Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
[see Updates at the end of this post]
Science is what we use to explain anomalies, to elucidate mysteries, to shed light on unexplained occurrences. For example, once we understand how the earth rotates, there is no great need for a scientific explanation of the sun rising in the morning. If one day the sun were to rise in the afternoon, however, that is an anomaly which would definitely require a scientific explanation. But there is no need to explain the normal everyday occurrences. We don’t need a new understanding if there is nothing new to understand.
Hundreds of thousands of hours of work, and billions of dollars, have been expended trying to explain the recent variations in the climate, particularly the global temperature. But in the rush to find an explanation, a very important question has been left unasked:
Just exactly what unusual, unexpected temperature anomaly are we trying to explain?
The claim is made over and over that humans are having an effect on the climate. But where is the evidence that there is anything that even needs explanation? Where is the abnormal phenomenon? What is it that we are trying to make sense of, what is the unusual occurrence that requires a novel scientific explanation?
There are not a lot of long-term temperature records that can help us in this regard. The longest one is the Central England Temperature record (CET). Although there are problems with the CET (see Sources below), including recent changes in the stations used to calculate it that have slightly inflated the modern temperatures, it is a good starting point for an investigation of whether there is anything happening that is abnormal. Here is that record:
Figure 1. The Central England Temperature Record. Blue line is the monthly temperature in Celsius. Red line is the average temperature. Jagged black line is the 25-year trailing trend, in degrees per century.
Now, where in that record is there anything which is even slightly abnormal? Where is the anomaly that the entire huge edifice of the AGW hypothesis is designed to elucidate? The longest sustained rise is from about 1680 to 1740. That time period also has the steepest rise. The modern period, on the other hand, is barely above the long-term trend despite urban warming. There is nothing unusual about the modern period in any way.
OK, so there’s nothing to explain in the CET. How about another long record?
One of the world’s best single station long-term records is that of the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. It has been maintained with only a couple minor location changes for over 200 years. Figure 2 shows the Armagh record.
Figure 2. Temperature record for Armagh University. Various colored lines as in Figure 1.
We find the same thing in this record as in the CET. The fastest rise was a long, long time ago. The modern rise is once again insignificant. Where in all of this is anything that requires billions of dollars to explain?
Finally, what about the global record? Here, you don’t have to take my word for it. A much chastened Phil Jones (the disgraced former Director of the CRU of email fame), in an interview with the BBC on Friday, February 12, 2010, answered a BBC question as follows:
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.
Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
So in fact, according to Phil Jones (who strongly believes in the AGW hypothesis) there is nothing unusual about the recent warming either. It is not statistically different from two earlier modern periods of warming. Since these warming periods were before the modern rise in CO2, greenhouse gases cannot have been responsible for those rises.
So my question remains unanswered … where is the anomaly? Where is the unusual occurrence that we are spending billions of dollars trying to explain?
The answer is, there is no unusual warming. There is no anomaly. There is nothing strange or out of the ordinary about the recent warming. It is in no way distinguishable from earlier periods of warming, periods that we know were not due to rising CO2. There is nothing in the record that is in any way different from the centuries-long natural fluctuations in the global climate.
In other words, we have spent billions of dollars and wasted years of work chasing a chimera, a will-of-the-wisp. This is why none of the CO2 explanations have held water … simply because there is nothing unusual to explain.
SOURCES:
CET:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html
ARMAGH:
ADJUSTMENTS TO THE CET:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/004482.html
JONES BBC INTERVIEW:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Jones also makes the interesting argument in the interview that the reason he believes that recent warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) is because climate models can’t replicate it … in other words, he has absolutely no evidence at all, he just has the undeniable fact that our current crop of climate models can’t model the climate. Seems to me like that’s a problem with the models rather than a problem with the climate, but hey, what do I know, I was born yesterday …
[UPDATE 1] Further evidence that nothing abnormal is happening is given by the individual US state record high temperatures. Here are the number of US state record high temperatures per decade, from the US National Climate Data Center (NCDC):
Figure 3. US state high temperature records, by decade. In the period 1930-1940, twenty of the fifty US states had their highest recorded temperature.
