Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the US House of Representatives, there is something curiously yclept the “Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming” despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming. They have a very professionally done website, filled with some of the most outrageous misrepresentations imaginable. It is designed to promote the “Waxman-Markey” cap and trade carbon tax bill by means of the historically tried and tested “Big Lie” method, viz:
All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
I’m going to take the website’s misrepresentations one at a time, as time permits. The first one is from a page entitled “Impact Zone – U.S. New England“, which contains this lovely photograph designed to tug at the heartstrings:
Figure 1. Photo of maple trees in New England, professionally chosen for maximum emotional impact.
The accompanying text says (emphasis mine):
Global Warming in New England: Slushier Slopes and Faded Foliage
Life and economic activity across New England is marked by the seasons ā maple sugaring in the spring, trips to the beach in the summer, the riot of color of the fall foliage, and the swoosh of skis and skates in the winter. This familiar cycle is already changing in noticeable ways.
Changing seasons
Since the 1970’s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues, by 2070 summers in Boston will feel like those of South Carolina today. By the end of the century, temperatures could rise up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the region. Cities across New England, which historically experience only one or two days per year above 100 degrees each summer, could average 20 such days per summer, while more southern cities such as Hartford could average nearly 30 days.
The character of the seasons will change significantly. Spring could arrive three weeks earlier, with summer lengthening by about three weeks, autumn becoming warmer and drier, and winter becoming shorter and milder.
So what’s wrong with that?
Well, once we note the conjectures (marked by the weasel words in bold), we see that most of it is nothing but unfounded, un-cited alarmist claims about imaginary future calamities. They have presented only one claim of fact ā that winter temperatures in the Northeast Region have risen by more than 4Ā°F.
Now, the USHCN has the data for all of the states, as well as by region. The Northeast Region is the data that starts with “101” in the first column. Figure 2 shows the temperature record for the four seasons, as well as the annual average temperature, for the Northeast Region:
Figure 2. Annual and seasonal temperatures, US Northeast Region. Photo shows winter surf in New England. PHOTO SOURCE.
As you can see, there has not been much of a change over the last 115 years in any of the seasons. The trend for all of the datasets is not significantly different from zero (winter p=0.06, spring p=0.15, summer p=0.34, fall p=0.68, annual p=0.06).
And more to the point, the winter trend over the last 40 years (1970-2009) is only 2.7Ā°F, not the “more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit” claimed by their website. Such a swing is not surprising in a dataset such as the winter temperatures, which shows a 10 Ā°F swing in one year, from 2001 to 2002.
But wait … there’s more. Because of the short length (40 years) and high variability of the 1970-2009 winter temperatures, the 1970-2009 trend is not significantly different from zero either (p = 0.12, a ways from significant).
SUMMARY: Their web page contains two misrepresentations of fact about US Northeast winters, two implied misrepresentations, and a big lie:
Misrepresentation of fact 1: the 1970-2009 winter temperatures have not “risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit”, they have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no rise of more than 4 Ā°F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.
Misrepresentation of fact 2: the 1970-2009 winter trend is not statistically significant, so we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no trend at all, much less a claimed 4 Ā°F trend.
Implied misrepresentation 1: The US Northeast winters are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the winter record.
Implied misrepresentation 2: The seasonal temperatures in the US Northeast are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the overall record for any season.
THE BIG LIE: When you look at the full record for the US Northeast, there is no statistically significant trend anywhere. Neither spring, summer, winter, fall, nor the full annual average temperatures have any statistically significant trend for the period of the study, 1895-2009. And remember, this is measured by ground stations that contain spurious UHI warming, and there still is no warming trend.
The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.
I will examine more of the malarkey from their web site as time permits, although the statements are so obviously untrue that it’s hardly sporting. It’s like shooting fish, not in a barrel, but in a bucket …
w.
that sounded like hitler, but i dont think it was. who did you quote at the top of the article?
Willis writes:
“They have presented only one claim of fact ā that winter temperatures in the Northeast Region have risen by more than 4Ā°F.”
Well, yeah, but even that figure is not a report on empirical obsevations. It is a report on multiple temperatures taken on a given day and averaged. What is it with climate change folks that they are so averse to empirical observations. Take readings of temperatures at various times during the day and do not average them, please. Report on the observed facts, not on some human contrivance, which is what an average is. Each such human contrivance must be justified on grounds of scientific methodology when it replaces reports on empirical observations. (Yeah, I know, disk space is so expensive…give me a break.)
I am convinced that these people are delusional. They actually believe their silly conjectures as if they were observable fact.
Well the house _Could_ change hands Nov. and Nancy Pelosi and Waxman _Could_
be out of their jobs. These _Could_ remarks are more likely than Palm Trees in Boston….
If you were convinced you had some divine mission to create a new world order, devoid of development, but made of butterflies, windmills, and organic food (and maybe you also just happened to be a wacko nutjob who thinks half of earth’s population needs to be exterminated), How big of lie might you tell? What if your cult grew to millions of members, many in positions of world power, and a devoted following of voters to keep you there? When rational information was placed directly in front of you, perhaps you would be incapable of accepting the truth. Your propaganda might grow ever more extreme.
We don’t need merely to win the scientific debate. That appears done. This is a battle between servitude and freedom. We need national leaders who recognize this as a dangerous cult that is already bleeding our country dry. (And somehow, strangely embraces communist ideology)
It’s worse than we thought…..
The warmists will say, that’s not our website, and hey, one small error, that just happens from time to time (see glaciergate).
It’s not a lie if you believe in it.
The slumbering giant has been awakened in MA. Senator Brown is now more popular than Senator Kerry or President Obama. (Source: Boston Globe Survey) People are starting to understand what the Cape Wind project will do to their electrical bills.
Willis:
You said: “despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming.”
