimes have similar weather and sometimes have very dissimilar weather, depending on flow patterns …so averaging across the continent makes sense sometimes. Nothing wrong with your analysis – just adding a note of caution regarding interpretation of the past 6 or 7 months […for which a spatial contrast “east vs. west” or “east minus west” reveals something a spatial blend “(east+west)/2” does not].
Same goes for casinos. If I walk into a Las Vegas casino and start playing slot machines, an outcome prediction for the very next “pull” will be less likely to be correct than the long term prediction that, if I play long enough, I will lose money.
Terrible analogy. Known system with known odds. Try again.
I am having trouble understanding how someone can make sense out of temperature data and its implications for global warming or cooling. If sites where data were collected and/or are being collected are subject to urban heating, if some sites were not used, if the thermometers and auxilary equipment are not properly calibrated to the same standards, if the raw data have been erased or lost for many of the sites, if the collection processes are subject to variations, what does the error band in the global timewise temperature graphs mean? Then of course there is cherry-picking too. Certainly, 0.17 degrees centigrade per decade could all be due to systematic errors in the recorded numbers. I understand that one can perform various statistical analyses of whatever numbers you throw into the computer program. However,are the variations in the data due to random errors or are they systematic errors? Those heroic individuals trying to sense of the temperature data situation deserve or praise, prayers, and consolatory support. I apologize in advance if my comments are offensive to those who devote time to the global temperature issue. I am writing in a state of pure ignorance of what the data really look like before they were correlated. I just remember performing an analysis of temperature measurements in my freshman physics laboratory where we were required to make estimates of ramdom and systematic errors in the measurements. Clearly, if the errors are all systematic, then one cannot ascribe an external cause for the changes. Maybe this evaluation of the global temperature data has been performed.
Baa Humbug (17:03:32) :
Unobstructed, the hole will let water out at a rate faster than it is added. The equilibrium is dependent on the occurrence of obstructions (both partial and full) happening at a rate that is consistent over time. At any moment it could be fully obstructed with water levels rising or clear with water levels falling or partially blocked, with different degrees of rising or falling tied to the degree to which the hole is blocked.
Mann O Mann 16:07:13
I fully accept your comment, I am a great believer in thought experiments-apart from anything else. they are cheap and eminently modifiable. I agree that your “expt” does give insight and I was trying to push it a bit further. The value of WUWT is that it enables such visualiations to be shared and commented upon in a positive manner so adding, hopefully, a little to the common understanding.
So I did my own thought experiment and figured the bucket analogy was interesting, but it seemed to me that it should work more like a capacitor. On a local scale we have all sorts of stuff happening, wind rain, convection, etc etc. But on the system level is is simpler. Total energy goes up, the system rises to a new equilibrium. If you know the time constant, you can figure out how long it will take, all the twists and turns along the way don’t matter in the end.
In reading the last IPCC they suggest CO2 doubling would constitue a rise in radiance of 3.7 watts per square meter. So I started wondering, what is the time constant of the system? The answer to that probably can’t be calculated at all, but I figured I could cheat. I would just match the data to my theory.
I used Crowley’s millenia model of the solar constant which shows total variation from high to low of 3.5 watts. If 3.7 is a hockey stick, 3.5 ought to show up. I slid the graphs around until I got a match.
It looks to me that it takes 150 years for an increase in radiance to show up in global temp. I even tried to predict the low and the high for the last 500 years and hit the end of the little ice age for a low, and 2000 with no significant temp change afterward for a high.
Am I on the right track or did I just make the data fit my theory?
http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/
The global sea surface temperature map looks mighty chilly.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Communism’s inability to produce enough food, clothes, electrical goods, cars, etc… used to be an open joke among the eternally queued Soviet citizenry, but it didn’t stop the politicians and newspapers from singing communism’s praises every day.
AGW’s Climate Change is exactly the same… The reality is in direct contrast with policy. But come hail, sleet, snow and continued lack of heating, they still persist in singing the validity of their AGW hypothesis.
So very roughly…… A temp record from 1850 to present shows ninety five years of warming when there shouldn’t have been-1850 to 1945. If one is to believe that CO2 is the primary driver for modern temperature changes.
Thirty four years of cooling when there shouldn’t be- 1945 to 1979.
Nineteen years of warming at a rate no different to earlier times-1979 to1998
Twelve years of cooling despite the continued rise of CO2-1998-2010
So, on the face of it…….. Nineteen years of unremarkable warming is a catastrophe needing the complete change of global energy usage and economic systems…..
I think we’ve been had!
Paul Vaughan (15:42:00) :
{Tenuc (10:55:47) ‘[…] because of deterministic chaos, our climate system cannot be forecast with any degree of certainty beyond a few days.’}
The assumption upon which this statement is based does not extend across all spatiotemporal scales. Via conditional analyses, we can identify the boundaries of hard constraints and substantially improve medium- & long-term forecasting probabilities. The lame, old “it’s ALL chaos” paradigm is holding back progress. It’s not all chaos – it is richly patterned if one looks with phase-aware methods. Eventually we may get down to residual chaos & measurement-noise, but we are nowhere near exhausting opportunities to learn from phase-conditioned analyses — quite the contrary – misguided paradigms have SHUT DOWN such pursuits, so little progress has been made despite tremendous effort (on largely unproductive fronts).
The fascinating thing about climate and deterministic chaos is that within the multiple interlinked process, seemingly orderly periodic behaviour starts to appear and it would seem that predictions can be based on these quasi-cycles.
Here’s a good example of a global temperature forecast for the the current century based on solar activity and planetary alignment, which I’ve used before.
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)
This is fine as far as it goes, but as a forecast it has many inherent weaknesses. It doesn’t give any information about the scale of the temperature changes. For example, will the cooling from 2010 to 2100 be another Maunder type minimum, or will it just be enough to wipe out the past warming trend, or will it be the start of the bifurcation which leads to the next ice age?
It also hides the fact that climate displays fractal behaviour at all temporal scales. On the decadal scale global temperature will also rise and fall, and that within each decade the same pattern will occur. It says nothing about when or where these shorter term events will happen or their magnitude.
It can’t explain all the mechanisms by which the changes happen or resolve the issues of is cause and effect.
To improve this forecast we need to be able to fully understand the net energy balance of all the interlinked global climate mechanisms, which includes what is happening in the biosphere. Our historic climate records are just not good enough to give us the base data to do this with any meaningful precision and even our current climate data gathering systems will only give a ball-park figure.
Examining quasi-cyclic behaviour can provide some idea of what is to come, but not at a resolution of scale or precision of location for it to be of much use and even this broad idea of what is to come can be easily confound should a super-volcano blow it’s top or random large meteor strike happen.
I checked my house insurance and it clearly states that meteor strikes and volanoes blowing their tops are specifcaly excluded as acts of God. As such they are pre-ordained and therefore predictable. All one need do is develope a reconstruction of God and extrapolate the frequency of smiting. Based on my initial reconstruction, smiting has hit a millenial low and stabilized at the current rate with no additional smiting forecast for the next decade at a minimum. My insurance company is insisting on corroborating reports from at least 3 accredited researchers before changing my policy. I have constructed 11 reports citing each other in such a fashion that scrutiny of any given report will only lead to direct examination of citations at least twice removed from the inital report. All I need now is some of you folks with PhD in your sig to step up and collaborate. Seriously, my house insurance is killing me.
Bob Tisdale (03:14:03) :
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
Bob, I have just been over to your site, looking at your plots.
Very nice work!
Now, if some of those NASA money that James Hansen is using could be diverted to the CLOUD experiment, maybe we could get faster results from Svensmark.
When data from that experiment is official, we will know more about the driving factors behind all this. Or not.
Very exciting times.
I forgot including a thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Internet, and for settling the Science for us.
And, I also forgot to mention that its too late already. I mean, according to Western leaders, we had to sign in Copenhagen, or DOOM would be here.
Paul Vaughan (16:03:42) :
“Vukcevic (13:30:16) “[…] evolution of the SA anomaly during the last 400 years. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SA-mag-anomaly.gif “
“Interesting evolution at the constriction between South America & Antarctica – fits nicely with concepts laid out by Barkin.”
Thanks for the note. I’ve looked at the global evolution/ anomaly. Most stable Geo Mag is at 60S, 130E (between Australia and Antarctica) , it has hardly changed (less than 5%) during the last 400 years, while elsewhere due to drift of the magnetic pole, the changes are anything up to 50%,.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC1.htm
Although the changes are large in both hemispheres, South Hemisphere at 60S circle appears to be most uniform; perhaps some link to the Circumpolar current’s flow enveloping the Antarctica. More magnetic anomalies here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
Vukcevic (02:45:19)
P.S. on the above graphs of the global magnetic anomaly, sweeps are in 10 degree steps at 10 years intervals.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC1.htm and
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC.htm
Tenuc (00:28:59) :
“1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)”
My list is a bit longer (numbers are from the NASA’s website), the rest is a bit of a guess-work.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GrandMinima.gif
Tom P
Comparing your graph with the
http://www.ianschumacher.com/img/TempsvsIPCCModelsWM.jpg graph, the difference is simple. Your graph uses 1990 as the zero date for the anomolies. The IPCC AR4 TS Fig. 26 clearly uses an older year for its zero mark. The two graphs are not comparable. Did you make the graph to which you linked? From where did the IPCC lines come? I looked at Woodfortrees.org. Their graphs do not seem to include an IPCC projections option, so they were drawn on later. If you shift the IPCC lines up vertically 0.2 degrees, you will see what people are complaining about.
I drew a picture for you:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/IPCC2007.JPG
John M Reynolds
Christopher Booker warns in the Sunday Telegraph:
Climate change: the true price of the warmists’ folly is becoming clear
From the Met Office’s mistakes to Gordon Brown’s wind farms, the cost of ‘green’ policies is growing………..
At last, in all directions, we are beginning to see the terrifying cost of that obsession with “global warming” and “green energy” which for nearly 20 years has had all our main political parties in its grip. For years governments, including the EU, have been shovelling millions of pounds into the coffers of “green” lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the WWF, allowing them in return virtually to dictate our energy policy. Not for nothing is a former head of WWF-UK now chairman of the Met Office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6958093/Climate-change-the-true-price-of-the-warmists-folly-is-becoming-clear.html
” Brian Dodge (16:03:11) :
“… a global average is not of much use …”
What happened to…
Have you all thrown in the towel on climatology, and decided to play weatherman instead?”
No we haven’t thrown in the towel we just found out how badly the books were cooked. Also as new information come in I, at least am willing to change my mind.
COOKING THE BOOKS:
Hansen’s changing temps: http://i31.tinypic.com/2149sg0.gif
The homogenization of the temperature data
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/would-you-like-your-temperature-data-homogenized-or-pasteurized/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/20/darwin-zero-before-and-after/
And then there is how much error is in the raw measurements thanks to the USA surface station survey and this CRU’s own computed sampling (measurement) error: http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
“The title of this graph indicates this is the CRU computed sampling (measurement) error in C for 1969. Note how large these sampling errors are. They start at 0.5°C, which is the mark where any indication of global warming is just statistical noise and not reality. Most of the data is in the +/- 1°C range, which means any attempt to claim a global increase below this threshold is mathematically false. Imagine the noise in the 1880 data! You cannot create detail (resolution) below what your sensor system can measure. AJ Strata
The graph show the USA with a sampling error of 0.5C but the surface station survey shows this is probably very generous. On top of that some are suggesting that as the effects of the oceans shift you get cooling in one location and warming in another, like we are seeing right now. Then you have the hot summer – cold winter phenomenon like in 1976.
