Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming
Michael Beenstock and Yaniv Reingewertz – Department of Economics, The Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, Israel.
Abstract:
We use statistical methods designed for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic theory of global warming (AGW). This theory predicts that an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations increases global temperature permanently. Specifically, the methodology of polynomial cointegration is used to test AGW when global temperature and solar irradiance are stationary in 1st differences, whereas greenhouse gas forcings (CO2, CH4 and N2O) are stationary in 2nd differences.
We show that although greenhouse gas forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcings, global temperature and solar irradiance are not polynomially cointegrated, and AGW is refuted. Although we reject AGW, we find that greenhouse gas forcings have a temporary effect on global temperature. Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.
Paper here (PDF)
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Stephen Wilde (14:20:11) :
I was going along a line even simpler: Coytoes and rabbits.
If you have an explosion of rabbit pop, the Coyotes prosper.
When the rabbits thin out, so do the Coyotes.
If we release a lot of prehistoric biofuels, there should be a biological response to consume them.
If they are not biofuels in origin, biological forces won’t eat them, geology will, and it’s really slow unless the oceans get really cold fast.
pat (13:54:28) :
(…)
**Potatoes and Climate change
In Peru, in the Andes, the potato is a vital, staple crop. Due to climate change, in particular a change in rain patterns, crop yields have been falling over the past few years. Now scientists, from all around the world have been working on different strategies to fix the problem…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0063zcn
(…)
An article about that was linked to in this WUWT post.
Peru’s mountain people face fight for survival in a bitter winter
In the article you’ll find a major cause of death is lack of medicine. As in any medicine. The one clinic mentioned had just aspirin. People are dying from lack of antibiotics. They are dying from lack of cough syrup.
How much medicine could be bought with the sums spent on AR4? With what has been spent and will be spent chasing “green energy”? People are dying NOW, but to “Save The Planet!” these “climate change campaigners” are willing to spend into the trillions of dollars to slay the fearsome CAGW dragon, which they assure us will save humanity hundreds of years from now. Will there be any of these Peruvian natives left to be saved then?
Doug Badgero (14:17:35) :
Also, what does stationary in 1st or 2nd differences mean as described in the paper? In googling the terms it seems to simply mean that the 1st derivative is a constant or the second derivative is a constant, respectively. Any help?”
I would expect it means the process is stationary in a stochastic sense in 1st or 2nd differences, as e.g., Brownian motion is stationary in 1st differences.
Richard Telford (14:43:26) :
“I never cease to be amazed how credulous climate skeptics are.”
I never cease to be amazed at how AGW enthusiasts believe failure to suppress information is equivalent to endorsing it.
If people have questions or doubts about the paper let me suggest to them what is always suggested to me.
1. read the paper it is all explained there
2. If you have any questions write the authors.
3. The data and the algorithms are all explained in the text, if you think it’s wrong then go do your own science.
All kidding aside, on it’s face, taken at face value, it’s an interesting analysis of the time series. But:
A. it purports to use a time series of data that many people question. You can’t have it both ways. well you can try.
B. It would appear to be at odds with physical theory. Which leaves us a choice: accept the physical theory and hunt for the mistake in the paper. OR accept the paper and reject a large body of science. This choice is determined by pragmatic values. Extant physical theory wins.
C. Aerosols missing from the analysis. Not sure what impact that has and of course people will speculate along predetermined lines.
Side notes: comments about when where and if the paper is published look silly to me having read all the climategate mails. Publishing a paper in a pal reviewed journal that does not require posting of the code and data is a meaningless exercise after the revelations of climategate. So, ask these guys to publish their data as used and their code as run. If they do, check it. If they don’t, their papers are as worthless as the words that pass for science in today’s pal reviewed journals that don’t require publication of turnkey replication packages.
I’m with pRadio at the top that, thank heavens, this is another nail in the AGW coffin. But then we still will have to deal with “guerilla” thermofascists in industrial and political positions of power as well as the general public, people who are superstitious as far as science is concerned and whose beliefs regarding AGW bear no relation to the findings of real science.
I defy anyone to come up with a reasonable physical mechanism to explain this “our results clearly indicate that it is not the level of greenhouse gas forcings that matters, but the change in the level”
If there are adaptive negative feedbacks with lags this could well be the case. Changes in ENSO patterns, for instance, or growth in biosphere activity due to increased CO2. Forests are cooler than deserts.
