NOTE: This has been running two weeks at the top of WUWT, discussion has slowed, so I’m placing it back in regular que. – Anthony
UPDATES:
Statistician William Briggs weighs in here
Eduardo Zorita weighs in here
Anonymous blogger “Deep Climate” weighs in with what he/she calls a “deeply flawed study” here
After a week of being “preoccupied” Real Climate finally breaks radio silence here. It appears to be a prelude to a dismissal with a “wave of the hand”
Supplementary Info now available: All data and code used in this paper are available at the Annals of Applied Statistics supplementary materials website:
http://www.imstat.org/aoas/supplements/default.htm
=========================================
Sticky Wicket – phrase, meaning: “A difficult situation”.
Oh, my. There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick.
Now, there’s a new look to the familiar “hockey stick”.
Before:
After:
Not only are the results stunning, but the paper is highly readable, written in a sensible style that most laymen can absorb, even if they don’t understand some of the finer points of bayesian and loess filters, or principal components. Not only that, this paper is a confirmation of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work, with a strong nod to Wegman. I highly recommend reading this and distributing this story widely.
Here’s the submitted paper:
(PDF, 2.5 MB. Backup download available here: McShane and Wyner 2010 )
It states in its abstract:
We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.
Here are some excerpts from the paper (emphasis in paragraphs mine):
This one shows that M&M hit the mark, because it is independent validation:
In other words, our model performs better when using highly autocorrelated
noise rather than proxies to ”predict” temperature. The real proxies are less predictive than our ”fake” data. While the Lasso generated reconstructions using the proxies are highly statistically significant compared to simple null models, they do not achieve statistical significance against sophisticated null models.
We are not the first to observe this effect. It was shown, in McIntyre
and McKitrick (2005a,c), that random sequences with complex local dependence
structures can predict temperatures. Their approach has been
roundly dismissed in the climate science literature:
To generate ”random” noise series, MM05c apply the full autoregressive structure of the real world proxy series. In this way, they in fact train their stochastic engine with significant (if not dominant) low frequency climate signal rather than purely non-climatic noise and its persistence. [Emphasis in original]
Ammann and Wahl (2007)
…
On the power of the proxy data to actually detect climate change:
This is disturbing: if a model cannot predict the occurrence of a sharp run-up in an out-of-sample block which is contiguous with the insample training set, then it seems highly unlikely that it has power to detect such levels or run-ups in the more distant past. It is even more discouraging when one recalls Figure 15: the model cannot capture the sharp run-up even in-sample. In sum, these results suggest that the ninety-three sequences that comprise the 1,000 year old proxy record simply lack power to detect a sharp increase in temperature. See Footnote 12
Footnote 12:
On the other hand, perhaps our model is unable to detect the high level of and sharp run-up in recent temperatures because anthropogenic factors have, for example, caused a regime change in the relation between temperatures and proxies. While this is certainly a consistent line of reasoning, it is also fraught with peril for, once one admits the possibility of regime changes in the instrumental period, it raises the question of whether such changes exist elsewhere over the past 1,000 years. Furthermore, it implies that up to half of the already short instrumental record is corrupted by anthropogenic factors, thus undermining paleoclimatology as a statistical enterprise.
…
We plot the in-sample portion of this backcast (1850-1998 AD) in Figure 15. Not surprisingly, the model tracks CRU reasonably well because it is in-sample. However, despite the fact that the backcast is both in-sample and initialized with the high true temperatures from 1999 AD and 2000 AD, it still cannot capture either the high level of or the sharp run-up in temperatures of the 1990s. It is substantially biased low. That the model cannot capture run-up even in-sample does not portend well for its ability
to capture similar levels and run-ups if they exist out-of-sample.
…
Conclusion.
Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with universitylevel, professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems. While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some
respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. The fundamental problem is that there is a limited amount of proxy data which dates back to 1000 AD; what is available is weakly predictive of global annual temperature. Our backcasting methods, which track quite closely the methods applied most recently in Mann (2008) to the same data, are unable to catch the sharp run up in temperatures recorded in the 1990s, even in-sample.