At this point the temperature seems to have leveled. I have seen information that it has increased 0.28 C, leveled and decreased. I think the most honest “opinion” is the noise is greater than the signal and we need to do a lot more research.
With the sun in a different mode than modern science has ever seen before, honest, open research should net us a lot more information if the scientists are not stifled by the AGW straitjacket.
jmrSudbury (04:17:59) :
Your plots of IPCC projections are incorrect. The IPCC projections are plotted by Roger Pielke Jr in the link I gave above:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf
Tom P, looking at the Pielke reference I see that those are not projections, but linear fits to the temperature data on the various dates listed. Of couse a linear fit made in (say) 2007 would give a great linear fit for the temps up to 2007, and would still look reasonable on a plot from 1990 to 2009. However, if you look at just the part AFTER their corresponding dates in your Wood For Trees plot you’ll see that the IPCC lines fit poorly after their creation dates.
Based on such evidence as Darwin zero and the NOAA adjustments (ref below) there is also a legitimate concern that the published temperature anomoly graphs display more warming than reality.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Gail Combs – first thanks for the reference, and you nailed the bottom line in this. The ‘noise’ is much greater than any phantom signals people are seeing.
The large ‘undiscovered’ noise is that in the station data, which is orders of magnitude greater than in the tree ring data. I noted this escalating uncertainty/error in this post:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12118
You referenced the CRU’s own error analysis, itself demonstrating that the noise is greater than any signal. But the CRU analysis is incomplete and highly optimistic.
The fact is the sensor coverage from land based sensors is much less than 1% of the surface. To create the impression they can create a global index these so called scientists attempt to extrapolate these point measurements over ridiculous ranges of distance and time.
The fact is these point sources degrade incredibly fast over very short distance and time. In the course of 10 minutes or 10 miles the station data point has lost a lot of its accuracy. I would say, given the dynamics of seasons, the mechanisms of weather fronts, the impact of altitude, the impact of large local bodies of water, etc that these station measurements degrade to crap so fast that any regional index cannot get through a 2 degree uncertainty barrier – forget if someone is making up virtual stations which probably have error bars of 2-5° C.
It is only through satellite measurements that we can get a consistent global index. Conversely, we now have satellite data over a decade – which is perfect for assessing the accuracy of both station measurements and station derived regional or global estimates.
We have the tools and data to show that the noise is horrible in the station data, which means the noise going back to 1880 will grow to surprising levels. And since tree rings map to large temperature ranges, their uncertainty could be an order of magnitude greater than the station data.
The reality is the science to date has been cursory and illustrates we are just beginning to grasp the problem of determining a climate climate model that is valid across minutes, let alone days or decades.
Edit problem: expanding error should go like this satellites<modern stations<oldest stations<tree rings and other proxies.
Ugh, need to review before publishing. Land station data covers less than 1% of the surface, leaving 99% to be derived through questionable math.
[Fixed RT – mod]
I don’t quite understand this:
“…if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings?”
We can’t predict the EXACT effects of global warming, but it’s pretty obvious that they won’t be good.
There are always factors we can’t control.
…this is my first visit here. I guess I’ll have to look around some more.
There was once an expression heard round the world: “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.” Today, in the omniscient present (the present is always omniscient:-), we hear: “Everyone talks about the weather but no one can do anything about it.”
Humans are the most gullible people on the planet. If you can sell a fool the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, you can convince enough people that the climate is changing and you and your “friends” can prevent it from happening if people will only raise enough money and let the smart folks “invest” it.
Today, with 6.5 billion people on the planet (or there about) the percentage of fools is possibly no higher than it ever was. But the effect they appear to be having on the rest of us does seem out of proportion to their number. I guess that’s always been true, however. We love to think that we’re so smart and that we can spot a con-artist a mile away. History suggests that the vast majority of people aren’t as smart as they like to think they are.
Is the planet warming? Is the planet cooling? Nobody knows; not really. Can a former VP or Haverd professor or two be a con-artist, how about your local TV weather guy or gal? Yes they can! Be careful who and what you believe, it can be very expensive.
Vukcevic (03:11:07) :
“[Tenuc (00:28:59) :
“1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)”}
My list is a bit longer (numbers are from the NASA’s website), the rest is a bit of a guess-work.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GrandMinima.gif
Yours is a very similar broad brush picture, showing a two hundred year(ish) cycle of warm and cool. I worry that some other event like a super-volcano erupting could make this depressing picture worse. We are now entering uncharted territory regarding what our climate could do.
Tom P
They are not my projections of the IPCC that are incorrect. Here is a link to the IPCC figure I mentioned that has an anomoly of 0.4 for all scenarios starting in 2000.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-ts-26.html
This is a much easier graph to read than fig 10.26 which Pielke Jr used.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-10-26.html
John M Reynolds
Tom_R (06:24:52) :
“Tom P, looking at the Pielke reference I see that those are not projections, but linear fits to the temperature data on the various dates listed.”
You are mistaken. As it quite clearly states in the Pielke reference these are the “IPCC global average temperature predictions from 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007.”
Your NOAA adjustment plot is just for the US, not for global temperatures. Global temperatures are in good agreement with the global satellite data since 1979 and so there is little evidence of any biasing in the land station records.
ryancmc (08:12:12) says:
How much global warming are you claiming won’t be good?
Being able to grow grapes for wine in England would seem to be pretty good.
The climate sensitivity to CO2 has been vastly overstated by the IPCC’s political appointees. If they were correct, global temps would be substantially rising, since there has been a third of a doubling of CO2. Yet despite that rise in CO2, current global temperatures are almost exactly the same as they were thirty years ago.
The fact that global temperatures have been on average flat to lower over most of the past decade indicates that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is very low.
It follows that with a low sensitivity number [≈<1], any warming from increased CO2 will be so insignificant that it can be completely disregarded; many other factors will overwhelm the minuscule CO2 effect, to the point that it cannot be empirically measured.
In fact, there are no empirical measurements showing that rise X in CO2 results in rise Y in global temperature.
Despite the many $billions granted to ‘study global warming’, it appears that no funds are ever made available to construct a relatively simple, testable and falsifiable experiment showing a verifiable real world temperature increase resulting from an addition of CO2 [and I am not referring to silly BBC “experiments” using plastic bottles]. No doubt those grants are rejected because that kind of experiment would be considered something only a skeptical scientist would perform.
The entire CO2 scare is based on model projections that result from programming done by people who are paid to expect a particular outcome. Who would pay such enormous sums only to be told that there is no emergency?
The alarm over the rise in a harmless and beneficial trace gas is fueled by money, and based on a litany of half-truths. And as we know, a half-truth is a whole lie. The geologic record shows conclusively that much greater rises in CO2, over million year time spans, did not result in a subsequent rise in global temperature. In fact, rises in CO2 are the effect, not the cause, of temperature increases.
The alarmists defend the outright rejection of the Scientific Method by those selling the CO2 scare, and ratchet up their squeals of anger over the fact that their half-truths are not sufficient to convince scientific skeptics – the only honest scientists – that the current rise in CO2 will lead to catastrophe. They demand that skeptics must accept their unverifiable, untestable assumptions on faith, and get angry when skeptics remain unconvinced.
If their motives of gaining money and control were not so catastrophic if put into effect, they would be taken no more seriously than if they were arguing their position wearing red rubber noses and clown shoes.
jmrSudbury (09:42:57) :
Pielke has plotted all the trends consistently, taking 1990 as an anomaly of 0 C. IPCC AR4 consistently uses the anomaly from the average 1961 to 1990 temperatures and hence 1990 is at 0.18 C.
You have mixed together trends based on two different anomalies and incorrectly shifted the 2007 IPCC projection up by 0.18 C. My plot, based on Pielke’s figure, is correct:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
Re: Tenuc (00:28:59)
Consider that forecasts could be considerably improved in specific spatiotemporal windows. The multivariate phase-relations of terrestrial oscillations are nonrandom due to universal constraints. If you are not working with phase-aware methods, I can understand why you have given up. I offer the following suggestions:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBO_fGLAAM_fLOD.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/WaveletMorlet2pi.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBOperiod.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/PolarMotionXY.png
Chaos & fractal geometry have their roles at some spatiotemporal scales; at others they are constrained.
J.Hansford (00:23:25) “Communism’s inability […]”
Same could be said of any system (including capitalism). Science does not divide along party lines – sorry man.
ryancmc (08:12:12) :
“I don’t quite understand this:
“…if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings?”….”
There are a number of problems
First as AJ Strata and I pointed out we do not have a good way of measuring “global temperature” at least until recently with satellite readings.
Second “Climate Scientists” like those at the CRU “homogenized” and manipulated the data and changed it.
Third grants, funding and publication of scientific papers were all geared toward CO2 is evil, this has held back other areas of research for a couple of decades. However there is a bunch of research out there that is “fringe” and Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn are doing pretty well on long range forcasting using this “fringe research” One wonders how much further advanced we would be if “Global Warming” had not come to be a political football.
Smokey (11:11:17) :
You insist on using out-of-date plots. You continue to ignore the agreement between the IPCC projections and current temperatures.
But you’re right, some people are indeed basing their conclusions on “a litany of half-truths.”
AGW discredited in one paragraph:
Absolute temp of Earth in degrees K = about 300K
Solar constant at LIA = 1363.5 watts/ meter squared
Solar constant now = 1367.0 watts/ meter squared
delta = 3.5 watts.
temp delta solar = 3.5/1363.5*300 = 0.77 degrees
IPCC estimated temp change from LIA to now = 1.10 degrees
delta due to ALL other heat source variables COMBINED = 0.33 degrees
IPCC claim that human generated CO2 accounts for 3.7 watts = false by at least one order of magnitude
Yeah yeah its more complicated than that. Fine, for the complicated explanation and how everyone seems to miss the fact that energy input changes don’t reflect in temps for decades later:
http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/
Tom P (12:01:57) :
Smokey (11:11:17) :
You insist on using out-of-date plots. You continue to ignore the agreement between the IPCC projections and current temperatures.
———
This is getting ridiculous. Your plots, Tom, are a sham. You start the trends in 1990 which is blatant cherry-picking for one. Also choosing start dates where the models have information on the future is cheating. Third you overlay plots on a woodfortrees temp plot without explaining. You don’t explain your offsets. And you do not give your source of model plots.
There is nothing outdated about Smokey’s plots. The IPCC blew it. That doesn’t change just because you want to rewrite history.
Average December temps/anomaly. Where’s the warming? click
Hey! Where did that 0.7° rise in temps go? click
Failure of IPCC predictions: click
Modeled IPCC temperature changes for a doubling of CO2 vs actual temperature changes: click
Tom P,
“Smokey (11:11:17) :
You insist on using out-of-date plots.”
Are you refering to the IPCC temperature projections? I thought Smokey was attempting to show that the older projections failed to predict the current cooling. The fact that they might have changed their mind with newer plots wouldn’t be relevant to the point being made.
Syl (12:26:34) :
My plot is no more than an update of the Pielke figure in the reference I gave:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf
but with monthly rather than annual temperature averages. The trends are all from the IPCC AR reports – the Pielke reference gives the exact figures and pages of the reports from which they were extracted.
In that article Pielke writes: “Once published, projections should not be forgotten but should be rigorously compared with evolving observations.” That is exactly what I have done.