If AGW were a fact, it would be reasonable to promote both lowering CO2 production and oil consumption. For example, additional nuke power plants used to charge vehicle batteries (either plug-in hybrids or pure electrics), would be a good policy direction. And before somebody points out the limits of the power grid, there is a lot of excess capacity at night, when most vehicle charging would be done.
Of course, AGW is not a fact, and Waxman-Markey is not a good way to accomplish these goals.
Things are strange all over.
Just this week, the US constitution came up for vote in the Supreme Court. The consitution won on this day, but only by a five to four margin.
mike-“that sounded like hitler, but i dont think it was. who did you quote at the top of the article?”
It actually does originate with Hitler, but it was more often repeated by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Interestingly, they actually weren’t outwardly admitting to using such a technique themselves, but accusing others of doing so. Of course, like all powerful leaders in History, then had no problem using it themselves. Their most incredible lie may have perhaps been that they weren’t the ones who did this, but their enemies were. The US Office of Strategic Services had this as part of Hitler’s psychological profile:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
I wonder why they haven’t sent out teams to find Al Gore’s missing warm swaddling blanket of CO2 around the equator. In a sane world it’s absence would be the end of the lies.
As a resident of New England, I think it’s probably true that winters, on average, have been getting somewhat milder. On the other hand, my perception is that summers are about as they were in my youth. It’s interesting that the GHCN charts seem to agree with the anecdotal evidence.
The source for the “4 degree figure” may be explained by a statement on the overview page, http://globalwarming.house.gov/ : “over the last 30 years, New England’s winters have warmed by 4.4 degrees.” So perhaps you should run your regression over a slightly shorter period. If you (carefully) choose the period 1976-2005, you can get a value like that.
Of course, that’s just cherry-picking at its best. Of course, it wouldn’t do to take a century-long trend; from the data you cited, the trend from 1895-2009 is 1.7 K / century.
As to where they got the 14 deg F (8 K) increase by the end of the century, I can only assume they’re looking at the very tail of an assumed distribution of outcomes.
On the other hand, it *is* a very pretty web site, very well executed. Can’t say I’m thrilled to see my tax dollars at work on it, though.
By environmentalistsā lies like this one reported by Willis Eschenbach, 40% people in the world don’t trust any longer in science. I’m sure money won’t make those people trust in science again.
Not exactly Hitler’s thoughts on the “Big Lie”, but rather his thoughts on why the Big Lie would work. From the chapter of Mein Kampf where Hitler was was describing the three kinds of newspaper readers:
Not much has changed…
Well so much for their professionally selected emotional impactphoto. I can show you pictures of 100 places in Washington and Oregon, that look exactly like that photograph in the fall; and don’t even get me started on the Yukon Territory.
So I wouldn’t set foot in any of those New England States if they paid me to do an all expenses paid tour. I’d like a dollar for every one that the nutcake politicians that they keep re-electing in those States; have personally cost me, as a result of their ultra liberal policies that they have helped inflict on the whole Country. I wouldn’t commit a dime to the economies of that part of the country.
But other than that, I’m glad they are there, and not here in California; we’ve already got all the fruits and nuts we need ourselves.
“the 1970-2009 winter temperatures have not ārisen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheitā, they have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no rise of more than 4 Ā°F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.”
Not true – they said since the 1970’s, which is a bit vague. But from 1977 the rise was 4.3F, and from 1978 it was 4.6F.
You are fond of saying that because a rise is not “statistically significant” then it’s not a rise. But statistical significance applies to a particular model of random variation imputed to the data, and yours (independent, normally distributed residuals, I presume) is only one of many possible.
In any case, a rise is a rise. A hot day is never statistically significant, but it is still hot.
I went to the web site and as I live in Australia, I had a look at the Australian section.
What a collection of misinformation !
Section on drought. We have always had drought, the driest inhabited country on the planet, but at the moment, is covered in water. Just ask the people who live in western Queensland and north western New South Wales. Lake Eyre in central Australia is full and the tourists are flocking there to see this event. Even today the flood waters are still making their way down the Darling River.
The statement āThe Murray-Darling River System, which produces well over half of the countryās water supply, dropped 54 percent below its record low.ā Is clearly wrong, how can you have 54% less than zero ??? Check out the 1916 picture of the Murray River on jennifermarohasy.com, and while you are there, read the article on the Murray River.
When they say that the Murray Darling system āproduces well over half of the countryās water supplyā, they give the impression that the water is for drinking, when the river system is in the remotest, least populated part of Australia.
Maybe they should have checked out the Burdekin River system and dam in north Queensland and found that there is plenty of water, more water than the Murray-Darling has ever seen. The water in north Queensland rivers is more than enough to supply all Australia, but there is no infrastructure to capture it and pipe it to the major population centers. We need something like the Californian Canal and then water problems in this country would be solved.
The Barrier Reef, I have never read such nonsense.
I live just south of the Great Barrier Reef, Hervey Bay. Now retired at almost 70, owned and ran a successful tourist business for years, and have never seen any decline in the quality of the reef ! I still travel regularly to Lady Elliot Island and Lady Musgrave and they are as they were 50 years ago. Even the sea level has not risen. I still drop anchor in the same places my father did 60 years ago.
Anyone who found that web site and read that nonsense, would come away with the totally wrong impression of what Australia is really like.
“”” Mike G says:
June 29, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Things are strange all over.
Just this week, the US constitution came up for vote in the Supreme Court. The consitution won on this day, but only by a five to four margin. “””
That’s what happens when you have important decisions made by people who are ESL disadvantaged.
Evidently four of them don’t understand the meaning of the word “infringed”; and they evidently also don’t understand that those “people” they were discussing; who have certain unalienable rights; are exactly the same “people” who about 30 some odd words earlier are guaranteed the right to meet peacably to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
Evidently they think you are only allowed to exercise your free speech or religion rights, if you are a member of an organized militia.
Thanks again, Willis, for another factual post. You seem to do these analyses with more facility that most of us do crude guesses on the back of envelopes. Even the latter, though, seem to be more realistic than the fancy-graphics Official Publications.