As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has
a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.
Our main contribution is our efforts to seriously grapple with the uncertainty involved in paleoclimatological reconstructions. Regression of high dimensional time series is always a complex problem with many traps. In our case, the particular challenges include (i) a short sequence of training data, (ii) more predictors than observations, (iii) a very weak signal, and (iv) response and predictor variables which are both strongly autocorrelated.
The final point is particularly troublesome: since the data is not easily modeled by a simple autoregressive process it follows that the number of truly independent observations (i.e., the effective sample size) may be just too small for accurate reconstruction.
Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. We have shown that time dependence in the temperature series is sufficiently strong to permit complex sequences of random numbers to forecast out-of-sample reasonably well fairly frequently (see, for example, Figure 9). Furthermore, even proxy based models with approximately the same amount of reconstructive skill (Figures 11,12, and 13), produce strikingly dissimilar historical backcasts: some of these look like hockey sticks but most do not (Figure 14).
Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate. Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.
===============================================================
Commenters on WUWT report that Tamino and Romm are deleting comments even mentioning this paper on their blog comment forum. Their refusal to even acknowledge it tells you it has squarely hit the target, and the fat lady has sung – loudly.
(h/t to WUWT reader “thechuckr”)
Smokey says:
>In his letter, Seitz says, “Fire in the hands of Neolithic man had already transformed >the ecology — and the albedo — of Australia and the Americas eons before.”
>
>In geological terms an eon is a billion years. Russell needs to get a grip.
An eon is also a thousand years in other fields. It’s only recently that it has been appropriated by geologists. The even older meaning is an indeterminate very long period of time.
JDN,
The only definition I found states that an eon is a billion years.
No mention of a thousand years [that is a millennium] in google’s on-line dictionary search. Where did you see eon = 1,000? I want to learn more — but if I listen to Russell Seitz, I might learn what isn’t factual.☺
Smokey- I think we’ve found a complete failure of wikipedia + google. It’s a short word and everyone uses it, so there are lots of hits, many of which aren’t relevant.
The eon (or aeon) means many things. It shows up in speculative Biblical interpretation and therefore in poetic uses in European romantic poetry. For an example of speculative theology, see http://books.google.com/books?id=lIux0-eQOhAC&lpg=PA313&dq=%22aeon%22%20%20thousand&pg=PA126#v=snippet&q=a%20thousand%20years%20eon&f=false . It doesn’t have a strict “thousand year” usage, but, can be used for such time periods. It can also mean, simply, “an age”, which also lets Seitz off the hook; the paleolithic & neothithic periods are ages.
I’m running by a research library today. I’ll see what I can turn up as far as origin of usage of the thousand year eon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eon_(normal_meaning)
A variety of manings ro ‘eon”. This includes 1000 years
JDN & DL,
Thank you for linking to the religious and mythological meanings for eon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Russell Seitz purports to use it within the framework of its scientific definition. [Or maybe not, since CAGW is based upon religious belief.]
My on-line dictionary widget says: eon |ˈēən; ˈēˌän| ( chiefly Brit. also aeon). Noun. Astronomy & geology; a unit of time equal to 1,000,000,000 years.
But Russell is a Harvard guy. Who am I to argue with such an exalted Authority, if the Authority says humans were around 1,000,000,000 years ago?☺
Mike Roddy (August 14, 2010 at 7:13 PM) says: “Similarly, climate scientists are getting bored with arguments from untrained individuals that the ‘trace gas’ CO2 does not play the major role in the recent and rapid temperature increases. This role was proven in a laboratory in the 19th century by Arrhenius, and has not been seriously disputed.”
Contrary to Roddy’s assertion, Arrhenius did not prove there was a major role for CO2. What he did was to construct a hypothesis. In a reversal of the burden that lies upon a scientist to provide evidence that his hypothesis is not wrong, Arrhenius declared that his hypothesis was right until proven wrong. Arrhenius’s hypothesis and reversal of the burden of proof became known as “the greenhouse effect.”