Roger Pielke Jr is the son of the author of this post and has himself written articles posted on this site. That you should call an update of his plot “a sham” reflects more on you than on any graph I’ve posted here.
The mood seems to be shifting in the British media – here’s an example.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
And here’s another.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6982299.ece
Right. The original projections should not be forgotten. But they shouldn’t be changed, either, and then use the newly adjusted/changed projections to compare with the new observations. If that were allowed, the IPCC would always be accurate in its predictions.
“brian dodge (16:03:11):
The climatology has not been replaced with weather focastering. Global temperature became a “barometer” for climate change in the media and by politicians. I share your dismay about the many confusing conclusions that have been made to define a global temperature. Of course, we do have strong indications that climate has changed other than from temperature data. However, it was the IPCC that carefully selected set of temperature data over a narrow time scale in order to create alarm in the world about an impending climatic doom. A doom that only they alone are able to predict. They became the “high priests” for predicting and controlling the temperature of the globe. Unfortunately they pointed much of scientific climate community in the wrong direction. If (a big if) all of the scientific community had been collectively engaged in the pursuit of climate mechanisms including honest evaluations of the systematic biases and random uncertainties in the temperature data, there could have been an honest evaluation of the uncertainty limits in calculating global temperature instead of the mess we have today. Now we have temperature data have been destroyed. We have global temperature results obtained from temperature data that have been contaminated or that were preselected and homogenized to prove one point. In addition, the uncertainties in the temperature measurements were never openly debated and evaluated by all of the scientitists with scientific interest in the results. As a result CRU and IPPC has diminished public belief in scientific integrity, especially with respect to climate.
I spent a number of years at Case Institute of Technology where the famous Michelson-Morely experiment was performed that was aimed at measuring the speed of light in an ether. Since almost all of the physics community believed that the speed of light depended on its motion through the ether, it was very troublesome when M-M obtained a negative result, But the result was ultimately believed because they carried out the experiment with very careful calibration of the instruments and understood and documented the uncertainties in their measurements. The whole physics community was included in the discussion of their data as well as their result. Michelson and Morley did not hide their data or attempt to selectively use only one set of data to show that there is a medium through which light travels, an ether. Contrast this example with the behavior of the CRU and IPCC climate prophets.
Sadly I do not see a way out of this temperature mess because the raw temperature data appear to be contaminated and or lost by the researchers at CRU. Many in the climate scientific community are trying to fix this situation. I pray that they will be successful before we are all forced to make a huge donation to the high priests of climatology.
Smokey (12:47:15):
I have shown that there is good agreement between all the IPCC global projections since 1995 and average global temperatures up to date.
In response you show plots of:
1. Just December temperatures from an unspecified database;
2. Just tropical temperatures;
3. Temperatures to the middle of 2008 (yet again!);
4. A comparison of warming with altitude which is not even included as an IPCC projection.
You’re certainly throwing a lot of plots at the wall. But do you have any that might stick?
Tom P
“That you should call an update of his plot “a sham” reflects more on you than on any graph I’ve posted here.”
I’m sure Pielke explained exactly what his methods were and where his data came from which you omitted. Besides it’s dishonest of you to throw out a graph with no attribution as if its yours.
Now tell us, what was changed in the models to give different results? The impression you’ve given is that nothing has changed and the IPCC has been right all along. And why do you insist that the ‘old’ graphs are invalid? Is it because they show the IPCC models failed and we can no longer rely on the IPCC conclusions? Are you trying to claim that even if the models were wrong, they were right?
Tom P
And another thing, I don’t care who makes up graphs. The modelers now know what the data is. So for all we know they’ve merely made adjustments to fit the curve.
And that proves nothing.
Gail Combs (11:50:12) :
“”There are a number of problems
Second “Climate Scientists” like those at the CRU “homogenized” and manipulated the data and changed it.””
Pretty sure they’ve been cleared of all wrongdoing.
“Third grants, funding and publication of scientific papers were all geared toward CO2 is evil,…”
Again, I don’t really understand this statement. Grant writing is an open process just like science itself. It sounds like you’re pointing to a conspiracy that spans all of the science community AND the entire grant approval side of government.
“…this has held back other areas of research for a couple of decades.”
I don’t think so. A good proposal will get approved. If it’s good enough and doesn’t get approved through standard grant processes, someone somewhere will fund it.
**************
Sidenote: This blog has been pretty interesting. It doesn’t have the stale taste that usually accompanies the climate deniers. I appreciate the links and references.
Syl (14:43:42) :
“The modelers now know what the data is. So for all we know they’ve merely made adjustments to fit the curve.”
Have you actually looked at the plot?
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
The IPCC prediction made in 1995 is in good agreement with current temperatures. Are you now claiming the modellers have some kind of time machine?
ryancmc (15:02:36):
Regarding your comment about the CRU scientists & Mann: “Pretty sure they’ve been cleared of all wrongdoing.”
I pretty much agree with you. Of course, the investigations have only just begun. But they probably followed the new climate science paradigm, and reached their conclusions first, to be followed later by selected supporting facts.
And: “Grant writing is an open process just like science itself. It sounds like you’re pointing to a conspiracy that spans all of the science community AND the entire grant approval side of government.” Here, read this.
Then you’ll understand that the process actually operates like this: click
I’m sure you’re aware that government funding of those scientists skeptical of AGW is less than one one-thousandth of funding for pro-AGW scientists.
The Scientific Method, with its antiquated, old timey requirements for full and open cooperation and disclosure between those promoting a new hypothesis and those questioning it, has been replaced by a much easier and more streamlined method of doing climate science: click
It’s amazing how well it works.
Thanks for the link. The article looks interesting.
However, the wording of your image was a little off, which makes the whole play on words fall through. It’s not that it CAN’T be peer reviewed, it’s that it fails peer review.
“”I’m sure you’re aware that government funding of those scientists skeptical of AGW is less than one one-thousandth of funding for pro-AGW scientists.””
While I’m inclined to agree, the entire sentence reeks of conspiracy theory. How do you even classify this?
I’ll grant that almost all scientists go into their experiments with a perception bias, but the grants are worded in generic language. For instance someone might be seeking grant money to research the effect C02 levels on…blah blah blah. Well that person may or may not be a skeptic. The grants are never written in speech like, “I’m seeking grant money to prove that humans are the end all cause of global warming.”
“The Scientific Method, with its antiquated, old timey requirements for full and open cooperation and disclosure between those promoting….”
Funny picture, but nobody uses the scientific method. The idea is noble, but that’s not how science is done. (well maybe drug testing in the medical field where things are very mechanistic)
Nonetheless, I’m hoping to get some first hand experience with the grant process this semester, so we’ll see. I’ll be the first to report back when I find that conspiracy. 😉
ryancmc:
Can you explain which part of the scientific method that you think people ignore?
“Carrick (16:18:47)
Can you explain which part of the scientific method that you think people ignore?”
We’re getting off topic here, but I can’t think of a single discovery that was made using the scientific method.
Let me ask, what part of the scientific method IS followed?
What really happens is people with a strong sense of curiosity set out to try to understand the world they live in. If they make any discoveries everything gets retrofitted back into the scientific method.
Nobody I know sits down and says…. “Ok, first I need a hypothesis, then I need to find a way to test it, then I have…..”
It’s more like an ongoing learning and tinkering process.
ryancmc:
Funny picture, but nobody uses the scientific method. The idea is noble, but that’s not how science is done.
A statement rich with irony. What’s scary about this is you’re so matter of fact about it, which leads me to suspect you’re being taught this in school. Let me clue you in on something. If the scientific method is not being used, it’s not science. It’s something else for which we do not have a name, and its reliability is highly suspect.
Following up on my comment to ryancmc, it could be that you’ve been taught a strict interpretation of the scientific method. For example, science can and is done by doing observation alone. I’ve sometimes heard people say that in order to adhere to the scientific method you have to have a designed experiment with a control for comparison. That would be ideal, but not all science is done that way, particularly when there’s a study of something on a large scale. This is done all the time in astronomy. The best that can be hoped for in these scenarios is something that closely resembles repeatability. My guess is the way scientists deal with the uncertainties of not having a control is they factor it into the error that accompanies any data that is gathered.
Like I said, we’re way off topic here, and talking more about the philosophy of science.
“If the scientific method is not being used, it’s not science.”
Whoa really? You think every scientific fact has been found using the scientific method?
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m specifically talking about the formal method they teach you in elementary school. I’m NOT claiming that there are alternate methods to find truth. I do NOT subscribe to mysticism, or any other new age mumbo jumbo.
Mark your second comment pretty much hits on exactly what I was talking about.
In fact, I was thinking of astronomy examples when I was responding. Lots of examples in Biology too though.
ryancmc if you are being taught that the Scientific Method is not the accepted method of separating scientific truth from false conjectures, then you are being cheated by your teachers and your school. You are being lied to.
Here is Richard Feynman, explaining the Scientific Method:
The Scientific Method requires full and open cooperation with other skeptical scientists, with everyone working to falsify the hypothesis. Only what has withstood all attempts at falsification is considered likely to be scientific truth.
That open cooperation, dedicated to finding the truth, has been perverted by government and university scientists seduced by fame and fortune. This process didn’t just start; it has been building up for decades, as President Eisenhower warned.
Now, with outside quangos and NGOs pouring $millions into the pockets of government and university climate scientists, the corruption of the relatively few gatekeepers has come to fruition. The process is complete: Mann, Pachauri, Jones and the others have been bought and paid for. They know that their CO2=CAGW hypothesis will be promptly falsified as soon as they provide all the raw and adjusted data and methods they used to construct it, just as Michael Mann’s hokey stick reconstruction was falsified. So they dig in their heels and stonewall information requests.
As Prof Feynman stated, the Scientific Method absolutely requires full cooperation. Try to credibly explain why the CRU scientists and Michael Mann have steadfastly refused to provide information supporting their hypothesis, even after more than forty legal Freedom of Information requests were filed requesting their climate data and methods. Explain the East Anglia emails, in which those same individuals strategize on ways to withhold information from other scientists. Explain why they admit to simply fabricating large swathes of climate temperature data in order to fit their conclusions. Explain why they are so full of hatred at those asking for their data that they state that they will destroy the data rather than share it.
Your claim that “nobody uses the Scientific Method” needs a citation. Who is teaching you this, ryancmc? Is it in a textbook? Cite the book. What science course teaches that? What is the name of the instructor?
Or, like the email admission in the Harry_read_me text, did you just make that up as you went along?
I don’t think it’s really necessary to get into too much detail about the scientific method used or not used at CRU. From what the world has learned from the emails and Fortran code, the “methods” used where horrible – as described by the programmer in the code comments. Speaking for myself, I don’t trust a single claim that comes from CRU or any of this current crop of like minded political activists. They have zero credibility with me and are highly suspect in their motives.
*shakes head*
Again I’m talking about the formal scientific method. The specific and formal 7 step process.
I’m very familiar with Feynman, and couldn’t agree more.
“Try to credibly explain why the CRU scientists and Michael Mann have steadfastly refused to provide information supporting their hypothesis,”
lol if it’s a hypothesis then it hasn’t been tested right? Following that ole scientific method then they aren’t required to share until step 7, right?
“even after more than forty legal Freedom of Information requests were filed requesting their climate data and methods. Explain the East Anglia emails, in which those same individuals strategize on ways to withhold information from other scientists. Explain why they are so full of hatred at those asking for their data that they state that they will destroy the data rather than share it.”