Speaking, as we are and as we were in the “Stupidest Article” thread, of expensive publications expressing complete scientific, technical, and economic illiteracy while dancing around the Magic Renewable Energy Fountain chasing the Global Warming Fairy, my vote for the prize goes to the UK — check out http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/
and download their beautifully graphic, full-color book. It’s hilarious.
One way to tell Eschenbach is practicing the Big Lie: He accuses others.
“Malarkey?” Loutish, offensive, and revelatory. Had Eschenbach a case, he’d not be trying a stand-up routine.
Ed Brayton is a lot better at stand-up, by the way.
Per the NCDC’s web site (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/regional.html), the winters in the northeast region are on a -13.2Ā°F trend per century since 1995. I would imagine most NE residents would love to have some of that missing 4Ā°F warming instead.
Leave it to the politicos to just flat-out lie.
p=0.06 is pretty close to significant especially since in environmental monitoring it is not uncommon to loosen the threshold from p=0.05 to p=0.1. What is the statistical power of these tests? At any rate, to argue against p=0.06 we should say that is would take x number of years at x temp to move that to .05.
I don’t know why the alarmists don’t use p=0.1 more often, I think they could make a legitimate argument.
Nick Stokes says: “You are fond of saying that because a rise is not āstatistically significantā then itās not a rise. But statistical significance applies to a particular model of random variation imputed to the data, and yours (independent, normally distributed residuals, I presume) is only one of many possible.”
Yes, it is only one of “many possible”, the only problem for you is that it is a very conservative model, which means just about any other model one could think of, would be even less likely to find the trends significant.
“In any case, a rise is a rise. A hot day is never statistically significant, but it is still hot.”
What a remarkable anti-scientific (by virtue of being anti-statistical) statement! A hot day is not statistically significant, because a hot day is something which occurs by random chance! The purpose of statistical significance is to ask whether something is unusual enough to suggest you need to refine your model. For a rise to be worth even talking about in terms of causation, it needs to rise to the level of actually being distinguishable from “noise”. If it does not, then you can’t say it isn’t just a fluke. I can’t believe you think that a rise that is not distinguishable from white noise is somehow important.
While Iām having my rant, I left out the bit about the āWild Firesā.
The reasons for the wild fires in Australia are well known, but of course governments wonāt address the problems.
Government wonāt allow clearing of leaf litter and fuel in the forests because it may destroy the habitat of some form of wild life, which will ultimately be destroyed when the fires do come. Governments āGreenā logic.
Fires in the forest have been started by poorly maintained electricity power lines falling down in high winds that come in the dry season.
People die in these fires because they want to live āgreenā and live in the forest. The government prevents them from clearing adequate fire breaks around their properties, so the houses burn.
The last lot of fires in Victoria showed how inadequate the fire warning systems were. āNoneā.
People didnāt know they were under threat, while the heads of the emergency services were out to dinner with their mobile (cell) phones turned OFF. ( See the results of the inquiry into the Victorian Bush fires)
Nothing to do with climate change, global warming, just pure human incompetence.
Waxman-Markey: bigger than Bernie, and one Key Lay almost got away with. The damage from this one piece of legislation will put swan song on America’s epitaph. The perfect script for Civil War II.
A writer who uses “yclept” wins my complete confidence. I will now believe anything you say.
timetochooseagain says:
June 29, 2010 at 3:36 pm
[–snip for brevity–]The US Office of Strategic Services had this as part of Hitlerās psychological profile:
āHis primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.ā
Huh! How about that?!
It begins to sound an awful lot like just about every politician in office in the U.S.
Certainly it does for BOTH my U.S. Senators!
Then there’s both the past and present mayors of Seattle …
And the Governor …
There’s a term here which bothers me: Sociopath.
See: http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
There ya go!
It looks to me, that they clearly have shown on that website evidence for Weather of Mass Disruption. Evidence which is fit for a demonstration at the UN Security Council, I may add.
Izzat raw or adjusted data?
“We donāt need merely to win the scientific debate. That appears done. This is a battle between servitude and freedom. We need national leaders who recognize this as a dangerous cult that is already bleeding our country dry. (And somehow, strangely embraces communist ideology) ”
Follow the dollars. That’s all Waxman/Markey are interested in, raising money, and transferring “wealth”. They need to fund their programs, period, and the budget is long since busted. They need new revenue, and CapandTrade is the means to that end…most likely the ONLY means.
JimB
TTCA
“I canāt believe you think that a rise that is not distinguishable from white noise is somehow important.”
Of course it is important. Every statistically significant result is the combination of results which are not, by themselves, significant.
The criterion of significance (95%) is the convention for making inference from that particular result alone. But that’s not what we have here. Temperatures rose not only in New England, but in many other places. It’s very likely that if you combined the rise in NE with a few neighboring regions, the result would be highly significant.
In any case, the rises from 1976, 1977 and 1978 were, for NE alone, statistically significant, according to this model.
Ed Darrell says:
June 29, 2010 at 4:35 pm:
One way to tell Eschenbach is practicing the Big Lie: He accuses others.
You just did it, too, and now so have I.
Well maybe it’s not true, but if it helps get the Wacky-Marxist Bill passed then it’s all in a good cause and therefore better than true in the minds of the deranged. [PS Ed Darrell – do you have any evidence refuting the post?]
You know Obama has been granted the power to shut down the internet for a period of four months?
Nick Stokes-“Temperatures rose not only in New England, but in many other places.” So what you are assuming, is that this cannot be a coincidence? Just asking. I am willing to believe that the fact that one location warms a non statistically significant amount, is independent from Global Warming, just as is the fact that the Southeast US cooled over the last century.
“In any case, the rises from 1976, 1977 and 1978 were, for NE alone, statistically significant, according to this model.”
