Josh at cartoons by Josh illustrates how the hockey stick continues to be undead in the eyes of its supporters. It is a simple matter of tipping…
Josh writes:
Lots of excitement about a new statistics paper at all our fav blogs – CA, BH and WUWT
and on many other blogs too – one comment caught my eye, and I think it was from
Real Climate (do let me know if I have this wrong), that it showed a hockey stick just like before … well sort of. Maybe they found the tipping point that has been predicted for so long…
Update: H/T to Stephen Brown for pointing out that there is a very nice example
of the hockey stick plus graph here at Climate Progress – many thanks!
Did Josh do the cartoon before Joe Romm posted his?
OT, but see article:
http://www.vermonttiger.com/content/2010/08/noaa-measures-604%C2%BAf-water-temperature-in-lake-michigan.html
regarding 604 degree F water in Lake Michigan
LOL!
If it’s a t-shirt I’ll buy it.
Hah, good one Josh. Maybe Gav should have had his head cocked left, a la James Hansen.
The tipping point goes “TILT”. 😀
Should have read the “hokey dip **** lives!”
Apologies to Josh.
Here’s an interesting paper behind AAAS paywall. From the Science CiteTrack mail-list: http://www.info-aaas.org/l.jsp?d=5671.623546.654.6D542cFkEgIZWzQ-MiP3XVQ..A
Carbon Cycle and Climate Change
As climate change accelerates, it is important to know the likely impact of climate change on the carbon cycle (see the Perspective by Reich). Gross primary production (GPP) is a measure of the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere every year to fuel photosynthesis. Beer et al. (p. 834, published online 5 July) used a combination of observation and calculation to estimate that the total GPP by terrestrial plants is around 122 billion tons per year; in comparison, burning fossil fuels emits about 7 billion tons annually. Thirty-two percent of this uptake occurs in tropical forests, and precipitation controls carbon uptake in more than 40% of vegetated land. The temperature sensitivity (Q10) of ecosystem respiratory processes is a key determinant of the interaction between climate and the carbon cycle. Mahecha et al. (p. 838, published online 5 July) now show that the Q10 of ecosystem respiration is invariant with respect to mean annual temperature, independent of the analyzed ecosystem type, with a global mean value for Q10 of 1.6. This level of temperature sensitivity suggests a less-pronounced climate sensitivity of the carbon cycle than assumed by recent climate models.
The CRU Memo:
We’re exchanging floor for ceiling – please proceed accordingly.
Cheers – Phil
The Hockey Stick just flatlined*:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2773
*(referring to the yellow line that never exits the error bars)
I thought the graph and hockey stick came from some site called deltoid or some such. That CP site scares me though.
Seen from that angle… yep, the hockey stick is still valid!!!
Tipping point.
Hmmm. Wonder if that’s what got Tipper all steamed up at Al.
Can you imaging being at a warming speech, and the subject turns to a word rhyming with your name?
(One of these days, Al, one speech too many about tipping points, and that’s it….pow….right in the kisser).
tallbloke says:
August 17, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Maybe Gav
I think that’s MM.
Checked at Romm’s reading room
hahahaha!
I wonder if any of his regulars will see through this rubbish or see through Romm’s picture just above, of the tilted
windmillhokeystick and bladenew york times’ justin gillis has another go at connecting weather extremes & CAGW (known to advocates as “climate change”):
l17 Aug: NYT Blog: Weather Extremes and Climate Change
For readers who wish to delve more into the science behind extreme weather, the American Geophysical Union has agreed to make public, at our request, a paper from 2009 by Gerald A. Meehl and several colleagues. It is a detailed exposition of the reasons that the number of record high temperatures is now outstripping record lows in the United States, by a ratio of about 2 to 1…
For those intimidated by scientific papers, a simpler write-up on the issue can be found here. And Dr. Meehl is also on YouTube talking about the findings of his research.
1:33 p.m. | Updated
And over at Climate Central, as noted in the comments below, one of Dr. Meehl’s co-authors has written an item explaining why scientists have such difficulty linking specific weather events to climate change.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/weather-extremes-and-climate-change/
Let’s say Romm’s Frankenstein/Zombie undead rebirth of the hockey stick is correct. We were only a 100 years away from the next ice age starting up again. Another 1C decline in the Arctic and Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland and the glaciers are back and growing again. A few thousand years and the glaciers are cutting off the St. Lawrence again. CO2 is a good thing.
Joe Romm writes: “In Part 2, I am planning to reprint a forthcoming forensic debunking of statisticians’ paper.”
So the dark side of the force has been aware of this paper for a while. That is somehow what a comment by Wyner on CA was alluding to.
Joe Romm quoting Kaufmann arctic study is also a gem… considering the usual suspect Yamal is in the line up.
pat, Dr. Meehl’s paper is the kind of stuff that means little to meteorologists and climatologists who understand the generation of weather events. Modelers like Meehl usually and sadly are obtuse to the facts. One NYT blog refers to this is suspect: the catchy title extreme events and climate change i.e. climate change meaning always here global warming shows the NYT swallowed the modelers’ line.
Contrast between polar air masses and the rest is supposed to become less important as the globe is warming: that’s what global warming means. Yet extreme weather events are by nature the manifestation of an increase of contrast between the poles and the rest, i.e. more energy in the system when air masses meet. Indeed climate changes: the climate has shifted in the 1960/70 but all meteorological signs points toward more contrast between the poles and the rest. Regional warmings in Alaska, West Antarctica can be explained through dynamical considerations in a general cooling evolution. Read Leroux.
Update: H/T to Stephen Brown for pointing out that there is a very nice example
of the hockey stick plus graph here at Climate Progress – many thanks!
____________________________
I love item number four:
Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.
This is put a little more bluntly in this paper by Warmist Scientists:
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
In other words if the Warmist are correct about CO2, it is the only thing keeping us from the long cold slide in to an Ice Age — NOW!
So why the heck are we not campaigning to produce as much CO2 as possible???
Seems they are hoist by their own petard.
I don’t know if someone would be able to place a hockey stick on the, so that the pallet would cover the before 1850 and the stick the after 1850. This would give the impression of looking at the stick from holding at the pallet point and the stick that goes away from you. This would mean that the pallet covers the range of uncertainties in the past while the uncertainties get narrower with time.
Gail Combs says:
August 17, 2010 at 7:01 pm
“In other words if the Warmist are correct about CO2, it is the only thing keeping us from the long cold slide in to an Ice Age — NOW!
So why the heck are we not campaigning to produce as much CO2 as possible???”
Excellent point. But… shhhhh. Let us hope they continue to pursue this argument as strongly as possible before this implication dawns on them. Not that I’m for full tilt CO2 spewing – China will do that without any encouragement – but this point does take the stupid hysteria out of the discussion.
Saved by CO2! Puuuuuuurfect.
” The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293]”
Damn those ancient Summarians and their gas guzzling SUVs
Amino Acid, it is actaully supposed to be Gavin, but he and MM do look similar.
I think I need to go and buy more popcorn. If I read that linked article correctly, they think the new study might actually help them. And then turn around and say they’ll try to debunk it. They should read our comments. We had plenty of discussion that the statisticians used their own data uncritically. I’d guess that if the pair of statisticians took a critical look at the data, they’d find that wasn’t assembled correctly either. Romm’s take on who killed the MWP was funny too. The new hockey stick ends at the peak of it.
I still think we’re having way too much fun.
They’ve used a special algoreithm.
The cartoon certainly encapsulates how poorly people on this site understand the article.