As you can see, the recent decades have not had record-beating high temperatures, nor are they unusual or abnormal in any way. Nearly half of the high temperature records were set back in the 1930-1940 decade.
[UPDATE 2] Here is another look at the lack of any abnormalities in climate data. I will add more as they come up. This is data on snow extext, from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab:
Figure 4. Snow cover variation, Northern Hemisphere. Transparent blue line shows the month-by-month cover, and the red line is the average snow cover.
So, nothing to see here. There is no evidence that the climate has gone off course. There is no evidence of the claimed reduction in snow cover which is supposed to provide a positive feedback to warming. In fact, the surprising thing is how little the snow cover has changed over the last forty years.
[UPDATE 3] We often hear about the vanishing polar sea ice. Usually, however, people only look at half of the picture, Arctic sea ice. Although you wouldn’t know it from the scare stories, we do have a South Pole. Here is the record of global sea ice, 1979-2006
Figure 5. Global ice area variation. Blue line shows the month-by-month area, and the red line is the average area. DATA SOURCE
This illustrates the non-intuitive nature of climate. As the global temperature was climbing from 1985 until 1998, global sea ice was increasing. Since then it has decreased, and currently is where we were at the start of the satellite record. Variation in the average is ±2%. Nothing unusual here.
[UPDATE 4] Another oft-mentioned item is tropical cyclones. Here is the record of Accumulated Cyclone Energy, for both the Globe and and Northern Hemisphere, from Ryan Maue .
Figure 6. Accumulated Cyclone Energy. Upper line is global, lower line is Northern Hemisphere. Area between lines is Southern Hemisphere
As you can see, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the accumulated cyclone energy either. It goes up … it comes down. Nature is like that.
[UPDATE 5] Arctic temperatures are often cited as being anomalous. Here’s the record for Alaska;
Figure 7. Alaska Temperature Average from First Order Observing Stations. DATA SOURCE .
The Alaskan temperature is regulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO shifted from the cool phase to the warm phase around 1976 [typo corrected, was incorrectly listed as 1986], and has recently switched back to the cool phase. As you can see, other than the step changes due to the PDO, there is little variation in the Alaska temperatures.
[UPDATE 6] There has been much discussion of the effect of rising temperatures on rainfall. Here is the CRU TS3 global precipitation record:
Figure 8. Global Precipitation, from CRU TS3 1° grid. DATA SOURCE
As in all of the records above, there is nothing at all anomalous in the recent rainfall record. The average varies by about ± 2%. There is no trend in the data.
[UPDATE 7] People keep claiming that hurricanes (called “cyclones” in the Southern Hemisphere) have been rising. They claim that damage from hurricanes in the US have been going up. Here is data on hurricane damage:
Figure 9. Normalized US Hurricane losses, in 2009 dollars. SOURCE
The figure above shows normalized US hurricane losses for 1900 to 2009. It shows an estimate of what hurricane damages would be if each hurricane season took place in 2009. The dark line shows the linear best fit from Excel. Obviously, there is no trend. This makes sense as there has also been no trend in U.S. landfall frequencies or intensities over this period (in fact, depending on start date there is evidence for a slight but statistically significant decline, source in PDF).
In terms of global tropical cyclone frequency, it was concluded that there was no significant change in global tropical storm or hurricane numbers from 1970 to 2004, nor any significant change in hurricane numbers for any individual basin over that period, except for the Atlantic (discussed above). Landfall in various regions of East Asia26 during the past 60 years, and those in the Philippines during the past century, also do not show significant trends.
[UPDATE 8] You’d think, from all of the shouting about the greenhouse radiation, that we would have seen some change in it over the last few decades. Here is NOAA data on average outgoing (from the earth to space) longwave (greenhouse) radiation (OLR).