The existence of Arrhenius’s greenhouse effect is a foundation stone of modern climatology. The reversal of the burden of proof and scientific pretensions of climatology identify climatology as a pseudoscience.
It is easy to falsify the existence of Arrhenius’s “greenhouse effect.” An “effect” partners with a “cause” in a “cause and effect relationship.” The existence of such a relationship implies: a) the event of the cause preceeds the event of the cause and b) given the event of the cause, the event of the effect occurs with a probability of 1.
In the case of Arrhenius’s “greenhouse effect,” the “cause” is a rise in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The purported “effect” is a rise in the average of the temperatures at Earth’s surface. That there is a cause and effect relationship is refuted by the numerous observations in which, following a rise in the atmospheric CO2 concentration, the average of the temperatures at Earth’s surface fell.
Smokey-
This discussion could be fascinating on another blog. This word aeon (or eon) comes directly from past and present religions. In many parts of the English speaking world, it is *the* definition. Let’s not hang Mr. Seitz for having a classical education.
I thought he wrote a good letter, and, I’m sure that, if he had wanted a geological eon, he would have said so.
Before this back and forth tennis match can be measured in eons, aeons, ions, or freons, can we let this thread move on down the road?
James Sexton said
“…the response I got from DC. “On every issue M&W side with M&M and Wegman.” Honestly, that was one of the reasons DC thought the paper should be invalidated. When I run into things like that, I get disheartened. How in the world does one speak to people like that? People say we need more dialogue between alarmists and skeptics. I don’t want to or rather can’t dialogue with people with that sort of reasoning.”
I would like to see a survey which finds out the top 10 (or 20, 50, 100) reasons why warmists feel they can disagree with us without even listening to us. Then we can strategise better. Personally, I suspect a key deep reason is the ongoing existence of “answers” to
skeptics’ issuesstrawmen that all the major science bodies have done, that have not been refuted one-on-one, as complete statements, by us. Or the Skeptical Science 119 issues.…oooh heck, I’m once again talking myself into writing the piece I know is needed…
From reading around the ‘traps’ the main criticism of M&W is referred to by DCA engineer and summarised by eli as detailed at my comment Aug 19, 6.59am; eli says:
“It looks like the basic error on this one is that by calibrating against the hemispheric average, rather than smaller grid cells, they loose information and kill the signal to noise. Averaging out the local signal means that noise looks better than signal and in their words, noise provides a better fit than the proxys.”
As I argued above this is not true but it does need elaboration; Mann had calibrated his proxies ‘locally’ by matching and discarding them which other similar proxies seperated by both space and time; that is, a proxy could be matched with another on the other side of the world or further in the past/future! But Mann went further and this seems to have been overlooked in M&W; Mann changed some of the proxy data from down to up, the scale of measurement of the proxy data was flipped from up to down, reversing the true meaning of the data. So when Tiljander did the study on the varves, they were interpreted as :-
.
Thin varve = warm temperatures
Thick varve = cold temperatures
.
When Mann used the Tiljander data, he changed the scale so it became:-
.
Thin varves = cold temperatures
Thick varves = warm temperatures
The local meaning of the proxies was therefore corrupted from the beginning. This data was then calibrated with instrument data which had been infilled using some sort of RegEM; RegEM is a method of EM infilling where the number of parameters to be estimated may be larger than the available amount of real information in the data; basically Mann has used a variety of RegEM because the temp data he wanted to use was sparse and he used more assumptions/paramenters to shape the form of the infilled data to make a sequence which was then used to calibrate with the pseudo-proxies as described above. For those who are interested McIntyre has done many posts on the dubious RegEM methodology of Mann.
The point here is that Mann and his associates have used esoteric, novel and untested methodology which seem to have been designed to do 2 things; firstly, obfuscate and prevent replications of his experiments [sic]; and secondly achieve a preordained or assumed result; namely that todays temperature and climate is exceptional. Mann’s egregious efforts have really undermined science generally and subverted the debate on AGW.