Key words: “according to this model” As I said above, independent and normal distributed residuals, is a model which rejects the null of no trend pretty easily. Using a tougher test, those trends might not be significant. Indeed, I seriously doubt that the climate system, much less small portions of it, is best thought of as behaving as white noise by chance.
George E. Smith says:
June 29, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Please don’t lump New Hampshire with the People’s Republic just south of us. A statistical study several years ago found that NH had the highest per capita use of cigarettes and alcohol among the NE states – they neglected to look at our tax structure that encourages people to come and spend money. Cheap cigarettes (well, whenever MA raises cigarette taxes, NH does the same, but we stay cheaper). Cheap booze (due in large part to the state putting big stores in border communities and paying subpar rent in other places). High room and meal tax (about the only tax higher than MA’s), but visitors tend not to look at that when they make hotel reservations.
No sales tax on other stuff, no income tax (sorta – there’s a payroll tax and some much hated LLC taxes, need to work on that). We pay our state reps and senators $100/year (whether they deserve it or not) and give them free highway tolls and travel expenses – grudgingly. There are 424 of them, so a dollar each would be good deal.
We were picked over places like Montana to be the target state for the Free State Project, http://freestateproject.org/ and while the deal when a goal 20,000 pledges were reached before people moving here, several “early adopters” have arrived and are doing good things, both politically and economically.
While the state is far removed from the days when something like a third of state funding came through horse racing, we still have the lowest tax burden in the region, and get less than our “fair” share from Washington. Our unemployment rate is a bit high at 6.4% (North Dakota is 3.6%) (Vermont is 6.2%) so we’re only #5 out of 51 (includes DC).
And we have some really cool weather, though I like to comment that the few perfect days we get in the autumn make up for the rest of the year.
BTW, I think the text at http://globalwarming.house.gov/impactzones/newengland is a few years old. After a couple really snowy winters with great skiing, I don’t think I heard anyone mutter about last winter’s late warmth as due to global warming. The snow wasn’t very good either, but a lot of what we missed hit DC, so we’re not complaining. In fact, it was great snow.
That photo isn’t very impressive. Too early, too many pine trees, the Sun should be more from behind and lower to reduce the shadows. The patch of good foliage in the center is likely a bog or swamp. That’s fine, but it would be better if it were twice the size. The sky is nice, but a wide expanse like that makes some of the distant trees too small and indistinct.
Willis, many thanks for your thoughts on the Big Lie as used in propaganda.
In case anyone is curious about the source of the quoted text in the introduction of your comment, it is from “James Murphy’s translation of the unexpurgated edition of [Hitler’s] ‘MEIN KAMPF’ [which] was first published on March 21st, 1939 by HURST AND BLACKETT LTD.”
See: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt [You can find the quote in CHAPTER X, WHY THE SECOND REICH COLLAPSED]
Have a look at the details of propaganda strategies described in CHAPTER VI, WAR PROPAGANDA
Anyone who reads that can probably not help but think that many who — all scientific truth to the contrary — persist in spreading their propaganda must without a doubt have taken more than one page out of ‘Mein Kampf’ to heart.
Airplanes.
The USA surface temp is held down by them.
Contrails = Clouds = Cooler.
Golly: the Global change since 1974 has been 0.39 C. Not too much to offset.
Less than 1 degree F. — and 60% of that is the Pacific Oscillation/Sun. I think. Dr. Roy Spencer says 85%.
Alas, the Arctic Warming is 4 times the Global Average, courtesy of:
Cap & Trade (Diesel soot is “forgiven” but = black dots make Ice absorb more SUN)
Cap & Trade (Coal soot is “forgiven” if from China & not tainted by Evil Western Culture)
Cap & Trade (Sulfur, the “Great Global Cooler”)
– – – why didn’t we forgive sulfur ?
PS – – Planes are what we can use FAST, against the Arctic Melt-off. Over the Polynnyas = Open Water.
I have a friend who is a native New Englander and, until recently, totally bought into the whole “rising temps”, “rising oceans”, “the world is dying” crud being liberally broadcast by the AGW crowd and their groupies in the MSM. After listening to his “it is so much warmer now than when I was a kid” malarky, I got into the weather station project, located the nearest station, requested the raw data, and then dumped it into Excel and plotted the trend line.
No warming.
There is now one less parishener for the AGW church after seeing the “unadjusted” data. I regularly send him links to posts on the outrageous station locations and he is now a true skeptic.
A rise of the size p=0.06 will occur purely by change roughly one time out of every seventeen observations. The crucial question in assessing whether it is statistically significant is what size sample was examined to find this rise? Omitting this step is one of the most common ways that arguments about statistical significance are commonly abused.
So lets see now – there are four seasons and what – four/five regions? That is 16/20 different temperature records in our pool. It is highly unsurprising to find a p>0.06 rise occurring in one region in one season purely by chance in a pool this size. Indeed it is likely that there is also a p>0.06 FALL in temperature in some other region in some other season amongst this set of records as well.
What’s the Fuss?? Here is the NorthEast US Winter Temp Trend, from 1930-2010.
.1F/decade, basically flat.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B5vbWLK5dTl2ZGU0MjhjMWEtM2UxNi00ZDdhLWI0Y2QtYzI1MTQwNGZiYTAy&hl=en&authkey=CI7Gi8kH
from here
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/regional.html
Not only has any temperature rise been exaggerated; but so have the colors in the “Photo of maple trees in New England, professionally chosen for maximum emotional impact..” I’ve taken quite a few New England Fall color pictures; they don’t look like that unless you really punch them up in a photo editing program. So like most of AWG agitprop; its a fake.
“The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.”
Sure, sure. But it could warm if we do not obey. Have you no respect for the Precautionary Principle? Don’t you care about the children?
Of course its a Big Lie. And a massive coordinated propaganda campaign. And it was working and for some it still is.