Figure 10. Global Outgoing Longwave Radiation. NOAA Interpolated OLR
Change in the average OLR over the period of record is less than ± 1%, and change since 1980 is only ± 0.5%. The current average value is the same as in 1976.
[UPDATE 9] OK, how about droughts? After all, droughts are supposed to be one of the terrible things that accompany warming, and the earth has warmed over the last century. Here’s the Palmer Drought Severity Index for that time span, 1901-2002:
Figure 11. Palmer Dourght Severity Index. CRU self-calibrating PDSI Once again, despite going up some and down some, we’ve ended up just where we started.
[UPDATE 10] More on the Arctic. From Polyakov et al ., we have this:
Figure 12. Arctic Temperature Anomaly . DATA SOURCE
The study used temperature stations from all around the shore of the Arctic Ocean, plus buoys and ice stations. It covered the area north of the Arctic Circle, that is to say the entire Arctic.
This matches an analysis I did last year of the Nordic countries. Here is a result from that study.
Figure 13. Nordic Land Temperature Anomaly. Original caption says “I used the NORDKLIM dataset available here . I removed the one marine record from “Ship M”. To avoid infilling where there are missing records, I took the “first difference” of all available records for each year and averaged them. Then I used a running sum to calculate the average anomaly. I did not remove cities or adjust for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.”
Note that, as we would expect, the temperature of the Nordic Countries is similar to that of the Arctic as a whole. This adds confidence to the results. I show the trends for the same intervals as in Fig. 12.
Again, there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The recent Arctic warming is often held up as evidence for human influence on the climate. The data shows the Arctic warming from 1902-1938 was longer and stronger than the recent warming. There is nothing for CO2 to explain.
Figure 14. Changes in storms in Lund and Stockholm, Sweden. Increasing values shows increasing storms.
About this graph, the authors say:
(1) There is no significant overall long-term trend common to all indices in cyclone activity in the North Atlantic and European region since the Dalton minimum.
(2) The marked positive trend beginning around 1960 ended in the mid-1990s and has since then reversed. This positive trend was more an effect of a 20th century minimum in cyclone activity around 1960, rather than extraordinary high values in 1990s. Both the 1960s minimum and the 1990s maximum were within the long-term variability.
(3) Because the period between the 1960s minima and the 1990s maxima spans a substantial part of the period covered by most reanalysis datasets, any analysis relying solely on such data is likely to find trends in cyclone activity and related measures.
Can’t be much clearer than that. There’s no change in North Atlantic storminess.
[UPDATE 12] More on rainfall, this time extreme rainfall and floods. I took the data from Trend detection in river flow series: 1. Annual maximum flow, and used it to compare record river flows by decade. Here are those results:
Figure 15. Maximum River Flow Index for US, European, and Australian rivers.
The math on this one was more complex than the record state temperatures. The river records are of different lengths, and they don’t span the same time periods. Of course, this affects the odds of getting a record in a given year.
For example, if a river record is say only ten years long, the random chance of any year being the maximum is one in ten. For the longest record in the dataset above, it is one in 176. In addition, the number of river records available in any year varies. To adjust for these differences, I took the odds of the record not being set in that particular year for each stream. This is (1 – 1/record length). I multiplied together all of those (1-1/len) odds for all the records available in that year to give me an overall odds of that year not being a record.
Finally, I took the average of those overall odds for the decade, and multiplied it by the actual count of records in that year. This gave me the maximum river flow index shown above. If there were lots of short records in a given decade, we’d be more likely to get a record by chance, so the record count in that decade is accordingly reduced. On the other hand, if there were only a few long records in that decade, there’s not much chance of a record being set randomly in that decade, so the count would be reduced less.
As you can see, there is no sign of a recent increase in the adjusted number of records. Or as the authors of the study say:
The analysis of annual maximum flows does not support the hypothesis of ubiquitous growth of high flows. Although 27 cases of strong, statistically significant increase were identified by the Mann-Kendall test, there are 31 decreases as well, and most (137) time series do not show any significant changes (at the 10% level).