Actually I’m pretty sure it was WAY more than 40 info requests. The hatred and disgust of these scientists comes from what they’re subjected to b/c of these conspiracy theory groups. Imagine trying to work when you’re complete inundated with these requests generated by every nut with a computer. Pretty much the exact same tactics Biologists deal with from the religious nuts, and that historians deal with from the Holocaust deniers. I’d be ticked off too.
“Explain why they admit to simply fabricating large swathes of climate temperature data in order to fit their conclusions.”
lol – I must have missed something big here.
ryancmc (18:33:05)
Despite your denials and attempts to hand-wave away your rejection of the Scientific Method by claiming to understand Feynman, when you obviously do not, you also conflate hypothesis with conjecture: “lol if it’s a hypothesis then it hasn’t been tested right?”
Wrong. Hypotheses are continually tested – as are conjectures, theories and laws. Newton’s Law of Gravity is being tested today, in the search for the Higgs boson.
At any point in the Scientific Method continuum, if a hypothesis or theory is falsfied, it is not scientific truth. Furthermore, there is no bright line dividing a conjecture from a hypothesis, or a hypothesis from a theory. They form an ascending verification of the starting conjecture, which is based on observation.
In fact, tesatability is a primary requirement of the Scientific Method:
As Mark Miller notes above: “What’s scary about this is you’re so matter of fact about it, which leads me to suspect you’re being taught this in school. Let me clue you in on something. If the scientific method is not being used, it’s not science.” You avoid corroborating your claim that, in your words, “nobody uses the scientific method,” by refusing to cite a textbook, a teacher, or a school that taught you that. Maybe you just made it up as you went along.
You also buy into the easily debunked excuse put out by the corrupt CRU scientists, claiming that they cannot accommodate all the requests for their data and methodologies because of all the time it would take. It is easy to show their mendacity:
They can very easily publicly archive all of their raw and adjusted data, methods, and code on a website with a few mouse clicks, and leave a link so anyone interested can click on it for the information. Instead, they tap-dance around, trying to explain to everyone how hard it would be. What they really mean is that they do not want to allow the taxpayers, who paid for their work product, to have access to it. Why not? Obviously, because their CO2=CAGW hypothesis would be promptly falsified, destroying what is left of their already tarnished reputations.
Recently, they have invented the excuse that they have agreements that forbid their sharing of information – even though they have already shared the same information with numerous friendly entities – and the journals they publish their studies in require that they provide their data and methods. [The same journals neglected to enforce their own ethics requirement in this regard. But then, as Prof Wegman pointed out in the Wegman Report to Congress, they’re all in the same clique].
The CRU crew refuse to disclose those putative “agreements”, as if they were protecting nuclear defense secrets, rather than weather records. Demands to see copies of any signed and dated agreements have been met with obfuscation and more stonewalling. If there are agreements, they should produce them. No doubt they are furiously attempting to fabricate and back-date such “agreements.” And why not? They have already admitted, in writing, to fabricating temperature data.
Your constant references to ‘conspiracy theory groups’ is a fine example of a red herring argument. Attempting to re-frame our questions to you in a way that hopefully lets you off the hook doesn’t work here. To the best of my knowledge, there are no ‘conspiracy theory groups.’ There are simply other scientists who wish to validate the claims. If you know of any conspiracy theory groups, please let us in on their identities.
Finally, you did miss something big, if you didn’t read the eastanglia emails and the Harry_read_me text. I suggest that you get up to speed by reading the highly incriminating files contained in the links here.
Gail Combs (05:00:56) : “COOKING THE BOOKS: Hansen’s changing temps:”
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from/mean:6/to:2010/plot/gistemp/mean:6/offset:-0.25
Hansen cooked the books to show a warming, and managed to get it to line up with what the satellite record was going to show before they were launched about 1978. Neat trick! Very prescient!
“The homogenization of the temperature data”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf
“One analysis was for the full USHCN version 2 data set. The other used only USHCN version 2 data from the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar.”
Without knowing a priori which stations Watts & his buddies would select as “good”, Hansen managed to ‘homogenize’ the data so that all stations and the good stations show nearly identical trends and variation. Another neat trick!, The man’s a mindreading genius!
“I think the most honest “opinion” is the noise is greater than the signal and we need to do a lot more research.”
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/cet_vs_co2-Tfyq5.jpg Do you just see noise, or can you see a signal? If you have the raw data, readily available on the net without an FOIA request, you can plug it into Excel and get your very own confirmation of the correlation coefficient. If you need help understanding the math (like I do – I’m a college dropout because my math skills suck), try http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/how-long/. It would be good to know whether the temperature rise with 2X CO2 is 2 or 4.5 degrees, and a lot more research IS being done.
mandolinjon (13:30:28) :”…raw temperature data appear to be contaminated and or lost by the researchers at CRU. ”
A few links to just some of the allegedly “hidden”, “lost”, “contaminated” but freely downloadable data and code can be found at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ – all they have is the following:
Climate data (raw)
* GHCN v.2 (Global Historical Climate Network: weather station records from around the world, temperature and precipitation)
* USHCN US. Historical Climate Network (v.1 and v.2)
* World Monthly Surface Station Climatology UCAR
* Antarctic weather stations
* European weather stations (ECA)
* Italian Meterological Society IMS
* Satellite feeds (AMSU, SORCE (Solar irradiance), NASA A-train)
* Tide Gauges (Proudman Oceanographic Lab)
* World Glacier Monitoring Service
* Argo float data
* International Comprehensive Ocean/Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) (Oceanic in situ observations)
* AERONET Aerosol information
Climate data (processed)
* Surface temperature anomalies (GISTEMP (see also Clear Climate Code), HadCRU (alternate site), NOAA NCDC, JMA)
* Satellite temperatures (MSU) (UAH, RSS)
* Sea surface temperatures (Reynolds et al, OI)
* Stratospheric temperature
* Sea ice (Cryosphere Today, NSIDC, JAXA, Bremen, Arctic-Roos, DMI)
* Radiosondes (RAOBCORE, HadAT, U. Wyoming, RATPAC, IUK, Sterin (CDIAC), Angell (CDIAC) )
* Cloud and radiation products (ISCCP, CERES-ERBE)
* Sea level (U. Colorado)
* Aerosols (AEROCOM, GACP)
* Greenhouse Gases (AGGI at NOAA, CO2 Mauna Loa, World Data Center for Greenhouse Gases, AIRS CO2 data (2003+))
* AHVRR data as used in Steig et al (2009)
* Snow Cover (Rutgers)
* GLIMS glacier database
* Ocean Heat Content (NODC)
* GCOS Essential Climate Variables Index
Paleo-data
* NOAA Paleoclimate
* Pangaea
* GRIP/NGRIP Ice cores (Denmark)
* GISP2 (note that the age model has been updated)
* National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC)
Paleo Reconstructions (including code)
* Reconstructions index and data (NOAA)
* Mann et al (2008) (also here, Mann et al (2009))
* Kaufmann et al (2009)
* Wahl and Ammann (2006)
* Mann et al (1998/1999)
Large-scale model (Reanalysis) output
These are weather models which have the real world observations assimilated into the solution to provide a ‘best guess’ of the evolution of weather over time (although pre-satellite era estimates (before 1979) are less accurate).
* ERA40 (1957-2001, from ECMWF)
* ERA-Interim (1989 – present, ECMWF’s latest project)
* NCEP (1948-present, NOAA), NCEP-2
* MERRA NASA GSFC
* JRA-25 (1979-2004, Japanese Met. Agency)
* North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR)
Large-scale model (GCM) output
These is output from the large scale global models used to assess climate change in the past, and make projections for the future. Some of this output is also available via the Data Visualisation tools linked below.
* CMIP3 output (~20 models, as used by IPCC AR4) at PCMDI
* GISS ModelE output (includes AR4 output as well as more specific experiments)
* GFDL Model output
Model codes (GCMs)
Downloadable codes for some of the GCMs.
* GISS ModelE (AR4 version, current snapshot)
* NCAR CCSM(Version 3.0, CCM3 (older vintage))
* EdGCM Windows based version of an older GISS model.
* Uni. Hamburg (SAM, PUMA and PLASIM)
* NEMO Ocean Model
* GFDL Models
* MIT GCM
Model codes (other)
This category include links to analysis tools, simpler models or models focussed on more specific issues.
* Rahmstorf (2007) Sea Level Rise Code
* ModTran (atmospheric radiation calculations and visualisations)
* Various climate-related online models (David Archer)
* Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) (FUND, FAIR, DICE, RICE)
* CliMT a Python-based software component toolkit
* Pyclimate Python tools for climate analysis
* CDAT Tools for analysing climate data in netcdf format (PCMDI)
* RegEM (Tapio Schneider)
* Time series analysis (MTM-SVD, SSA-MTM toolkit, Mann and Lees (1996))
Data Visualisation and Analysis
These sites include some of the above data (as well as other sources) in an easier to handle form.
* ClimateExplorer (KNMI)
* Dapper (PMEL, NOAA)
* Ingrid (IRI/LDEO Climate data library)
* Giovanni (GSFC)
* Wood for Trees: Interactive graphics (temperatures)
* IPCC Data Visualisations
* Regional IPCC model output
* Climate Wizard
Master Repositories of Climate Data
Much bigger indexes of data sources:
* Global Change Master Directory (GSFC)
* PAGES data portal
* NCDC (National Climate Data Center)
* IPCC Data
* Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Lab: Atmospheric trace gas concentrations, historical carbon emissions, and more
* CRU Data holdings
* Hadley Centre Observational holdings
If you asked someone who can use google and distinguish propaganda from facts, there’s lots more actual data, software, and real science out there to be found. They’ll probably be more helpful if you don’t start out with accusations of fraud, wrongdoing, scientific misconduct or motivations of greed.
Doug S (18:20:37) : “Speaking for myself, I don’t trust a single claim that comes from CRU or any of this current crop of like minded political activists. They have zero credibility with me and are highly suspect in their motives.” Do you know how many of the 928 papers that Oreskes analyzed came solely from CRU scientists? Do you really think that every scientist since Arrhenius who studied climate and concluded more CO2 would cause global warming has ZERO credibility or suspect motives?
A book in agreement with that perspective is Henry Bauer’s Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, available here: http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Literacy-Myth-Method/dp/0252064364/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263190613&sr=1-4
Brian Dodge (22:18:47) :
Brian, how can one possibly have any confidence in the team of people that have cooked the books and sold the entire world on false, catastrophic predictions? I’m sure there’s good science commingled with the manufactured results but how in the world can the public know what is good and what is fiction? These “scientists” have thrown away their credibility and their careers IMO. Really sad, actually.
Brian Dodge (22:18:47)
“Do you really think that every scientist since Arrhenius who studied climate and concluded more CO2 would cause global warming has ZERO credibility or suspect motives?”
Not necessarily – the general consensus here is that they are just wrong.
The vitriolic character of much of the skeptical criticism of AGW is an understandable reaction to the arrogant and bombastic nature of the claims of certainty concerning global warming, combined with the incontrovertible political chicanery that has openly set out to suppress scientific development and communication of skeptical viewpoints and hypotheses. Among the many scientist posters on this site are some whose funding has been cut for not singing the praises of AGW whole-heartedly enough. (Analagous to the fate of Roman courtiers failing to praise Nero’s musical recitations with enough enthusiasm.) The existence of this web site points to the impossibility of such suppression.