What M&W have done is bypass this arcane approach by Mann, assume Mann’s data is acceptable [which it isn’t] and applied replicable and transparent statistical metehodology to that data; when they have done that Mann fails.
The specific complaint by eli is addressed here:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/mw10-some-thoughts/#comments
From comment 21 onwards; M&W were entirely aware of this problem, which Mann had done [how ironic!], and dealt with as they describe; it is evident that this ‘fault’ with the paper could only have been found by someone who has not read the paper or who has not understood it.
I found figure 4 on page 9 of the paper to be astonishing. What it’s saying is, the apparent correlation between two random walks can be spurriously high.
I wanted to check this out for myself, so first I generated 5 runs of 25 Heads and Tails by flipping a coin, and got 5 series going
HTTTH TTHTH—- etc for 25 in each series, and 5 series.
I first converted H to 1, T to 0 and got 5 runs of 25 going
10001 00101
Then changed them to a non-stationary run, counting H as +1, T as -1, and got
1 0 -1 -2 -1 -2 -3 -2 -3 -2 …… etc for each of the runs and series.
I then went to the Vassar site
http://statpages.org/#Regression
clicked on linear correlation and regression, punched in 25, the number in
each run, and got
http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/corr_stats.html
I then did correlations between pairs of runs from the 5 series.
When I ran pairs of stationary runs, I got correlations of 0.107, 0.221, etc
and got 2 tailed p tests of 0.1724 and 0.6274, meaning that I would get chance runs that close or better 17.24% of the time or 62.74 % of the time respectively-to be expected in coin flip data.
I then applied the non-stationary random walk series to check the correlation of
1 0 -1 -2 -1 etc with another random walk run, and got figures like
correlation of -0.617 and a 2 tailed p test 0f 0.1% for the same data!!
Keep the non-stationary effect of those temperature anomalies next time you
read about the “incredibly small probability” of one of those runs happening by
chance alone.
Interesting comments from the R community on the McShane and Wyner paper:
http://probabilitynotes.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/global-temperature-proxy-reconstructions-bayesian-extrapolation-of-warming-w-rjags/
ok..on the topic of responces to a story:
“Why conservatives shouldn’t believe in man made climate change”
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: August 17th, 2010
1584 Comments Comment on this article
.
the numbers on this one blew me away
Alan; M&W say this:
“We further make the assumptions of linearity and stationarity of the relationship between temperature and proxies, an assumption employed throughout the climate science literature (NRC, 2006) noting that ”the stationarity of the relationship does not require stationarity of the series themselves” (NRC, 2006).”
In other words they gave the Mann data every opportunity to replicate his results. If the data had been treated as having a full or partial unit root the hockeystick would have had even less chance of occurring.
cohenite says:
August 22, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Of course, you could have pointed out to Eli that they did indeed consider the local vs. hemispheric average. From the paper:
3.6. Proxies and Local Temperatures. We performed an additional test which
accounts for the fact that proxies are local in nature (e.g., tree rings in Montana)
and therefore might be better predictors of local temperatures than global temperatures.
You’ll find that most of the criticism is in the same manner. People actually believe climatology has special numbers with magical properties that even statisticians can’t come to understand and that accepted mathematical and statistical practices don’t apply to climate science.
Most of the responses that don’t simply dismiss out of hand the paper, when all of the whining trimming is cut away from the critique, that that the methods are wrong because we do it different in climatology, which is funny all by itself, because many of us thought that since Mann98.
Does anyone have an ETA for the publishing?
Lucy Skywalker says:
August 22, 2010 at 4:11 pm
“I would like to see a survey which finds out the top 10 (or 20, 50, 100) reasons why warmists feel they can disagree with us without even listening to us. Then we can strategise better. Personally, I suspect a key deep reason is the ongoing existence of “answers” to skeptics’ issues strawmen that all the major science bodies have done, that have not been refuted one-on-one, as complete statements, by us. Or the Skeptical Science 119 issues.