The subliminal effects are illustrated by this comment from
BJ says:
June 29, 2010 at 7:29 pm
“I have a friend… After listening to his āit is so much warmer now than when I was a kidā malarky”
I too have met lots of people like that. The power of suggestion combined with selective memory is a marvellous thing.
I’m certain that the snow was a lot deeper when I was four years old and three feet tall.
R. de Haan says:
June 29, 2010 at 6:38 pm
You know Obama has been granted the power to shut down the internet for a period of four months?
Well, you know? It’s not like he ‘needed’ said permission, what with all the other powers the idiots in that place have absconded with lately.
Hell, all they have to do anymore is write an EO and give themselves free gratis powers for whatever reason or cause cĆ©lĆØbre happens to fit their game plan of the moment.
Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me at all that he’s already given himself the power to annihilate half the US to please his masters in the EU, and then blame it on Mexico.
Now, just so you know: Shutting down the net won’t help at all, inasmuch as personal computers can āand doā act as routers in the entirely local sense. So any such act by his wholly reluctant GOD-KING won’t amount to much, as THE WORD =WILL= get through.
It might take a day or two, but THE WORD =WILL= make it though.
here is a piece of NE global warming propaganda for you.
http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu/oceansamp/pdf/samp/samp_300_climatechange_6.22.10.pdf
This a Chapter from a document the Ocean SAMP that will be a model for zoning offshore waters for designated uses.
This Chapter was recently approved with out much fuss and is based on the hockey stick, the IPCC, and temp stations that moved from the coast to the airport.
Check out the video of a public workshop here http://www.christocrats.net/?p=857 before the document was approved.
David M. Brooks says:
June 29, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Good to see you here! Here’s a photo, I’m pretty sure it’s digital, apparently from 2001, and that means my first junky digital camera, so you could blame the electronics for some of the color. OTOH, the spruce (left) lilacs, and grass look quite reasonable.
http://wermenh.com/images/autumn_tree.jpg
I don’t know if I have the original handy any longer. I’m sure I did no tweaking on this, but did look at some low level data. A lot of the brighter reds are saturated, something I’ve seen on Kodachromes of some flowers on Block Is off the coast of Rhode Island. The darker areas are not saturated. Gotta learn to take some under exposed photos of foliage and flowers.
The view is to the northeast, the sun is at my back, and pretty low. Both bring fewer shadows. Instead of a muddied sea of forest, contrast comes from individual leaves. I think the camera had no zoom and was fairly wide angle, hence there’s a lot of sky for the clouds to fill in. I much prefer cirrus for photos, but this cumulus did pretty well.
One annoying thing – the tree has never been this red again, it hasn’t even been very orange. Foliage biochemistry is so weird. Also, it’s been affected by that leaf spotting mold for the last few years.
BTW, the sun-at-your-back technique is one reason I think Vermont foliage is better than NH foliage. The Vermont mountains are lower and “softer” so a lot of roads go along the sides of the hills. In NH a lot of roads go through valleys, so you’re looking up. Also, the bigger mountains mean peak foliage is in a band that moves up slope during the season up to the spruce line.
That can be worked – one of the best NH photos I’ve seen is of Mt Washington from a bog in September. Bog plants in the foreground, trees around the base of the mountain, then spruce, then rocks, all topped with snow. And of course, a decorative sky.
The first unqualified statement that caught my attention was the segue from temperature rise to “heat-trapping emissions” viz:
“Since the 1970ā²s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues,”
HaroldW says:
June 29, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Well, thirty years before 2009 gives us 1980. The rise since 1980 is 1.8 Ā°F.
If we (carefully) cherry pick, the rise from 1976 to 2009 is 3.87 Ā°F, still not 4.4 Ā°F, and still not significant (p = 0.6).
Nick Stokes says:
June 29, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Not according to the USHCN dataset. In that dataset, the highest rise in the winter dataset is 3.89 Ā°F.
You, on the other hand, are fond of putting words in my mouth. This is why I say that if you disagree with me, QUOTE WHAT I SAID. I don’t find anywhere that I have said that if a rise is not statistically significant then it is not a rise.
Willis
“QUOTE WHAT I SAID”
Indeed, a good practice. What you said was:
“The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.”
Yet your post says that temperatures rose throughout the period, but you said that it’s not statistically significant. Then, in this statement, you say it is not a rise.
On my figures, 1976/77 to present showed a rise of 4.32Ā°F, std error 1.75Ā°F
and 1977/78 to present 4.58Ā°F s.e. 1.85Ā°F. That’s clearly significant.
Are you sure of that 3.89F max? Sounds like HaroldW and I are getting much the same result. I got 4.32F for the winter 1976/77 to present.
They use the old favorite cherry-picked start date trick.
Go back through the history of the temperature records until you find a minimum, which turns out to be in the 1970s, see for example nofreewinds graph (corresponding to ice-age-scare time). Then choose this as your start date so you can say there’s been warming since the 70’s.
Nick is taking this trick to extremes by choosing the exact year. Just look at nofreewinds graph to see how misleading this is, and how meaningless his numbers like 4.58 are.
This is a widely used trick to mislead people, for example by the IPCC on hurricane data.
Tim Neilson asks:
Most claims of someone practicing “big lie” tactics are self-refuting, the opposite of a self-proving document under the law. Is this any exception? Mr. Eschenbach offers no evidence to suggest that a committee of Congress publishes material it knows to be wrong for propaganda effect. (The quotes relating to Hitler comprise a grand rhetorical tactic known as “red herring.” The mere presence of that material, were we to apply Godwin’s law, refutes Mr. Eschenbach’s case.)
There is no evidence to refute.
Mr. Eschenbach offers a few jabs at data that show the effects of warming in New England, but he does not appear to bother to look at the data the committee used. This is a bait-and-switch tactic of argumentation that most rhetoricians would label a spurious. Does Eschenbach rebut or refute the committee’s data? How could anyone tell?