Smokey (20:20:22) : “To the best of my knowledge, there are no ‘conspiracy theory groups.’”
Perhaps it would be enlightening for you to see a financial network analysis by the good Prof Wegman on the ties between Exxon, Lindzen, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Baliunas, the Friends of Science, Balling, the Cato institute, Singer, the American Petroleum Institute, Monckton, and the rest of their cronies[what you might call a “clique”]. Of course, there are plenty of deluded denialists willing to do their dirty work for free.
Doug S (22:59:59) :
According to http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html the people listed below are the top 50 most cited scientists who have written on climate change. They have published thousands of papers and been cited tens of thousands of times. Not one of them is skeptical of global warming. Almost half have signed an “activist” statement.
Which of these scientists will you go on record accusing that they have cooked the books, made false statements, and/or thrown away their credibility and their careers?
Please cite specific instances – e.g.”G. Gerlich and R. D. Tscheuschner in “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects within The Frame Of Physics”, International Journal of Modern Physics B Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275-364 made the false claim that radiation from cooler layers of the atmosphere to the warmer ground is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.”
Sir Robert M May
Sir John Sulston
David Tilman
F Stewart Chapin
Jean Jouzel
Stuart Pimm
Sir John T Houghton
Robert Costanza
Kevin E Trenberth
William H Schlesinger
Sir Nicholas J Shackleton
David S Jenkinson
Gerard Bond
Paul Falkowski
Chris Field
Robert W Howarth
Minze Stuiver
Peter H Raven
J Michael Wallace
Joseph A Berry
James E Hansen
James W Hurrell
Jane Lubchenco
Dennis V Kent
William J Parton
Jonathan M Gregory
Charles David Keeling
Philip D Jones
Gerald A Meeh
David Schimel
John FB Mitchell
Peter Liss
Kelly Chance
Stephen Pacala
Michael Hulme
Peter J Webster
Sydney Levitus
Richard W Reynolds
Georges Bonani
Steven C Wofsy
Tom ML Wigley
David Rind
John F Nye
Gene E Likens
Wally S Broecker
Tomomi Yamada
Brent Holben
David W Schindler
Inez Fung
William D Nordhaus
Peter B Reich
Brian Dodge (01:09:20) :
“According to http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html the people listed below are the top 50 most cited scientists who have written on climate change.”
So Brian by your own admission there are only a handful of scientists producing most of the support for the already falsified hypothesis of man-made global warming. It is also proved that this hypothesis has no predictive power.
Many of the names on your list are part of the CRU/Hadley/GISS/IPCC cabal, and as the Climategate papers show, their methods and practice behind their work can no longer be trusted. They colluded to try hide the raw individual thermometer & other proxy data, they tried to avoid FOI requests, they tried to subvert the peer review process and colluded with the MSM to promote their failed hypothesis.
There is no evidence for CAGW, the scientists behind the scam have been discredited, so I’m puzzled why you and the rest of the CAGW brigade still cling to your false belief?
Tom P
I plotted and lined up the HadCRUT data (only first 11 months for 2009) over top of the IPCC’s AR4 TS-26 graph.
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/ipcc_ar4_ts-26.JPG
Assuming the IPCC did the original graph correctly, this graph is correct as well without the spaghetti of several lines from woodfortrees.
The last 6 years are all below the scenario lines. This ‘lack of warming’ for such a long period is what worries the IPCC. Six years is too long for all of the forcings that the IPCC included without a significant volcanic eruption. Even four years is too long.
John M Reynolds
Tenuc (02:58:30) :
Good question. I think Brian Dodge is deliberately disregarding the very incriminating evidence contained in the leaked emails. He’s another believer in conspiracy groups out to get him, when it’s simply a matter of right and wrong.
Brian Dodge actually seems to believe that those people, who were caught strategizing on how to control and subvert the peer review process, who worked behind the scenes keep skeptical viewpoints out of journals, and who ran other scientists off of editorial boards simply because they expressed skepticism, were just honest scientists trying to warn the populace of climate armageddon. He can’t believe they could have been crying “Wolf!!” for fame and fortune. Sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
And it’s interesting that Brian is given the opportunity to post here, and link to his echo chamber over at realclimate – which would promptly censor his comments if they were skeptical of CAGW. People routinely comment here that their views are censored at RC, which is run on taxpayer-paid time by the same taxpayer-paid censors who were caught up in the East Anglia email net. How does that doublethink compute with Brian? Here’s how:
Down is Up, War is Peace, Black is White, Freedom is Slavery, Evil is Good, Ignorance is Strength…
Cognitive dissonance. The hallmark of the true believer.
Brian Dodge (01:09:20) :
Thanks for the list. It may prove useful.
jmrSudbury (03:56:57) :
“I plotted and lined up the HadCRUT data (only first 11 months for 2009) over top of the IPCC’s AR4 TS-26 graph.”
There’s no temperature data after 2005 in the plot you link to, though I’m sure the IPCC figure is correct.
“The last 6 years are all below the scenario lines. This ‘lack of warming’ for such a long period is what worries the IPCC.”
Really?
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
Tom P
What are you talking about? There are temperature data after 2005 because I put them on.
Here is that graph link again in case you clicked on the wrong link:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/ipcc_ar4_ts-26.JPG
Since you are only fisking, let me know when you check the above link.
John M Reynolds
Brian Dodge (01:09:20) :
Brian, I do appreciate your responses. I don’t want to fall into the trap of having a closed mind on any of these very complex issues. Still, for me the underlying issue is credibility of the people out on the tip of the AGW spear making claims in public “the science is settled”. The science is settled?! From the little I have been able to glean from this and other excellent blogs and the very knowledgeable people, perhaps some of those you referenced, the science seems to be far from settled. The climate and weather appear to be a very, very complex systems with many of the individual components fairly well understood but the interaction between these components are largely unknown. Fool me once shame on them, fool me twice shame on me.
>> Brian Dodge (23:34:17) :
Perhaps it would be enlightening for you to see a financial network analysis by the good Prof Wegman on the ties between Exxon, Lindzen, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Baliunas, the Friends of Science, Balling, the Cato institute, Singer, the American Petroleum Institute, Monckton, and the rest of their cronies[what you might call a “clique”].<<
If you are going to delve into the realm of ad hominem attacks, which seems to be the fall-back position of the CO2-hater crowd when their scientific arguments fail, you might note that Big Government spends a thousand times more every year than Big Oil has spent total. Could you please give a subset of the 50 names you listed who have received less money from Big Government than the amount (say) Lindzen received from Big Oil?
jmrSudbury (05:56:43) :
OK – I see – it’s the little grey balls. A key might have helped…
All you’ve done is to replot a figure linked to in a comment several days ago: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
But that figure gives some important additional information that is not included in your overlay. From the 95% confidence limits of the grey envelope you can see both HadCRUT and GISTEMP are currently well within one standard deviation of the mean IPCC AR4 projection. Why on earth do you think this “worries the IPCC”?
>> Tom P (10:01:47) :
You are mistaken. As it quite clearly states in the Pielke reference these are the “IPCC global average temperature predictions from 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007.” <<
I see four straight lines drawn through the data existing at the time the lines were drawn. Did the IPCC really just predict straight lines?
In any case, my point stands; the predictions appear better than they really are because much of the plot shows them matched against the backfitted measurements. Just view the predictions against the measurements taken AFTER each line is drawn. 1995 looks pretty good, but is also the lowest of the predictions; if it's right we have an insignificant 1.8 degrees warming by 2100.
Brian Dodge (20:41:06) Thank you for your helpful response to my query. I am guilty of reacting to the many comments made on this blog and others concerning the relaibility of raw temperature data. Perhaps only Mann and the CRU are guilty of using data for which the equipment was not calibrated or for which the site was subject to errors. I greatly appreciate the time you took to provide the list in your response to me. It should be a great help to many other bloggers.
Tom_R (08:37:12) :
“Did the IPCC really just predict straight lines?”
For shorter periods of a decade or two the IPCC projections are very close to linear. Over several decades the projections rise faster.
“1995 looks pretty good, but is also the lowest of the predictions; if it’s right we have an insignificant 1.8 degrees warming by 2100.”
With the warming of the previous century, that makes about 2.5 C in all. That’s a third of the warming associated with the temperature cycles of the ice ages, so hardly insignificant. Of course this assumes no acceleration in the warming rate.
Tom P
I don’t know what you are talking about. I made that graph this morning. Like I said, I took the IPCC AR4 TS 26 figure linked below.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-ts-26.html
That graph already has black observed temperature dots on it. They are the HadCRUT yearly average temperatures. I overlayed the same points as well as the years beyond 2005.
Are we on the same page so far?
John M Reynolds
>> Tom P (09:39:15) :
With the warming of the previous century, that makes about 2.5 C in all. That’s a third of the warming associated with the temperature cycles of the ice ages, so hardly insignificant. Of course this assumes no acceleration in the warming rate. <<
2.5 degrees of warming is insignificant compared to the daily temperature range on all but isolated tropical islands.
And it also assumes that the observed warming 1990-2009 is not the rising and top section of a sinusoid, which fits the historical ups and downs much better than either a straight line or a rising line.
Golly! I’ve been reading over at RealClimate. Apparently I’m supposed to still be freaking out. A half a degree variance of global temperature over a 35-year span! Surely there’s no way that could be natural.
Tom_R (11:05:02) :
“2.5 degrees of warming is insignificant compared to the daily temperature range on all but isolated tropical islands.”
Yes, 8 C is a typical daily variation in temperature. This happens to be the same size as the temperature variations seen during ice-age cycles. However, we fortunately don’t get icesheets appearing and disappearing or sea levels rising and falling by 100 m each day!
You’ve got the timescales of the Earth’s response very confused if you don’t think there’s anything to worry about here.
Smokey (04:56:58) : Tenuc (02:58:30) :
“…only a handful”
“They colluded to try hide the raw individual thermometer & other proxy data, they tried to avoid FOI requests, they tried to subvert the peer review process and colluded with the MSM…”
Dudes, if you had bothered to actually click on the link, you would have noticed that there are over 2000 scientists with statistics of cites and papers on the list. I just spotted you the top 2-1/2 percent. 13 are from the University of East Anglia(CRU). 37 from Hadley, 14 from GISS. ~620 were IPCC authors. Did the other 1400 scientists deliberately falsify data in order to get published, or are they just too stupid to know that the” cabal” is lying? Name someone from either my list or the larger linked list who you think is actually part of the cabal, and give us a link.
Since I’m not afraid of using real names, mine or others, I’ll help you get started: according to the stolen email file http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=498&filename=1109021312.txt, Phil Jones said “Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !” (In the same circumstances, I might have said “these morons pestering me for data couldn’t pour FOIA from a boot – don’t tell them instructions are printed on the bottom!” – YMMV)
One down, #28 on the list, still 2000+ to go. Next down, #29 Gerald A Meehl; not at GISS, UEA, or Hadley, but published in IPCC AR4. Do You think he is part of the cabal, just falsifying data to get published, or just too stupid to know the difference?
Vukcevic (02:49:51) “[…] global magnetic anomaly, sweeps are in 10 degree steps at 10 years intervals. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC1.htm “
I look forward to seeing the time-series of spatial-maps when you have it ready. I would suggest normalization based on the all-time global minimum & maximum to ensure a static color-scheme. If there is drift in the time-series, you may need to plot the first derivative (smoothed over a dominant temporal mode if there are high-frequency oscillations in the differences).
ryancmc:
Mark your second comment pretty much hits on exactly what I was talking about.