If the data shows this conclusively, the physics will eventually follow.
The AGW hypothesis itself is a transitory one – the planet eventually settles back to a radiation balance and the argument is about the rearrangement of heat within the surface-atmosphere system when this happens.
Richard Telford,
It means there’s a lag for something like the oceans to catch up and compensate.
It’s like the inflation rate. The inflation rate doesn’t actually matter as long as it’s constant because everyone can factor it in. It’s the change in the inflation rate that burns some people and makes other rich as they are forced to adjust to the new rate, depending on how they’ve invested and how their compensation is calculated.
On the scientific point, if global warming could be simply explained with radiative physics then this wouldn’t be the 15th year without any stastically significant warming (according to Phil Jones, former head of CRU).
_Jim-
Hank – Hank whats-his-name of RC fame maybe?
No that’s not me – for some reason I forgot the last half of my regular nick which is Hank Henry. I rarely go to RC anymore, and when I do I tread lightly. It’s funny how much time those guys waste getting their message just so.
David (14:13:02) :
Why is it in all the books that I have read on the subject of climate change; all the newspaper articles etc etc, I have not seen any mention of Precession. as I understand it (and I am not in any way qualified) all the calculations for a planetary rise in temperature are inaccurate unless Precession is taken into account as a base figure.
David,
It takes the earth 26,000 years to complete one precession cycle. Obliquity takes 40,000 years to complete a cycle. The contribution that a change in precession and/or obliquity contributes to climate over a hundred year period is correspondingly minuscule.
http://www.sciencecourseware.org/eec/GlobalWarming/Tutorials/Milankovitch/
Mike Ramsey
Has this paper been peer reviewed?
DCC (13:21:52) :
I think you caused the economics.huji.ac.il web site to crash 🙂
Better them that CA! 🙂
That would be “rather than”, not “that”.
OT – but concerns robust and glaciers.
Damn this, here is the source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/14/climate-scientist-himalayan-glacier-report
If the findings of this paper are correct (I presume they are until further notice) then it’s more than just another nail in the AGW coffin. It’s a direct nuclear blast that destroys it completely, and there’s nothing left to even have the need for a coffin. It is now time for the likes of Al Gore, Rudd, Obama, Jones, Mann, etc. to call a truce and re-think the whole AGW debate. Otherwise, they should now be called upon to defend their agendas and theories in a court of law and if found guilty be punished accordingly.
Common sense should tell one that the earth cannot experience permanent (or ‘run-away’) warming due to anything as trivial as a tiny rise in a natural gas. The planet would not have existed as it has for the last some-billion years if that were the case. We’d have all drowned under 100 feet of water before we’d gotten around to evolving.
@ur momisugly Richard Telford: “Constantly forgetting that the theory of AGW depends on an understanding of radiative physics.”
Actually, it depends on a lot more than that. But in the absence of such understanding (given that there is so much we just don’t know) it depends on faith.
Re: Richard Telford (Feb 14 14:43),
So who’s credulous? I haven’t seen much blatant credulity on this thread so far.
See: Beenstock & Reingewertz’s Presentation
Beenstock and Reingewertz do not include the affect of water as the most important greenhouse gas. It will be interesting to apply these statistical tests to the full greenhouse model including water. The conventional GHG models assume rising CO2 increases ocean temperatures which increase absolute humidity. Contrast Ference Miskolczi’s planetary greenhouse theory which finds the total atmospheric absorption will remain about constant.
Their basic claim is that CO2 follows the statistical pattern you’d get if you took a stationary time series (one where the distribution is constant over time) and integrated it twice. Temperature, they say, matches a stationary series integrated only once. These are two completely different sorts of behaviour that can’t remain correlated for long – so any correlations you do see must be spurious.
The cointegration stuff is about bending over backwards to allow for statistical oddities, because there are some exceptions to the above rule in which variables can be genuinely related even though they appear to have different orders. Cointegration occurs when two time series are both non-stationary, but there is a stationary linear combination of the variables (or their nth differences) – i.e. the difference between them has a constant distribution. This sort of thing can happen if there are certain sorts of feedback mechanisms. So they perform some additional tests to eliminate this possibility, which take up the bulk of the paper.