Once again, we see no sign of the changes in climate predicted by the UN IPCC. What were the changes they predicted?
Figure 16. Observed and Projected Changes from the UN IPCC Third Assessment Report.
As you can see above, there is no increase in extreme drought, precipitation, extreme high temperatures, or cyclone events.
[UPDATE 13] Oh, yeah, a pet peeve of mine. You know how they always say “Yeah, but nine out of the last ten years have been among the ten warmest years of the record”, as though that proved that the last ten years was an unusual, anomalous time?
The trouble with this argument is that in a time of rising temperatures, that is often true. The temperature is rising, so where would you expect the warmest years to be?
How often is it true? Thanks for asking, here’s the data from the GISS temperature record .
Figure 16. Number of “Top Ten” years in the GISS global temperature record up to that point that occurred in the ten years previous to a given year.
So yes, nine of the last ten years were in the top ten years in the record … but that was true three times in the 1940’s. So once again, there is nothing unusual about the recent warming.
[Edited to Add] I got to thinking about the IPCC WG1 report, which is the science report. People always claim that it contains nothing but science, and none of it has been overthrown. So I pulled up the Summary for Policymakers. Under the second section, called “Direct Observations of Climate Change”, the very first item says (emphasis mine):
Eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature9 (since 1850). The updated 100-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74°C [0.56°C to 0.92°C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the TAR of 0.6°C [0.4°C to 0.8°C].
Since the claim was slightly different than the one I analyzed above, I went back and looked at the top twelve. Here they are:
Figure 17. Number of “Top Twelve” years in the GISS global temperature record up to that point that occurred in the twelve years previous to a given year.
Once again, nothing unusual … yes, the earth has been warming, but not in any unusual or anomalous way.
Next, there is no “therefore” in the comparison of the trends. The mere fact that a number of the warmest years were in the last 12 does not guarantee an increase in the trend. If the post 2000 trend continued to increase regularly and very slightly, there would always be 12 of the warmest years in the last 12 … but the 100 year trend would steadily decrease.
[UPDATE 14] The predicted acceleration of sea level rise is one of the favorites of those who want to scare people about CO2. Since 1992, sea level has been measured by satellite. Here is the record of sea level rise over that period:
Figure 18. TOPEX satellite sea level data. The satellite measures the sea level rise using radar. DATA SOURCE
As you can see, rather than accelerating, sea level rise has been slowing down for the past few years. Another inconvenient truth …
[UPDATE 15] Extreme weather events are a perennial favorite among the forecast ills from purported climate change. I found good data on the maximum three day rainfall totals for eight areas on the US Pacific Coast. The areas are Western Washington, Northwest Oregon, Southwest Oregon, Northwest California, North Central California, West Central California, Southwest California, and Southern California. For each record, I ranked the results, and averaged them across the 8 records. This gave me a ranking index showing which years had the most extreme events over the entire region. Fig. 19 shows the results, with larger numbers showing higher ranked years (those with more extreme rainfall events).
Figure 19. Extreme rainfall events, averaged over eight US Pacific Coast climate zones DATA SOURCE
Abduction Willis!
Hey, are you going to help on the UEA inquiry? I’m setting up a blog
and will give you authorship rights?
mail me.
Re: kim (Feb 13 07:25),
anna v. 6:55:56. Please see what David Goldman, AKA Spengler, has revealed about an email from Greece. Please tell me you’ll be alright.
Do you mean the one in the Asian Times blog?
I hope I will be alright one way or another. Hope springs eternal in the human heart, after all.
We have lived through inflation of 30% 30 and 40 years ago, and survived. The problem now is that the government cannot print money and fool the fools as happened then.
I do not know about the content of the e-mail. I think it is more mismanagement than corruption per se, and selling political influence and socialism to the masses. We have three more times the civil servants we need because of this. In addition we have an enormous military burden: because of the belligerence of Turkey which continually threatens our islands and neighboring lands we are forced to keep a large army ( more civil servants) and continuously buy weapons. This last is the reason of the EU turning a blind eye in the past to excess borrowing since we buy from Germany and France.