Alright. Well I can tell that you weren’t trying to mislead, but I think what you said about “nobody uses the scientific method anymore” is a misstatement. Perhaps you were misinformed by your teachers. It is being used by many fields of research to the best that it can be applied. Like I said, if they don’t have a control, it’s likely they incorporate that uncertainty into the error, so they would be compensating for not having it. That to me still fits within the parameters of the scientific method. My guess is the same is done in cases where perfect repeatability is difficult or impossible.
I had the thought after I wrote my comment that astronomers have searched for and found phenomena in the Universe that they can use as a kind of “control”. For example neutron stars have a very regular rotation cycle and they put out a consistent “on-off” signal. I’ve also heard that when astronomers are observing a galaxy that supernovae occur on a regular basis that can be predicted. And last I checked, scientists still consider the speed of light to be constant. So in terms of checking their results about time against a “control”, they have those things.
As I heard physicist Michio Kaku say recently, “Science is done by the seat of your pants.”
I think what the more critical comments on here have been saying is that the sharing of all data (including code and data for models), and the inclusion of all testable theories are important to the scientific method, as well as the independent verification of results, including making models and results available to mathematicians/statisticians who can do a “sanity check” on the results.
ryancmc:
A word about how science is taught in public schools and such. I don’t know your background. Maybe you had it better than this, but I’ve found by looking back at how I was taught science in the public schools that I wasn’t getting the full sense of what science really was. You probably already know most of this (or all), but in real science you come up with your own hypotheses, you design your own experiments, and you make your best guess at what the error is. The latter is still a big question for me. I asked a scientist about this recently and the answer I got suggests that error is determined by statistical/probabilistic methods. When I had science classes in school the error was determined (I even recall this in undergrad physics) by taking our results and comparing them against a model that was already determined to be very good. But in real science that’s not how it’s done, because you’re venturing into new territory to begin with. What do you have to compare against, unless you’re researching something that’s a “one off” from something that’s already done (which I hear is done a lot these days)? And even then, you’d have to consider that there may have been flaws in research that your own is close to. You just have to think about the likelihood that you’ve missed something.
Re: the comments about who’s funding whom, etc.
This is really trivia when it comes down to it. It’s good to be conscious of the funding sources on the one hand, because that can tell you why there’s so much “noise” in the discourse about climate, but it doesn’t answer the question of “what’s happening with climate?” That my friends comes down to the data, and all that has been discussed about the scientific method. I personally don’t care if a scientist was funded by the government or an oil company. What I do care about is if the scientific method is allowed to progress (and we don’t have to get tangled in the weeds about whether it follows a strict prescription, so long as the basic principles are applied, of falsifiable theory, observation, determination of error, and a complete reporting of methods and results for independent review) so that research can be checked and something closer to the truth can be found. You would think this is like “Well duh!”, but in the field of climate research, at least when it comes to looking at the causes of climate change (not its effects), this process has been royally messed with by the CRU crew. I just wish those in the field would be honest about that so that the process of science can move forward.
Tom P
I am now assuming that we finally agree on the following graph:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/ipcc_ar4_ts-26.JPG
As to your strawman argument, the IPCC is not worried (yet) about the 95% confidence limits as you say.
What worries them is the recent trend that shows at best a lack of warming. Their models do not include a forcing that can prevent the expected warming for four or more years save large volcanic eruptions. There have been no large volcanic eruptions since 1991.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (17:15:48) :
HadCRUT shows three years of falling temperatures followed by last year’s rapidly rising temperatures. Three-year declines are commonly seen in model runs under all the emissions scenarios, see for example fig 10.5 in IPCC AR4. Hence the last few years of HadCRUT temperatures are quite consistent with the natural variability that is incorporated into the models.
@ Mark Miller (15:26:52) :
Mark you misquoted me. You added the word ‘anymore’ which actually changes the meaning of my statement quite a bit.
Other than that I agree with pretty much everything you said.
My take on it is that we haven’t actually found and wrongdoing from the scientists involved in climategate, just some petty behavior.
They need to be 100% transparent, as do all scientists. In fact I think that would have been a much better strategy for presenting their side of the story. Instead they tried to hide the data that could be cherry picked and taken out of context to spread misinformation.
So, in general the scientists were kind of douchy. What I haven’t seen though, is actual falsified data, or how climategate somehow discredits all of the other research from other independent organizations.
It’s a very interesting subject though, I still have a lot to learn.
Tom P
Look again. The temperatures have been, at best, flat since 2002. The year 2008 was a La Nina, so it should be lower than the others. As for 2009, it was a El Nino year, so it should be higher. The trend for the past several years has not been modelled. You may be correct that 3 year declines are possible with some combination of the IPCC’s chosen forcings. Six years without warming is not.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (10:00:50) :
“The temperatures have been, at best, flat since 2002. The year 2008 was a La Nina, so it should be lower than the others. As for 2009, it was a El Nino year, so it should be higher. The trend for the past several years has not been modelled.”
The IPCC projections are not designed to predict ENSO events, but to show the longer term trends under various forcing scenarios. They are not expected to follow every squiggle in the temperature.
“You may be correct that 3 year declines are possible with some combination of the IPCC’s chosen forcings. Six years without warming is not.”
Did you have a look at fig 10.5 in IPCC AR4? The models show periods of more than a decade without warming.
Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the Earth.”
Smokey: “Give me ‘various forcing scenarios’ for longer term trends, and even I will make a good guess.”
Brian Dodge (12:39:43),
As always, you turn the Scientific Method on its head, and call it science. But it’s not. The CAGW hypothesis – which specifically claims that a rise in human-emitted CO2 will cause runaway global warming – is the central pillar of that new and repeatedly falsified hypothesis.
In order to succeed, CO2=CAGW must falsify, or explain reality better, than the long-accepted theory of natural climate variability. It fails, because it can not make accurate or reliable predictions.
Only by giving numerous different “projections” can a random one of them even approach reality. That is the reason the IPCC shies away from predictions, calling its assumptions “projections.”
Predictions, unlike projections, must be validated. The CAGW hypothesis is literally invalid. It doesn’t explain reality, and it can not make accurate predictions.
Based primarily on computer models, and on circular studies fueled by grant money, which cite similar studies that cite others, which in turn cite the originals in self-reinforcing circular appeals to authority, the CO2=CAGW hypothesis can not falsify the theory of natural climate variability – which shows that the current climate is well within its long term natural variability parameters.
Nothing unusual is happening regarding global temperatures. Nothing. In fact, the current climate is extremely benign, and even planet Earth laughs at the rent-seeking hubris of the ethics-challenged AGW crowd, by cooling as CO2 rises. Notify us when the global temperature goes outside of its historical parameters.
The papers cited have one recurring theme: they all rely on the argumentum ad ignorantiam: the fallacy of assuming that something is true, simply because it hasn’t been proven false.
As Einstein pointed out in his retort to 100 scientists who signed an open letter claiming his theory of relativity was wrong: ”To defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.”
Climatologist Roy Spencer points out: “No one has falsified the theory that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability.” That is what the Scientific Method says must be falsified. Your citations only have the effect of trying to prove a negative. They have not falsified the theory that what is being observed is anything except natural climate variability.
By turning the Scientific Method upside down, and demanding that their own ‘studies’ must be falsified, rather than the prevailing theory of natural climate variability, the alarmist crowd has made an unscientific argument. It isn’t based on the Scientific Method, it is only rhetoric.
Trumping your relatively small list, there are currently more than thirty thousand signers – including more than 9,000 PhD’s – all with degrees in the hard sciences, who have downloaded, printed [no emails accepted], signed and mailed in the following statement:
How have we arrived at this juncture, in which the long-accepted Scientific Method is disregarded, or even more ridiculous, the false claims that the Scientific Method has not been central to the enormous progress in health and living standards? The answer is that money and status have perverted science. The leaked emails show corrupted scientists discussing how they fabricated temperature data in wholesale lots in order to promote their grant funding alarmism.
To understand how we have arrived at this point, a little history of the IPCC is very helpful: click. Keep in mind that the usual ad hominem response means that is all the alarmist contingent has to offer.
Tom P
Yes, I did look at fig 10.5. It is irrelevant without knowing the causes of the cooling periods. What matters is what is causing THIS lack of warming period.
The ENSO events like La Nina and El Nino are called natural variation and don’t last much more than a year and a half on their own. There is no single natural variation acknowledged by the IPCC that can cause 6 years or more of no warming that is happening now. There was no large volcanic eruption, and I have not seen any data showing a sudden huge surge in sulpher emissions. This negative forcing is not in their models. What is causing the current lack of warming? That is the question.
John M Reynolds
Smokey (12:34:02) :
Since you can’t answer my challenge and actually name any scientist who committed fraud, but want to move the goal posts to another area, I’ll play along.
You say “In order to succeed, CO2=CAGW must falsify, or explain reality better, than the long-accepted theory of natural climate variability. It fails, because it can not make accurate or reliable predictions.” By all means. let us begin to “explain reality”
Absent a greenhouse effect, thebalance between incoming solar radiation and outbound (greybody) thermal radiation would result in an earth average temperature much lower, ~245 K, than it is, ~288 K. (Fourier 1820)
CO2 and water vapor, being a polyatomic gases, absorb infrared radiation. (Tyndall 1850)
Increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere will:
1. Raise the average temperature.(even though the sun is getting slightly dimmer – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/offset:-1366/mean:10/scale:0.5/plot/hadcrut3vnh/mean:30/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.008/offset:-2.6)
2. Because of the difference in albedo between water and land, the difference will be larger in the Northern hemisphere.(http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page29.htm)
3. Because of albedo feedbackas the ice melts, warming will be greater at the pole(http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2008.jpg) and higher altitudes(http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/img/5-9.jpg)
4. Because the relative humidity will stay the same, but absolute humidity will increase with rising temperatures, nighttime temperatures will increase more than daytime temperatures.(http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp)
[predicted by Arrhenius in 1896 with a greatly simplified and therefore inaccurate, but generally correct model calculated by hand.
The links are to observations that “validate” his predictions; although inaccurate, e.g.”doubling CO2 will cause temperatures to increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees C” is not the same as wrong-“CO2 does not cause global warming”]
What “prevailing theory of natural climate variability” accounts for the collapse of ice sheets 6-11 thousand years old, that somehow managed to survived the Medieval European Warm Period? A recent post on RealClimate posited “The oceans are potentially free to both cool and warm as they like and take the global temperatures along with them” but I think that a theory requiring the oceans have a mind of their own violates the First Law of Thermodynamics.