If anyone wants to check it, I’d start off thinking about their first claim, that the time series are of different orders meaning that the correlation is (without cointegration) necessarily spurious. I’d be concerned that all they’re testing is whether the trend in temperature is entirely down to CO2, which given the noisy jagged temperature and the smooth quadratic Keeling curve it is pretty obviously not. If you have a fast first-order process on top of a slow second order one, it could look first order to tests, although it had a strong second order component. They do cite some earlier papers which might be worth examining. (e.g. v, vi.)
But if that first argument does work, the second part with the cointegration test will probably go through on the same reasoning. However, I’m not a specialist at this sort of thing – you need to find a statistician and ask.
Basically, it’s saying that there is some sort of unknown feedback mechanism, adjusting some other quantity, that compensates for the effect of changes in CO2 within a few years. i.e. CO2 warms the atmosphere, which permanently releases something else, which cools the atmosphere again.
steven mosher
The point is that the IPCC, climate scientists, all of the people involved in climate modeling have already explicitly made this point.
You can’t explain the temperature changes in the last hundred years by CO2 changes alone.
As I said, I have my own skepticism about models.
But this new paper appears – on the face of it – and I only read it once – to agree with the IPCC!
Therefore, not at odds with “physical theory”.
So it is amazing to see all the cheering!
scienceofdoom
“For example – not that I am convinced by the argument – but the modeling community says that when they run their models with the effects of CO2 AND aerosols, they can explain the last 100 years of climate history. (Seems like a necessary but not sufficient proof of climate models..)”
They only do this by assuming the warming is CO2 because the models cannot explain the warming otherwise. Bottom line: the models do not understand the magnitude of natural variation and are thus stuck with a tautology.
I do agree, however, in not understanding exactly what this paper is doing. There seems to be something missing or something sideways. IOW, something I can’t articulate bugs me about it.
if this paper is correct then there must be some kind of rapid negative feedback mechanism that virtually eliminates all of the warming from greenhouse gas increases. It’s a mathematical approach so I think it requires some careful consideration.
A very strange idea indeed.
So if the effect of the absolute CO2 level is temporary, not long term, would it be going too far to say that CO2 affects “weather, not climate”?
Just had to throw that out there. 🙂
As an amateur I do not understand this paper. Nor do I understand Miscolczi’s paper on a constant optical optical density for the atmosphere. However, I believe I got the gist of both of these papers and I believe they reinforce each other.
Miskolczi claims that the semitransparent nature of the atmosphere in contact with an essentially infinite source of greenhouse gas in the form of water vapor from the oceans is in a state of dynamic equilibrium. As CO2 increases, a little water vapor rains out to keep the net optical density of the atmosphere constant. Remarkably, radiosonde data shows that the humidity above 300 mb has decreased over the last 50 years as CO2 has gone up. This fact rejects all of the GCMs that assume constant relative humidity (which is, or was, all of them).
This new paper by Michael Beenstock and Yaniv Reingewertz looks at the statistics of the changes in temperature, solar radiance, and CO2 and finds that the first and second derivatives do not match in a series of sophisticated tests that I do not understand. Taking it on faith, that they do know their statistics, I find it remarkable that they find that changes in the rate of CO2 emissions cause a short term rise in the temperatures for only a few years. This is consistent with Miskolczi who would certainly allow a short term change before equilibrium is re-established.
Here is my model of how it could work. CO2 absorbs IR from the ground. Due to the long decay time it collides with other molecules before it re-emits the IR. Each level of the atmosphere is heated by the extra absorption and CO2 only emits IR in agreement with the local temperature. Adding heat to the lower atmosphere will drive more convection and the lapse rate will continue to a slightly higher altitude. The tropopause becomes higher and colder. The stratosphere becomes dryer as the dew point at the tropopause becomes lower. Net effect: Constant optical density per Miskolczi and the statistics of temperature rise do not follow GHG per this paper.
In a shock revelation, the organization known as the IPCC said they agree with the new unpublished paper by Beenstock and Reingewertz.
A high level IPCC scientist admitted last night:
We hid the results away so that no one could find them
Finally, forced by angry public pressure to release the location, this top scientist pointed to an obscure website called http://www.ipcc.ch.
Now that the media have had a chance to examine the revelation, they found this shocking comment buried away in the Executive Summary of Chapter 8 “Model Evaluation” (2001 Third Assessment Report):
And later, even harder to find without actually reading it:
-More shocking revelations of stuff the IPCC never told anyone, coming up next hour..