The basic reason for the mess is the world economic crisis which brought forth the weakness of the greek economy.
It is true that people are averse to paying taxes, everybody. In polls 80% are saying they are willing to help solve the problem but when it comes to paying taxes, it is the other fellow who should do it. Tax evasion is an olympic game.
So, as it used to be in the former soviet republics, a lot of civil servants moonlight in other jobs not registered in the open economy : from helping in their wife’s shop to tutoring or driving a taxi while holding down another job, the majority of greeks are hard working, but hiding income from taxes.
It will take sometime to computerize everything so as to catch most of this.
What does Average Temperature Mean?,
It means that the maximum temperature has gone down and the minimum has gone up, is that the Jones & Wang no UHI effect or does CO2 only come out at night.
Andrew30 (12:29:45) : One un-realized prediction invalidates the Theory, that is why it was an is a travesty.
Sorry. Way too many indicators that we are warming.
Even Willis agrees that there is recent warming: “So in fact, according to Phil Jones (who strongly believes in the AGW hypothesis) there is nothing unusual about the recent warming either.”
Willis Eschenbach (12:27:12) : Thanks Willis. The semantics used by the “Climate Change” community has always confounded me. Your article goes straight to the heart of the problem, with the mis-use of the word anomoly, when we are actually discusing temperature variations. The dictionary defines an anomaly as: “Any occurrence or object that is strange, unusual, or unique. It can also mean a discrepancy or deviation from an established rule or trend”. As no rules or trends confirm the present existance of any strange, unusual or unique variations to the Earth’s atmospheric temperature, there are no anomolies, only misunderstandings, mistakes or mischievousness. For example, the dramatic jump in Global Temperature Anomoly, reported by UAH for Jan 2010 – up by 0.44 degC in a month. Now that was an “Anomaly”! At that rate, we’ll all be toast by Christmas!!
Also, the Earth does not have a “climate”. If it does, I would like to hear the definition from someone. Astronomers never refer to the “climate” of planets”, only to their atmospheric properties. I would venture to suggest that the USA does not have a climate – or Britain or Australia or most countries.
P.S. Willis: the weather records for the USA (Eastern seaboards), including the records kept by Charles Peirce of Philadelphia, to date cover 220 years. Canada, Australia and NZ have records going back 150 years or so.
Regards, Bob.
How about “Alclimists”? (allusion to Al)
They have put themselves in a position where they can’t back down from a bet. That’s the comeback you should make to their sneers, to put them in their place: Put up or shut up. Here’s a comment I posted a couple of days ago in response to someone who had run into a similar bunch of know-it-alls:
Ron Broberg (12:07:02) :
…the CO2 atom…
*snicker*
AGW CO2 theories arose from having some data that could indicate warming, noticing CO2 levels were going up, and trying to link the two. The basic radiative properties of the CO2 molecule may have been studied in the lab, but it was not understood how it behaves in the real world, in the atmosphere, and those properties alone cannot account for the warming. Thus AGW CO2 theories rely on “positive feedback mechanisms” involving H2O, which have not been demonstrated to exist but AGW CO2 theories need them therefore their existence is assumed and cited as fact, whatever they are.
The “A” comes from assigning blame for recent warming to mankind, thus gaining favor among the eco-crowd and making it a political issue. Which was bad science. For proper science, the concept should have been worked on until it could say for X atmospheric concentration of CO2 there should be Y global average temperature. Near as I can tell, this has never been done, and real research is showing they are quite a long way from doing so, if it is at all possible. What they do have is computer models using what they think they know that show what might happen if they are right. If they ever do get to X yields Y, then they can figure out how much of the recent CO2 increase is due to mankind, note how much added temperature this has yielded, and let the assorted political interests do with it as they will. And that would be correct and proper science.
(…)
You seem to think AGW theory exists to explain recent warming.