How can the “…the observed temperature changes” of increasing temperatures, causing loss of Summer ice in areas that have been permanently covered for many millenia, be”… a consequence of natural variability” such as the periodic ups and downs of ENSO, PDO, NAO,or other observed cooling forcings such as Milankovic cycles or the decline in TSI and increase in GCR?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:10/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vnh/mean:30/from:1900/offset:0.4/plot/sidc-ssn/scale:0.002/mean:10/from:1900
“Trumping your relatively small list, there are currently more than thirty thousand signers – including more than 9,000 PhD’s – all with degrees in the hard sciences…”
I’ll see your list of doctors, lawyers, economists, and if memory serves me correctly, a Spice Girl or two and some fictitious characters, and raise you with
the national science academies-
* of Australia,
* of Belgium,
* of Brazil,
* of Cameroon,
* Royal Society of Canada,
* of the Caribbean,
* of China,
* Institut de France,
* of Ghana,
* Leopoldina of Germany,
* of Indonesia,
* of Ireland,
* Accademia nazionale delle scienze of Italy,
* of India,
* of Japan,
* of Kenya,
* of Madagascar,
* of Malaysia,
* of Mexico,
* of Nigeria,
* Royal Society of New Zealand,
* Russian Academy of Sciences,
* of Senegal,
* of South Africa,
* of Sudan,
* Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
* of Tanzania,
* of Uganda,
* The Royal Society of the United Kingdom,
* of the United States,
* of Zambia,
* and of Zimbabwe.
plus
American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, European Science Foundation, Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, American Geophysical Union, European Federation of Geologists, European Geosciences Union, Geological Society of America, Geological Society of Australia, International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, National Association of Geoscience Teachers, American Meteorological Society, Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Royal Meteorological Society (UK), World Meteorological Organization, American Quaternary Association, International Union for Quaternary Research, American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, American Society for Microbiology, Australian Coral Reef Society, Institute of Biology (UK), Society of American Foresters, The Wildlife Society (international), World Federation of Public Health Associations, and World Health Organization. The scientists in these organizations support the conclusions of the IPCC, are already seeing the adverse effects of global warming in many disciplines, and expect them to get worse. In 2007, even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists changed their policy statement which rejected the finding of significant human influence on recent climate, because the “…statement is not supported by a significant number of our members and prospective members.”
By “usual ad hominem response” do you mean “corrupted scientists”, “alarmist crowd”, http://ubama.org/algore_believe.jpg, “Meehl is an idiot”???
jmrSudbury (05:10:45) :
“I did look at fig 10.5. It is irrelevant without knowing the causes of the cooling periods.”
It is very relevant. The IPCC models incorporate both forcings and natural variability and show that extended periods of cooling are possible even when there is a long-term warming trend. This contradicts your claim that such models cannot explain a few years’ flat temperatures.
“What matters is what is causing THIS lack of warming period.”
As to why a continuous forcing might result in the plateau in temperatures seen since 2002, I would suggest atmosphere-ocean coupling and the much greater heat storage capacity of the the oceans might be relevant here.
“What is causing the current lack of warming?”
Currently we’re very much warming! November was a record warm month as measured by UAH and January is heading in the same direction. It looks like we might be about to see a very large amount of stored energy released from the oceans this year. Have a look at the similarity between the latest RSS anomaly map and December 1997:
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/1599/rssdec20091997.png
jmrSudbury (05:10:45) :
“There is no single natural variation acknowledged by the IPCC that can cause 6 years or more of no warming that is happening now.”
I think you are conflating “acknowledged” with “identified” or “explained”. Clearly the models can’t include unknown mechanisms, and with the known mechanisms that are included, they create 10+ years of cooling in some runs. It is also known that although the models do produce behaviors like ENSO, they don’t accurately capture the timing and magnitude of events like the ’98 spike. The 95% confidence levels of the models cover most, but not all, of the observed temperature excursions from the mean trend; they still do a pretty good job of approximating the upward noisy trajectory of temperature. see http://www.imagenerd.com/show.php?_img=ipccgistemp-a47CE.jpg .
The biggest science question right now is can we do better parameterization of cloud behavior, or will it require models with much denser (cloud size) grid cells and better understanding of the physical processes driving cloud formation. Lindzen and Choi (GRL2009) suggests that the parameterization should produce less positive water vapor feedback because of more clouds, but Trenberth, Fasullo, O’Dell and Wong(GRL2010) note that LC09 analysis is sensitive to chosen endpoints, and a moth or two change produces a more positive feedback. Forster & Gregory (JC2006) , in a similar analysis which was not limited to the tropics like LC09, also produced more positive water vapor-cloud feedbacks. Chung, Yeomans and Soden(AGU: in press) compare satellite radiation measurements with the models and find that the current models accurately reflect the overall interaction of water vapor-cloud feedbacks and temperature forcing even though there are large intermodel and spatiotemporal variations.
The biggest policy question is, over the next 25 years, do we invest trillions to push the economy towards employing more people building windmills, solar cells, concentrating solar thermal powerplants, geothermal, and wave/tidal power plants,(not “destroying the economy”) based on what we know about the science, or do we continue BAU, ” invest” trillons in fossil fuel profits(exxon-$40bnX25yr=1trillion, just one company), betting that some as yet unsubstantiated GCR/solar/cloud iris feedback will magically appear to bring back the glaciers, arctic sea ice, ice shelves, 500+ cubic kilometers per year of the Greenland ice sheet, and lower the sea level?
Brian Dodge (07:14:59) :
“Since you can’t answer my challenge and actually name any scientist who committed fraud…”
I didn’t think anyone could be serious who actually believes there is no fraud exposed in climategate. But since you’re still demanding an example, one that occurs to me is the ongoing fraud charge filed by Dr Doug Keenan against Wei-Chyung Wang. In their emails, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley and others were also discussing damage control on behalf of Wang. Wigley essentially agreed with Keenan’s fraud charges.
I’ve followed the Wang fraud case since the charges were first filed. Although a final determination is pending, it is interesting that the university clearly violated its own ethics policy by barring Dr Keenan from his right to fully participate. That is understandable, since Wang is one of the school’s rainmakers, bringing in over $7 million in grants.
The essence of Keenan’s fraud charge is that Wei-Chyung Wang published using data from 84 weather stations in China in his peer reviewed paper, and misrepresented that his conclusions were supported by the raw temperature data.
When challenged by Keenan to produce that evidence, Wang maintained for a year that it existed and he could provide it. But he never has been able to. His only corroboration comes from one associate in Beijing, who, according to Wang, claims that she can ‘remember’ the 19 year old temperature data from 49 out of 84 temperature stations in which Wang claimed that raw data exists. [I would sure like to have a memory like hers!]
Wang published based on his assertion that he referenced the data from all 84 temperature stations. Thus Dr Keenan’s charge of fraud [which, according to university policy does not require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but only a preponderance of the evidence. There is much more to this case; I’m just providing the basics here.]
In one of the eastanglia emails, Dr Benny Peiser comments on the Wang fraud charges:
And Tom Wigley comments in another email: “Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point.”
In another post, you don’t simply “allege” that these emails were stolen – you state it categorically. I personally think they were leaked by an insider who had an admin password. I could be mistaken. But since you state unequivocally that the emails were “stolen”, which means they were illegally taken by someone who had no right to view them, such as a hacker, please cite your proof.
And finally, neither your endless appeals to authority, nor the authorities themselves, falsify the theory of natural climate variability. Those appeals to authority are a red herring argument, intended to distract from the fact that natural causes of climate variability have not been falsified, and are sufficient in and of themselves to explain climate fluctuations. Insisting, without any empirical, measurable evidence that CO2, a tiny trace gas, is the central driver of climate change which will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe is looking more and more ridiculous. You know, it’s still possible to admit you were wrong about that.
I did not claim that IPCC models cannot explain a few years’ flat temperatures. I am saying that the forcings included in the models do not explain the past 6 years of no warming. Brian Dodge said that “… with the known mechanisms that are included, they create 10+ years of cooling in some runs.” Great. Thanks Brian. What caused the 6 years of lack of warming? If Tom P is correct that the oceans caused the six years to not warm, then that is something that has not been included properly in the models. If natural known phenomenon cannot be included in the models then they will never be reliable.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (11:21:23) :
“If Tom P is correct that the oceans caused the six years to not warm, then that is something that has not been included properly in the models.”
The IPCC AR4 models incorporate ocean-atmospheric coupling and the model runs do show multiyear pauses in warming. Your repeated criticism here is groundless.
If you are insisting on the prediction of exactly which years will have flat temperatures, that is certainly well beyond any current model. That, though, is hardly a valid basis for discounting the long-term projections any more than than aerodynamic engineers’ current inability to precisely model turbulence is a valid reason never to fly in a plane.
Tom P
Multi year is not as long as 6 years.
Of course I would not expect them to predict which specific years would have an el nino, la nina, or flat temperatures. That is a ridiculous fallacious strawman argument.
The IPCC ensemble of models has no forcing that could counteract their heavily weighted green house gases for 6 years like we just had. They missed something big or their big thing was vastly overstated or both.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (18:15:01) :
“The IPCC ensemble of models has no forcing that could counteract their heavily weighted green house gases for 6 years like we just had.”
By shifting the basis of your argument to the ensemble of models, you’ve just demonstrated the weakness of your point.
The ensemble averages out the random variations to produce a much smoother trend – it will not reflect the interannual variability either observed or seen in the individual runs.
Once again;
1. The IPCC models incorporate both external forcing and natural variability.
2. The individual model runs show periods of a decade or more with no warming together with a long-term warming trend.
3. The claim that IPCC models fail because of the observed lack of warming from 2002 to 2009 is therefore incorrect.
By the way, have you seen the current UAH global anomaly – 0.7 C – the highest value since the super El Niño of 1998. This really could be “something big”.
It has always been about the ensemble of models. That is one of the problems. The individual model runs do not tell us what forcings they combine to create a decade of no warming. This kills your second point. If they were able to explain using a smaller group of models, then they could get rid of several individual models from the ensemble. We do not qualify for the constant commitment scenario, but it is still included. You are trying to divert from the main idea. They have not been able to explain the 6 years of a lack of warming.
They are missing a forcing or have given a forcing too much weight. This kills your first point.
Apparently, you have no explanation for it. Others do. Keep reading. This is getting interesting.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (02:28:11) :
“It has always been about the ensemble of models.”
No it hasn’t – you can’t hope to reproduce interannual variability from an ensemble of models. Your criticism of the IPCC models has no statistical validity.
Smokey (11:01:28) : (or should I say “Nathan Poe”?)
Keenan asserts that Wang committed scientific fraud by fabricating data about moves of weather stations, apparently because Jones said Dr Wang was the source of the data, Dr. Wang said Dr. Zeng collated and transcribed the data from 1953-1984 and Dr. Zeng said that she was personally aware that the 49 stations for which she hadn’t had documentation hadn’t been moved, and that she no longer (as of the 2008 complaint 45 years after the fact) could [or maybe wouldn’t bother to] provide to people who were accusing others of fraud.
I assert that the emails were stolen, not leaked.
(The circumstantial evidence, not proof, is the hackers tried to hide their identity by using Russian and anonymous Chinese proxy servers, hacked into other servers trying to place the data in embarrassing places, and didn’t notify any news organizations or send them the stolen data-not things a whistleblower would do.)
You claim that because there’s no longer a paper trail that shows Wang is innocent of fraud, he must be guilty, “Although a final determination is pending”
I claim that the e-mails were stolen, since there IS a trail of IP addresses leading to Russian/Chinese hackers, and that the noisy “Climategate! Climategate!” rabble can’t even provide evidence that it was an inside job, let alone identify who is responsible. When the guilty party(ies) are identified, that will be a final determination.
I will grant you that my list of the major scientific organizations that have vetted the science of global warming and found it convincing might be seen as a “red herring” response to your “pink guppy” appeal to the Oregon Petition.
Pray tell me what the “theory of natural climate variability” actually is. Your link points to a mish-mash of excerpts from The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, CBS news, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, “science fiction authors” who “embraced the topic.”, the LA Times, and a verse from a song by The Clash. The page leads off “Fire and Ice – Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can’t decide weather we face an ice age or warming”. If this is the typical source of your impression of science, no wonder you are confused.