The site of the committee, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, offers several arguments to suggest changes in New England from warming might pose problems. So far as I see, Mr. Eschenbach addresses only one of those arguments, and that one incompletely.
1. The committee claims that average winter temperatures in New England have risen by 4 degrees F since 1970. Eschenbach offers a chart that, so far as I can tell, confirms the committee’s claim — but Eschenbach uses a chart that covers a much longer period of time, and offers it in a way that makes it difficult to determine what temperatures are, let alone what the trend is (IMHO, the trend is up, and easily by 4 degrees in Eschenbach’s chart). Oddly, he illustrates the chart by showing a surfer in a wet suit, surfing in winter in New England. Surfing is generally a warm-weather enterprise, and though the man has a wetsuit, and though the Gulf Current would warm those waters, the picture tends to deny Eschenbach’s claim, doesn’t it? If it’s warm enough to surf in winter, it’s warmer than the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
And look at the actual numbers — Eschenbach confesses a rise of 2.7 degrees, roughly 9/13 of the rise he intends to deny. Heck, that nearly-three degree rise is enough to cause concern, or should be.
2. The committee notes warmer temperatures would put more precipitation as rain, and not snow. Eschenbach offers no comment on this. Ski seasons in New England have suffered recently because it’s been too warm to keep natural snow, and too warm to make artificial snow (68 degrees F on January 6, 2007). (This is a national concern, by the way.) If the committee errs in this claim, Eschenbach offers no data.
And especially, he offers no data to back his “big lie” claim, that the committee knows differently from what it says.
3. The committee notes that warmer temperatures produce later autumns — a huge impact on tourist revenue in New England, where an enormous travel industry has built up around watching the changing colors of the trees. Such a change would be consistent with other long-term observations, such as those by the Department of Agriculture and Arbor Day Foundation, that the plant zones across America show warming (and some cooling).
Eschenbach doesn’t contest this in any way. Should we presume this is Eschenbach’s agreement that this claim is not a “big lie” claim?
3. The committee refers to warming oceans, and the potential effects on certain parts of the fishing industry, especially cod and lobster. This is caused by ocean warming, not atmospheric warming — so Eschenbach is again silent on this claim. The committee’s claim tends to undercut Eschenbach’s claim of a “big lie” here, and Eschenbach offers no support for his own argument.
4. The committee refers to greater storm damage due partly to rising sea levels. Eschenbach offers no rebuttal of any sort.
Eschenbach fails to make a prima facie case for his big lie claim, and his rebuttal is restricted solely to one measure of temperature that Eschenbach fuzzes up with an unclear chart.
May I ask, since you style yourself a skeptic, what evidence you found in the post that make a case at all?
No, I don’t know that — and despite your claim, without significant, extraordinary supporting documentation, I doubt that has occurred. Sen. James Inhofe, though remarkably ill-educated on some issues, probably could figure out a way to block such a move, and probably would — unless, of course, you have evidence that Inhofe hates the internet and wishes it would be shut down.
Turn on your Hemingway excrement detector when you see claims like that.
Paulm
I don’t think the statement that temp has increased by more than 4 degrees since the 70’s is a representative one, and I would not have made it. I just took issue with Willis’s claim, which I must quote:
“There is no rise of more than 4 Ā°F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.”
What are you trying to express with the qoute from Mein Kampf?
Wasn’t it Herr Goebels, late of the Third Reich, who invented the Big Lie?
George E. Smith says:
June 29, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Perhaps that is why there is a rise in organized militia.
NH’s tourist industry is already suffering the effects of AGW. We all know the Old Man on the Mountain crumbled due to Global Warming.
The sky is falling. What now? Every day some other scare tactic.
āSince the 1970ā²s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues,ā
Have they considered clouds?
It seems they took the liberty that clouds are ruled out and it was heat trapping emissions.
If you cherry pick the starting and finishing dates in order to maximise the increase, then you cannot use standard error to say that the result is significant. If you cherry pick a season and region to maximise the increase then you cannot use standard error to say that the result is significant. It is the same abuse of statistics over and over and over.
Lets conduct an experiment. Lets model temperatures by rolling a dice. I think we can all agree that no observed trends will mean anything significant in this situation. Use the dice to generate temperature measurements in each of four regions in each of four seasons for the last 50 years and then lets analyse the data.
You’ve got 16 sets of season/region data. Some will show an observed increase, some will show an observed decrease. With 16 sets of data you can expect to see at least one set which shows an increase which is statistically `significant’ at the .0625 level. By cherry picking the starting and/or finishing year you can improve this and obtain an increase which looks even more significant. Simply starting at a 1 and ending at a 6 will have a huge effect. You’ve actually got an excellent chance of finding an increase which meets the scientific ‘gold standard’ of ‘significance’ at the 3 sigma level. Gosh your dice must be suffering from global warming!
I encourage doubters to actually do this – take a dice – generate some `temperature’ data – and scan through it to find a season and a region and a time period where you get a nice looking increase. Then compute the statistical `significance’ of the increase you find. Using sigma to compute significance is a probabilistic argument that assumes that the data was observed randomly. If you cheat and cherry pick then you’ve broken the assumptions on which the notion of `significance’ is based and rendered it completely meaningless.
Nick Stokes says: June 30, 2010 at 2:25 am
I donāt think the statement that temp has increased by more than 4 degrees since the 70ā²s is a representative one, and I would not have made it. I just took issue with Willisās claim, which I must quote:
āThere is no rise of more than 4 Ā°F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.ā
The quoted statement from the website is:
Since the 1970ā²s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region.
Obviously, an ambigious description of the starting date. Without access to the actual numbers but looking closely at the chart, it appears if you start ~1975 (third or fourth coldest winter available) that it may be close to a 4F increase, which is apparently what they did.
So what is your point, Nick? Are you quibbling whether the increase is 3.8, 3.9, or 4.1 since 1975, and by so doing, attempting to distract us from the rampant perversion on the website by ignoring the longterm, cyclical, non-trend?