(…)Warming is the prediction that results from AGW theory.
Chicken and the egg logic. Noticing warming lead to AGW CO2 theories, which try to explain why there was warming and why there will be more. Warming to AGW CO2 theories to warming. If they could not explain recent warming then they would not exist, as they are expected to hindcast to verify their ability to forecast.
Well, if one accepts they exist for reasons other than generating funding.
Rob (13:13:29) : Rob, Could you please tell me how I can get a copy of the excellent video presentation by J Richard Wakefield. Thanks, Bob.
Thanks, anna v. That’s reassuring.
=====================
Two comments:
1. The question of whether “it is accepted that CO2 will have a warming effect” is open until all the feedbacks are fully understood. There is not even any reason I have seen to believe that the feedbacks are constant – they may well be very variable.
2. The question of whether decadal temperature trends are statistically distinguishable is meaningless when there are major autocorrelation and long-term time series factors involved. All that can reasonably be said is that common sense tells us from the historic charts that there is a lot going on we don’t understand and that nothing much seems to have changed recently.
DeWitt Payne (10:14:57) :
My guess is that the x axis is in decimal years and so your slope is 2.58E-03 C/year not month.
Too true. my engineering caution deserted me. Apologies!
What is evident from my plot is that the period from 1985 to present does not (yet !!) conform to the general linear trend. Adding a trend line to 1985 to present gives a warming of 4.4degC/century (got it right this time I think)
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/7086/cet.png
The current trend in CET is negative so there is a possibility that in a decade or so there will be a return to the .3C/100year average. But can we wait to find out?
Looking at satellite data:
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/6361/amsu.png
data: http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
the channel CHLT (no longer reported – too much of an incline??!!) gives a temp increase of 11C/century.
It would be interesting to know why this channel was dropped.
REPLY: Still can’t stay away, shiny new email address eh Bill? You never did respond to this after accusing me of improper conduct. Me thinks its time for you to be put into the troll bin, since changing email addresses and handles is a no no.
…
OK Fine, final question then. Your electronics company there in the UK has a contract with the U.S. Navy for some avionics test systems. Somebody takes that design, reverse engineers it, and sells a product based on your work. Is that fair use?
That’s the case with me here. All my pages have a copyright notice on them. I did the work for over two years, and Menne et al took the work and made something from it without permission, against my protestations even. Unless you are prepared to say your company’s designs should be fair game for anyone to use and profit from, I suggest you kindly refrain from criticizing my project further. – Anthony
Please excuse my lack of familiarity with the detail of this thread, but my response to Willis’ perceptive post is that there is indeed a valid question here requiring scientific research. The question is: as ~ 30% of the current atmospheric CO2 load, i.e. ~ 105ppmv, is of anthropogenic origin, why are we not seeing a uniquely definable global mean surface temperature warming signature indicative of this, noting that signfiicant anthopogenic CO2 addition commenced in circa 1850?
A closely reasoned and dispassionate analysis of the data supporting the 30% anthropogenic CO2 addition since 1850 is based on DELC13 signatures of volcanic vs vegetation vs petroleum vs methane, with the analysis found here
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html
Note also that the DELC13 data also indicate that ~ 55% of the total anthropogenic emission load is now resident in the biosphere and oceans. I found Ferdinand’s analysis compelling and robust.
” Bob (Sceptical Redcoat) (14:19:43) :
“Rob (13:13:29) : Rob, Could you please tell me how I can get a copy of the excellent “video presentation by J Richard Wakefield. Thanks, Bob.”
Click on the graaphic in the referenced posting. Left click to play in place, right click to go to YouTube to play.
(Sorry Mac owners – don’t know your rules.)
kadaka: Chicken and the egg logic. Noticing warming lead to AGW CO2 theories, which try to explain why there was warming and why there will be more.
Same error Willis made.
AGW predicts warming.
It wasn’t invented to explain it.
Warming did not lead to AGW CO2 theories. CO2 warming theories were advanced in the 19th Century. The issue was again addressed in 30’s and 50’s by guys like Callendar and Plass.
