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.
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