By Harold Ambler
A new editorial in Nature is startling for what it reveals, especially the fact Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure about how hard scientists have it when it comes to media access.
Ehrlich is an individual who became an international celebrity by spinning one frightening story after another (about the death of the oceans, for one thing) who maintains, with a straight face, that he and his fellow scientists have an unfair disadvantage in communicating their side of the climate debate.
He is quoted by Nature as saying, regarding the aftermath of Climategate and the fact that skeptic scientists are finally getting a hearing,:
“Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”
People often forget: Goliath, right before the end, sensed that something was amiss.
For, ironically, among the most pervasive myths attending global warming is the one pitching David against Goliath, in which those touting the risks of damaging climate change are cast as David and Big Oil is Goliath.
The story requires observers to ignore the facts: Media, most scientists, and governments the world over have spent and received so much money on their version of events that they have collectively become Goliath. Observers must ignore, too, the reality that skeptic scientists maintain their intellectual freedom at significant risk. Funding routinely dries up; tenure is denied them; ad hominem attacks of the most vicious variety are launched against them from the Ivory Tower of academia, from the studios of multi-billion dollar news organizations, and from the bully pulpit of government.
read the rest at Talking About the Weather
johnnythelowery (08:34:14) :
Two sorts of inventive fiction come from East Anglia. The first is from the brilliant and prolific Ian McEwan who is a masters graduate of the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. The second is, of course, from the Climatic Research Unit.
Anu,
“Since you have trouble eyeballing where the year 2003 lies, look at this graph from another WUWT contributor Bob Tisdale:
http://i38.tinypic.com/zxjy14.png.”
This graph showing the grid is much clearer. I apologise – 2003 was indeed cooler than the following years. I have pulled off the following data points:
2003 – 0.1
2004 – 0.3
2005 – 0.3
2006 – 0.3
2007 – 0.3
2008 – 0.3
2009 – 0.3
So yes, I concede your point that there has been warming since 2003, but not since 2004.
Your last link, to RC on the Pielke criticism is quite interesting. It begins by restating Pielke’s criticism “There has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003.” Their response is not to say that Pielke is wrong, but that the time scale is too short to be statistically significant: “Pielke is referring to a 5-year period which is too short to obtain statistically robust trends in the presence of short-term variability and data accuracy problems.”
They then refer to the Levitus data and point to a positive trend but “with an uncertainty (both in the trend calculation and systematically) that makes it impossible to state whether there has been a significant change.”
So, Pielke say’s there’s not trend. RC says the period is too short to be meaningful but even if there is a positive trend the errors are too large to draw any conclusions.
I agree – they are both right. Yet against this background you try and fob me off with two further papers (both behind paywalls) that claim to show significant warming of the oceans, and another paper (Trenberth) that estimates that heat is being absorbed based on CERES data. If heat is being absorbed where is it? We’ve already seen from RC and Pielke both more or less agreeing that there hasn’t been statistically significant ocean warming over that short period.
And didn’t Trenberth also admit that there hasn’t been any warming and it’s a travesty that we can’t account for it?
IIRC, Cooper faced three or four opponents. He had one assistant. The opponents were knocked off (mostly, anyway) in a run-and-hide-and-stalk gun battle involving several episodes.
George E smith
You ask whether oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to “radiant heat”
Well now you have me bamboozled because I have no idea what that is. I do know that oxygen and particularly nitrogen are pretty transparent to “radiant energy”; but not to whatever that “heat” part is.
Here we are at the heart of AGW fraud.
It was John Tyndall in his book Contributions to molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat 150 odd years ago that originally proposed that oxygen and nitrogen were quote: “practically transparent to radiant heat”.
What you are attempting to do it seems is confuse “radiant heat” and “radiant energy” when of course they are one and the same. As for the rest of your mental gymnastics I have no response I’m afraid as I completely fell asleep.