Modern AGW theories started their run in the 1970s – so their predictions predate the “recent warming” trend that Willis alluded to above. At least, come before a statistically significant trend was present.
Point to kadaka for correcting my atom ~ molecule error.
Truly snicker worthy.
Bob (Sceptical Redcoat) (14:19:43) :
Rob (13:13:29) : Rob, Could you please tell me how I can get a copy of the excellent video presentation by J Richard Wakefield. Thanks, Bob.
Utube,
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OjPJnEtfUE )
ha,
I like the large error bar argument. It’s actually right. But what people dont see is how “large error bars” are also used to “confirm” AGW.
For example, you have models that have large error bars and the measurements are “consistent” with them. meaning you cant reject the Null.
It’s funny how everyone ( except lucia) remembers that there are type II errors.
Oh well, glad to see nick point that out.
ot,
Saw this on realclimate,
Anand Rajan KD says:
13 February 2010 at 1:32 PM
Mr. Machanick:
155.Much as I dislike schadenfreude, the news that climate denier Chris Monckton has come down with heat stroke is a delicious irony. No doubt he thinks it’s a case of frostbite.
Kind of like how Phil Jones felt that the death of the denier John Daly was cheering news, isn’t it? I totally agree.
Can you believe any blog would allow such comments.
As far as I know, the only reconstructions which show otherwise are based on proxies, not actual temperature measurements. And also as far as I know, none of those proxies have been shown to be terribly good temperature proxies.
Anyone who says it one more time that the debate is over and the science is in, only proves he’s either a liar or a dumb idiot of the highest order. This thread proves my statement is true.
Oliver K. Manuel
“Pavlov’s dogs were trained with dog biscuits…”
Some of them. Pavlov trivia: he had to reject about 25% of them because they wouldn’t accept the harness. He called it the “freedom reflex.” It’s very odd that everyone learns about fight/flight/freeze and other assorted reflexes from Psychology 101, but not freedom. You’d think the psychology textbooks would at least mention it.
Squalor and Genamum (04:37:18) :
Hear, hear!
The whole argument is stupid.
Quite simply, there is NO record of energy contained, even in the atmosphere, let alone the Earth!
Cooling will be crowed about by the sceptics, warming by the warmists.
Until energy is monitored, there will be no settling of the argument!
Global temperatures say nothing.
DaveE.
Seems like the BBC have removed or re-written the part about models failing to replicate warming so it’s our fault!
Was there one minute, disappeared on a page refresh.
Hope someone has the original cached.
REPLY Try Google search for that story (you didn’t say which) and check google cache link
Willis Eschenbach dismissed rw’s query about the 25 year trailing trend with the put down, “If you don’t know what a 25 year trailing trend is, I fear this is not the place for an explanation.”
On the contrary, this is precisely the place to explain what you mean by it. Including the “I filtered it with a 17 year window” statement.
My understanding of it is that a value on your ” jagged black line” is computed from monthly values from the preceding 25 years, (though I don’t see how the 17 year window fits into this). This understanding is supported by your graph, where the start of your jagged black line is 1685 and the start of your blue monthly values is 1660, 25 years earlier, as far as can be judged.
It is never possible to adequately compare smoothed data from the end of a time series with that from the interior of the graph, because the final values of the smoothed graph require data from years that have not yet occurred. Using such a long 25 trailing trend exacerbates this problem. Since you were specifically wanting to compare recent rates of warming with earlier periods would it not have been better to use a much shorter period of time for the smoothing?
Re: davidmhoffer (Feb 13 12:41),
Yes, you did. Although it’s a common misunderstanding. For glacial/interglacial transitions, CO2 would act as an amplifier, not the principle driver, of temperature change. The same goes for albedo change (the fraction of incoming sunlight that is reflected rather than absorbed) due to the change in ice area at the poles. Would you accept the argument that a change in albedo has no effect on temperature because the temperature starts to go up before the ice melts?