Tom P (07:01:13) :
How about looking at this from another perspective. You suggest that some of the models allow for a decade of no warming. Great. What forcings did those models use to come up with a decade without warming? Luckily, the IPCC listed all of their forcings.
With that list, we should easily be able to look up what forcings caused the lack of warming for 6 years. The problem remains that none of their listed negative forcings had a large enough magnitude to cause no warming for those six years.
I would be glad to be wrong about this. All you, or anyone, would have to do is let me know what IPCC forcings caused the lack of warming for those six years.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (08:52:47) :
“All you, or anyone, would have to do is let me know what IPCC forcings caused the lack of warming for those six years.”
Climate models, like climate itself, are stochastic systems – they contain both predictable and random behaviour. The forcings produce the predictable behaviour, such as multidecadal long term trends. The random behaviour, such as multiyear trends, is not deterministic. By rerunning the models it is possible to confirm this by seeing what are the repeatable outcomes.
A simple example of a stochastic system: lets say you have a biased coin which is twice as likely to turn up heads as tails. You win a dollar every time it turns up heads. Obviously there is a deterministic outcome to your gamble in the long term, though with random short-term results. Over one hundred tosses you should be ahead, but there will often be periods of many tosses when you are not making money:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/111/biasedcoin.png
It is as pointless to ask for a cause for one of these periods as it is for you to ask why IPCC models produce periods of lack of warming, even though the forcing trends are in total positive.
Tom P
“The random behaviour, such as multiyear trends, is not deterministic. ” That multi year trend from random behaviour is only a few years max. Six years is well beyond the random nature of climate. It involves a forcing. What forcing is missing or overstated?
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (11:23:14) :
“That multi year trend from random behaviour is only a few years max. Six years is well beyond the random nature of climate….What forcing is missing or overstated?”
You either can’t or won’t understand the behaviour of stochastic systems. IPCC models can produce six or more years of cooling with known dominant positive forcing terms. How did they manage to achieve the impossible?
Tom P (13:01:31) :
Your comment is illogical. You are suggesting that positive forcings can cause cooling. They cannot. The model runs must have used some negative forcings to produce cooling.
Stochastic incorporates both forcings and random behaviour. That random behaviour, or natural variability, explains why the average temperature of adjacent years varies. This variance is small. The larger changes have known forcings like El Nino and La Nina. The IPCC suggests that anthropogenic green house gas emissions are so potent that they will produce 0.2C of warming each decade. That did not happen for those six years. Wait. Let me check… Reload the page… Nope. No December data from HadCRUT3 yet. Still six years to compare to 2002. The average temperature for 2009 — an El Nino year too boot — should have been considerably higher than 2002, but
A large forcing must have counteracted that warming, or their positive forcing was overstated.
Moving on a bit, what makes you think that natural variation can be large enough to counteract 0.2C per decade of warming and able to last a decade? That is a huge amount of energy. Anything that large would have to be identified, so we can know how repetitive it is. That is the whole point of climate science.
Or are you seriously suggesting that the IPCC has included the idea that ‘we will loose a decade of warming every once in a while … or so. We don’t know how often, but though it is large enough to counteract the humans’ effect on climate, don’t worry about it. It is nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here. Please move along. But we are still 95% confident in our scenarios.’
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (16:05:05) :
“Or are you seriously suggesting that the IPCC has included the idea that ‘we will loose [sic] a decade of warming every once in a while … or so…”
Absolutely. In fact we hadn’t see any UAH anomaly temperatures above the peak of the 1998 Super El Niño until today:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
We’re currently 0.79 C above the 20-year average. This is highest anomaly in the UAH daily records going back to 1998.
Lose not loose. Sorry. — John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (16:05:05) :
“Moving on a bit, what makes you think that natural variation can be large enough to counteract 0.2C per decade of warming and able to last a decade? That is a huge amount of energy.”
Random periodic changes in the ocean overturning circulation (ENSO, PDO, AMOC) have long time constants and can transport large quantities of energy (The Gulf Stream transports about 1.3 petawatts).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/abs/nature05277.html
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:36
http://kkelly.apl.washington.edu/natl/hc_eof.gif
Wait wait wait.
Are you saying that natural variation can be large enough to alter global temperatures by 0.2C over a decade?
John M Reynolds
Darn. I forgot to hit refresh before I replied.
Now Brian Dodge suggests that the gulf stream is important. One of his links says that the gulf stream became 10 % stronger from the 650 year span of the little ice age to the 1850 to today (so far) time span. Should climate now be defined as at least 1200 years to remove the noise of the gulf stream fluctuations? Perhaps we don’t need to go that far. Maybe simply averaging out the 60 year PDO and 55 year AMO ocean cycles would be enough.
The problem with the ENSO is that over 60 years, the El Ninos and La Ninas, caused by the ENSO, get averaged out. Oh, wait. There is that ocean cycle idea again.
Perhaps we are onto something here. I am sure I saw a graph like that before. Oh, yes. Days ago a comment near the top of this thread included a link to a JoNova graph showing the ocean cycles.
http://joannenova.com.au//globalwarming/graphs/akasofu/akasofu_graph_little_ice-age.gif
[ Thanks to Smokey (05:01:00) 2010/01/09 ]
Hey. That could even include Brian’s Gulf Stream idea. I like it. All feedbacks are included as well. Nice.
John M Reynolds
jmrSudbury (19:03:11) :
“Days ago a comment near the top of this thread included a link to a JoNova graph showing the ocean cycles.
http://joannenova.com.au//globalwarming/graphs/akasofu/akasofu_graph_little_ice-age.gif
… I like it. All feedbacks are included as well. Nice.”
So after criticising the IPCC for being unable to explain pauses in warming of six years, you now propose in its stead a continuous warming from the LIA superimposed with natural cycles. You have rather overlooked that instead of six years of no warming, your new favoured theory now has to explain over eighty years of no warming!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1930/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1930/trend
Ha ha. That is funny Tom P. Eighty years! That is great. No. Of course, the cycle is about 60 years.
That same Smokey comment’s “click 4” link shows what you did wrong. You did not get the data from similar parts of the cycles. Doing what you did allows you to produce a trend line of a wide array of slopes both positive and negative. You also have to be careful to take years that don’t have El Nino nor La Nina. Finally, you need to use yearly averages. Comparing the January 1, 1870 to Dec 31, 1930 will not allow you to compare to the IPCC graphs.
John M Reynolds
Brian Dodge (08:49:45) :
Smokey (11:01:28) : (or should I say “Nathan Poe”?)
Thanks for the Nathan Poe reference. I had never heard of it before, so I had to look him up. It doesn’t seem to apply to me, since this isn’t a creationism/evolution debate, but thanks for adding to my internet knowledge ☺
You misrepresent the Keenan fraud charge against Wang. In its simplest terms: anyone submitting a paper to a journal for publication must be able to provide verification of all facts that they used as the basis of their study.
The burden is on the submitter. At first Wang didn’t say any records were lost; he maintained for a year that he had those records in his possession. Somewhere within the numerous links I provided is a letter from a university committee stating that sufficient evidence of fraud committed by Wang had been presented to upgrade the issue into an official investigation.
I knew it would come to this anyway, nitpicking any evidence of fraud that was provided. Cognitive dissonance will close a person’s mind to something that is obvious to everyone else. The Harry_read_me file would surely convince any unbiased observer that fraudulent activity was routine in the CRU, such as the straightforward admission that large chunks of temperature data were fabricated out of whole cloth as they went along. In case you can’t see it, that’s not OK. It’s a clear admission of fraud. And it is strong evidence that the CRU’s belief in the AGW hypothesis was a done deal; they believed in AGW to the point that they bludgeoned their ‘adjusted’ data until it said what they wanted it to say. And when there were large swathes of missing data, they simply invented numbers and plugged them in. And they provided no public citation, explanation or admission of fabricating data. That is fraud. Who was defrauded? The taxpaying public.
Most folks visiting this site [32 million hits so far] would fit your personal definition of “noisy rabble.” Maybe we’re all wrong. But I think there might be more than a few who would point out some problems in your argument:
First, if something is “stolen”, then what exactly is missing? And trying to put the focus on how the information was provided, rather than on the misconduct it exposed, is simply a red herring: “Hey! Forget that. Look at this over here!”
The real issue is the incriminating fabrication of temperature data that was exposed, and the shenanigans of avoiding paying taxes, and their treating of colleagues who simply had a different point of view as enemies to be professionally destroyed, and their use of threats against journals and individuals who didn’t toe their line, etc. Over a thousand emails paint a picture of corruption.
You may believe that your ‘circumstantial evidence’ leads to the conclusion that an outside hacker copied the emails, but it doesn’t. Hackers generally take everything they can get and dump it online, rather than, as you say, “trying to place the data in embarrassing places.” That’s something an insider would do.
Why would an outside hacker go to all that trouble? For what? And your argument about the use of proxy servers proves nothing one way or the other. It’s simply a means to avoid being identified, and it was used whether it was done by an outside hacker or an insider. If that’s the basis of your belief that it was a hacker, then you’ve got nothing.
Those emails and code were very carefully selected. That points to an insider. It is not the “noisy rabble” labeling the leaker the “guilty” party. The actual guilt in the climategate exposé belongs to those who committed scientific misconduct. Phil Jones isn’t currently unemployed for no reason.
jmrSudbury (02:35:38) :
“Comparing the January 1, 1870 to Dec 31, 1930 will not allow you to compare to the IPCC graphs.”
The slope I plotted is a linear regression to the full eighty years of data. The trend is insensitive to the exact selection of and points: in fact if you insist on using sixty years from the start of the data the trend is even worse:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1910/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1910/trend
“You also have to be careful to take years that don’t have El Nino nor La Nina.”
Funny you should say that now – you weren’t quite so careful in the past. When you were criticising the IPCC projections you took 2002 as your start of the period of non-warming. 2002 was an El-Niño year.
Given that there were further El Niños in 2004-2005, 2006-2007 and 2009-2010, and a La Niña in 2008 you have just totally removed by your own admission any basis for your original criticism of the IPCC.
You are reaching pretty far there Tom.
Neither 2002 nor 2009 were strong El Nino years. Compare 2009 to 2002, and the six years still applies. I am comparing apples to apples. There was still no warming. My original criticism of the IPCC is still unanswered, but at least we are getting somewhere.
Picking 1850 simply because it is the beginning of the record set makes no sense. Instead of WoodForTrees, which does not do the yearly averages that the IPCC likes so much, here is a graph I made almost 2 years ago of HadCRUT3 data that goes up to 2007:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/HadCRUT20080618.JPG
The dark blue line is the yearly averages. The pink line is the 5 year average and the light blue line is the 10 year average. I chose the mid-points of the warming periods as the start of each cycle to capture full cycles. I get these temperature increases:
1870 to 1930: 0.14 C
1930 to 1990: 0.36 C
The 0.14 is the background warming before GHG emissions took off.
With these, if the warming of the 1930 to 1990 period continues, then by 2110 the HadCRUT anomoly would be only 0.9C. If we return to the 1870 to 1930 trend, then by 2110 the HadCRUT anomoly would be only 0.54C. Here it is in a graph where the dark blue is still yearly averages and the pink is 10 year averages:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/MyModel.jpg
The MyModel graph has had the most recent 60 years (1947-2007) tacked on twice. This simplistic method is quite close to that JoNova graph.
John M Reynolds