Try this to keep things as simple as possible:
Air is 20% oxygen and 79% nitrogen and 0.0385% CO2
Inconvenient truth:
Air, pure oxygen and pure nitrogen all absorb more heat than pure CO2.
For proof, see here: “AGW Debunked for £3.50”
and for verification see here: “Specific Heat Capacity of Gases”
AGW R.I.P.
Don’t believe AGW is a fraud, know it!
http://www.spinonthat.com/CO2.html
Vincent (06:00:56) :
Anu,
So yes, I concede your point that there has been warming since 2003
———-
There, was it so hard to admit you were wrong ?
Yes, I agree that scientific papers should not be behind paywalls on the Internet – having them published on paper and sold for exorbitant prices to University libraries is probably holding back the progress of science, if only a little (although the Journals argue this pays for the peer-review process, and they are doing a service). It looks like there is movement towards free access to published papers on the Web, even if only after 12 months:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/openmit/
I think you missed the important point in my explanation – not that short sequences seldom show statistical significance ( flip a coin – heads, heads, heads, heads is not statistically significant, at a 5% level, but heads, heads, heads, heads, heads is)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
The important point is that Argo floats now allow us to look at the ocean heat content down to 2000 meter depths, not the 700 meters you are fixating on.
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/FrHow_Argo_floats.html
At this depth, there has been no stalling of the heat content rise, such as the 700 meter top of the ocean from 2004 to 2009:
http://tinyurl.com/yeurhn3
Global ocean heat storage is definitely rising, in the top 2000 meters of the ocean, during this time.
If the Argo network were more numerous and the floats went deeper, we would have an even better understanding of where all the extra heat from global warming is going – the vertical flows, the ocean currents involved and their oscillations, how deep the warming is penetrating, etc.
Here’s a preprint PDF of the Schuckmann 2009 paper:
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
It’s the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans that doesn’t want to share the entire paper (just the Abstract), not me.
5. Conclusion
During the six years of in-situ measurements [2003-2008], an oceanic warming of 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm−2 occurred in the upper 2000m depth of the water column.
Major advances in measuring the global ocean hydrographic changes have been made by the implementation of the Argo observing system
In addition to the rates of global hydrographic changes, the large-scale spatial patterns of temperature and salinity variability have been estimated. With our finndings it is possible to classify time scales of variability within different latitude bands, at least over the period of our in-situ field. These show large amounts of interannual and decadal fluctuations at northern mid-latitudes which reach deep into the water column.
And from the Introduction:
In addition, the long-term global warming trend is also largly caused by warming in the Southern Ocean that extends deep into the water column
It is hard to see the warming “deep into the water column” if you are not measuring there – 0 m to 700m measurements are not looking at 700 m to 2000 m ocean heat.
Anu (21:47:58) :
Your sarcastic and condescending responses do not hide the fact that you selectively answer the questions you can, while ignoring the ones you can’t. Your entire point is moot, and instead of acknowledging that fact, you ask another completely unrelated question. This is intellectually dishonest, so it may be okay with you, but I will not engage in your distraction tactic. You made the assertion, it is on you to prove anything. All I did was ask for proof your assertion was true, but you asked for proof it was false. That is not how things are proven, but given your position, I am not surprised by the tactic. Maybe you are surprised to be caught using it?
Anu,
You have provided interesting information. But here is the problem I have. A renowned climate scientist – Roger Pielke sr – asserts that Argo data tells us there has been no warming since 2003 or 2004. You show me a graph which is completely at odds with what Pielke is claiming. How can a scientist who is presumably very knowledgeable in this area make a statement that is demonstrably false and why hasn’t Gavin Schmidt pointed this out?
The other problem is that if the upper 700m of ocean has not shown a warming trend as you accept, then why would the bottom 1300m be warming without affecting the top 700m?
The whole thing sounds very fishy (pun intended) and although I am not so strident as before, I’m not convinced by your assertions either.