Willis.
You make me hungry. With the photo of autum leaves in New Hampshire and Vermont. I see the trees replaced with orange groves and fresh from the tree oranges at the local farmers market. We also waste a lot of petrol importing bananas which we will soon raise in our back yards.
Since the 1970ā²s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region.
Misrepresentation of fact 2: the 1970-2009 winter trend is not statistically significant, so we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no trend at all, much less a claimed 4 Ā°F trend.
Reading their sentence carefully, I’d interpret this as comparing the average winter temperature from the 70s (70-79, or 71-80, whichever is lower) to some recent, though unspecified decade’s average. I would choose probably choose 1996-2005, give or take a year, to maximize the decadal difference. They do not mention trend in association with the 4 Ā°F rise (aka difference). rise could be interpreted as a trend, but in this context I’m quite certain rise connotes a mathematical difference.
What concerns me is that the Supreme Court got to vote on the American constitution. I just can’t believe this. I thought states had to vote on the constitution. The Supreme court only interprets the constitution. Surely, they cannot alter it. What about the division of powers envisaged by the founding fathers? Can someone explain this. I always thought America was the best last hope of the West.
Kevin G says:
June 30, 2010 at 8:05 am
NHās tourist industry is already suffering the effects of AGW. We all know the Old Man on the Mountain crumbled due to Global Warming.
Sarcasm, right?
Back when I lived there over 40 years ago, the reason given for the crumbling of that edifice was the repetitive freezing and thawing which takes place in winter.
The water seeps into the fissures, freezes and expands, weakening the various layers such as to break them loose and cause separation.
In fact, in the springtime here in Washington, traveling some of the older logging roads which run past sheer rock faces can be an interesting experience if your you’re not watchful and careful about the matter.
If the weather had been warmer, there wouldn’t have been the freezing, and there wouldn’t have been the breakdown of the rock structure.
Anyway, at that time, the state of New Hampshire had an ongoing project to patch-up the losses.
Nick Stokes says:
June 29, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Thanks, Nick. We seem to be disputing about semantics. You seem to think that statistical significance is of no significance. Should I then be able to trumpet “Northeast US cooling at a rate of 10Ā°F per year!” because it dropped that much between 2001 and 2002?
Of course not. And why not? Because it is not statistically significant. Yes, it did cool that much during that time … but does that mean the Northeast is cooling? No. Despite the fact that the Northeast clearly cooled at 10Ā°F per year, that doesn’t mean that it is cooling.
My guess at the difference is that you may not be using the right data for the winter. Meteorlogical winter is January and February from this year, and December from last year. But that’s just a guess. Or it is possible that you are using a different dataset.
Or it may be that you are simply subtracting winter 1976 from winter 2009, whereas I’m calculating a linear trend.
Regarding significance, have you adjusted for autocorrelation?
In any case, thanks for actually running the numbers, that’s how science progresses.
w.
Grumpy Old Man says:
June 30, 2010 at 10:49 am
What concerns me is that the Supreme Court got to vote on the American constitution. I just canāt believe this. I thought states had to vote on the constitution. The Supreme court only interprets the constitution. Surely, they cannot alter it. What about the division of powers envisaged by the founding fathers? Can someone explain this. I always thought America was the best last hope of the West.
Without resorting to longwinded exposition, let me say this about that.
Jefferson complained of the matter as you do above. But the real problem arises when the conniving, deceitful, and perfidious elected and appointed officials decide to make law which flies into the face of the Constitution itself.
Thomas Paine complained about there not being any kind of mechanism to hold those aforementioned elected and appointed rats to account when they intentionally overstepped the bounded limits of the Constitution, and inflict fiat law upon us.
Our only peaceful recourse is to resort to the court to overturn the egregious machinations in law. But many times that ends up being just as bad, inasmuch as the court has a history of teaming up with the idiots in the Congress to actually make matters worse.
Paine’s comment:
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. ” ~ Thomas Paine ~
The problem with any elected body is that they figure they might get away with anything when the People aren’t looking, and the courts get away with making law ā an act from which they are specifically forbidden, because it suits the elected idiots.
One hand washes the other …
Old saying: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
And of course: āAll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’
In the context of that US Government website, I see no difference between lying by commission or lying by omission. In this case, repeating disputed claims (and climate claims are hotly disputed) without checking to see if they are true is lying by omission in my book.
I wouldn’t complain if the claims were made on some random website. Random bloggers operate to a much lower standard. In their case it might be an honest mistake, or simple inertia that kept them from actually looking to see if their claims were not true.
But this is a website run by part of the US Government. For them to just toss out spurious claims, without making any attempt to investigate if they are correct or to place them in a context, is not a simple mistake. It is an attempt to influence public policy by repeating unverified, untested claims simply because the claims agree with their worldview.
And to me, when a government does that, that’s the big lie … although, of course, YMMV.
899 says:
June 30, 2010 at 10:54 am
It would have taken a much greater than 4°F rise to stop freezing temperatures on Cannon Mt. In mid winter, there’s very little freeze/thaw cycling because it’s all frozen. Spring and fall are more damaging seasons. The Old Man crumbled on the talus piles with all the other rocks that have fallen off the cliff. The trigger for the collapse was weakening of the 2 feet of ledge that held up the chin. When that fell, there was no support for the rest of the structure. See http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/oldman.php for a very good summary.
The fall occurred on May 3rd, the average low temp at the Old Man may well have been below freezing then.
I miss my old man.
“”” John Trigge says:
June 29, 2010 at 9:44 pm
The first unqualified statement that caught my attention was the segue from temperature rise to āheat-trapping emissionsā viz:
āSince the 1970ā²s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues,ā “””
Talk about gobbledegook:- “If the current rate of heat trapping emissions continues.”
So pray tell what the hell are “heat trapping emissions” ? Enquiring minds want to know.
And just in case you haven’t figured it out by yourself; be advised that the range of electromagnetic radiation wavelengths that interract with CO2 in the so-called “grrenhouse effect” l ie between about 5.0 microns, and about 80.0 microns wavelength; that being the limits of the spectrum (98% of the possible energy) that can be emitted by ANY body at a Temperature of 288 K or 15 deg C, or 59 deg F, that being the mean global surface Temperature asserted by Trenberth’s global energy budget diagram.
And you will also find that such wavelengths are NOT detected by the human sensory mechanisms as “heat”.
You cannot detect with your senses the “heat given off by a brick that is radiating at +15 deg C Temperature; and it is that radiation which is captured for a short while, by the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere.
For one thing, the energy of those radiations is absorbed in less than 10 microns of your skin suface; and none of it ever makes it deep enough into your body to be sensed as “heat”.
So if you are feeling “heat” on your skin; you are not being attacked by any global warming phenomenon.
Willis,
I used the USHCN data that you linked in your article, and yes, I did take winter as DJF and calculated the regression slope to 2009/10 and multiplied by the period to get the change. What value do you get starting in 1976/7?
I don’t think it makes sense to quote trends that are highly uncertain. My objection is to your statement that I quoted:
“The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.ā
“It is not” is wrong, asserting the contrary is true. If you’re relying on statistical significance you should say “we can’t be sure”, which has quite a different meaning. But that wouldn’t support the “big lie” claim.
And Tim Clark, my point is that Willis’ statement
āThere is no rise of more than 4 Ā°F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.ā
was simply, arithmetically, wrong. Some of his criticism is valid, but this overdoes it.
Ric Werme says:
June 30, 2010 at 12:22 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
It would have taken a much greater than 4Ā°F rise to stop freezing temperatures on Cannon Mt. In mid winter, thereās very little freeze/thaw cycling because itās all frozen. Spring and fall are more damaging seasons. The Old Man crumbled on the talus piles with all the other rocks that have fallen off the cliff. The trigger for the collapse was weakening of the 2 feet of ledge that held up the chin. When that fell, there was no support for the rest of the structure. See http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/oldman.php for a very good summary.
The fall occurred on May 3rd, the average low temp at the Old Man may well have been below freezing then.
I miss my old man.
Not to beat this into the ground, but an important point which many are remiss to consider is that if you graph the volume of ice-versus-temperature, it actually expands considerably at a few degrees below freezing and then contracts. It’s that expansion which wreaks havoc on rock structures.
George E. Smith says:
June 30, 2010 at 12:37 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
Talk about gobbledegook:- āIf the current rate of heat trapping emissions continues.ā
So pray tell what the hell are āheat trapping emissionsā ? Enquiring minds want to know. [–snip rest–]
Well, you see, George? It’s all that ‘hot air’ being expelled by the ‘Catastrophic Alarmist Gore Whining’ (CAGW) camp.
Lately they’re sorted to using the ‘CC’ initials to throw people off, but those stand for ‘Constant Claptrap.’
So there you have it! š
@Willis Eschenbach,
Are you sure about the attained significance levels you cite? I downloaded the data and ran regressions (using R, code at http://gist.github.com/459226) which gave Northeast region annual mean temperature warming of 0.007 Ā°F / year for 1895-2009 (p = 0.02) and 0.03 Ā°F / year for 1970-2009 (p = 0.03). On Winter months alone, I get warming of 0.016 Ā°F / year for 1896-2009 (p = 0.04) and 0.08 Ā°F / year for 1970-2009 (p = 0.04).
That final estimate of 0.08 Ā°F / year is in general agreement with the roughly 4 Ā°F of warming in recent decades that you dispute.
Can you do me the courtesy of showing me the code you used to get your figures so we can find the source of our disagreement?
Nick Stokes says:
June 30, 2010 at 12:51 pm
I get 3.9Ā°F. I am using the category “101” from the USHCN database here. These are the winter averages and the trends:
Year, Winter Avg. Temp, Change to 20091970-1971, 22.07, 2.7
1971-1972, 25.03, 2.4
1972-1973, 25.57, 2.6
1973-1974, 26.00, 2.8
1974-1975, 27.13, 3.2
1975-1976, 24.17, 3.8
1976-1977, 19.10, 3.9
1977-1978, 20.23, 3.1
1978-1979, 21.37, 2.3
1979-1980, 24.83, 1.7
1980-1981, 22.53, 1.8
1981-1982, 21.67, 1.3
1982-1983, 28.17, 0.6
1983-1984, 24.73, 1.2
1984-1985, 25.33, 1.2
1985-1986, 23.33, 1.3
1986-1987, 24.27, 0.8
1987-1988, 24.77, 0.6
1988-1989, 25.20, 0.4
1989-1990, 24.20, 0.3
1990-1991, 27.83, -0.1
1991-1992, 26.03, 0.6
1992-1993, 24.00, 0.8
1993-1994, 20.27, 0.3
1994-1995, 26.80, -1.8
1995-1996, 22.60, -1.7
1996-1997, 27.97, -3.5
1997-1998, 29.90, -3.1
1998-1999, 28.43, -1.6
1999-2000, 26.47, -0.2
Neither do I … which is why I object to what the Waxman Markey website has done.
First, saying something is not true does not mean that the contrary is true. Saying “It is not true that John is guilty” does not mean “John is innocent.” It may simply mean that John has not gone to trial.
But what the heck, let me rephrase it:
Itās like shooting fish, not in a barrel, but in a bucket ā¦>/i>
And in this case, the fish are loading the rifle and handing it to you.
Unhappily, the execrable Rep. Ed Malarkey is in a safe district (in which I have the misfortune to reside). There is a Republican running against him this year, Dr. Gerry Dembrowski,
http://www.gerrydembrowski.com/index.html
but he has been largely invisible so far. We’ll have to see what we can do about that. Send him some money.
/Mr Lynn