…oooh heck, I’m once again talking myself into writing the piece I know is needed…”
I look forward to reading the piece with great anticipation! 🙂
Mr. Watts,
This is quite confusing…are we experiencing GW now or not?
Is the warming we are seeing dangerous or not?
What do you think is causing it and when do you think it will stop?
If it does not stop shortly how much hotter do you think it can get before the entire world starts experiencing extreme events like we have seen this year so far on approximately a yearly basis?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Climate-Portals/139434822741700?ref=ts
Terry Oldberg says:
Contrary to Roddy’s assertion, Arrhenius did not prove there was a major role for CO2. What he did was to construct a hypothesis. In a reversal of the burden that lies upon a scientist to provide evidence that his hypothesis is not wrong, Arrhenius declared that his hypothesis was right until proven wrong. Arrhenius’s hypothesis and reversal of the burden of proof became known as “the greenhouse effect.”
Terry, what Arrhenius (and everyone after him) forgot is that CHG’s also perform cooling functions in the atmosphere, by re-radiating sunshine. You cannot measure the amount of this cooling in a laboratory. I can feel it happening here, standing in the African sun, that the heat from the sun on my skin becomes less if during the day the humidity increases. The so-called climate experts keep on telling me that you can ignore this cooling (because it is smaller than the warming) but in the case of ozone and CO2, I am not at all so sure. Looking carefully at the incoming and outgoing radiation I think/estimate that ozone is cooling more than warming and I think it is pretty much evens between the warming and cooling of CO2. So the net effect of the increase of both these substances during the last 10 years could be cooling rather than warming.
Extreme heat?
Its August in Britain – and pouring down! Extreme heat my a***!
What extreme heat? It’s 45°C, which isn’t bad for this part of Iraq — I won’t even need a sweater by noontime…
Lucy said;
“I would like to see a survey which finds out the top 10 (or 20, 50, 100) reasons why warmists feel they can disagree with us without even listening to us. Then we can strategise better. Personally, I suspect a key deep reason is the ongoing existence of “answers” to skeptics’ issues strawmen that all the major science bodies have done, that have not been refuted one-on-one, as complete statements, by us. Or the Skeptical Science 119 issues.”
Climate change has been primarily a British led issue for many years, whether by the original setting up of Hadley, the financial and intellectual endorsement of the IPCC, Tony Blair rasing it to a key issue when he was Prime minister and leader of the G8, and ourselves being the first (only?) nation to incorporate carbon reduction into our laws.
I firmly believe there are two complementary forces at work here;
Firstly, the ‘We know best’ syndrome deeply embedded amongst the leaders of Britain and nowhere better observed than in our MP’s, political appointees, mmedia and such as Phil Jones.
Second has been the incestous nature of the ‘we know best’ brigade who peer review (endorse) each others work whether at a political, social or scientific level.
The democratisation and rapid speeding up of the scientific process via Blogs such as this one has completely flat footed the scientific establishment and they try to re-assert their ‘we know best’ mentailty by such absurd non objective enquiries we witnessed over Climate Gate, the Iraq war etc.
I think there are other things going on as well, in as much people don’t seem to think as much for themselves these days (automatic response to a query is to defer to Wikipedia) and have a poor knowledge of history and precedence.
If we collectively continue to shine a light into the deeper recesses of the ‘science’ sooner or later those in the wider world are going to start realising that not everything is as black or white as they believe. I feel you are still seeking to put together a ‘skepticpedia’ which would undoubtedly be one useful strand in the limited armoury we currently have. Another would be a humorous but scientifcally accurate ‘Climate change for dummies’ type book.
We have to be careful not to portray ourselves as being anti green (i.e ‘anti-progressive’) though.
I think Hubert Lamb summed it up beautifully in one of the last things he ever wrote- a revised preface to his great book’ Climate History and the Modern World.’
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environnment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb December 1994
Tonyb
Richard S Courtney says:
August 20, 2010 at 9:48 am
RR Kampen:
Thankyou for your responses to my comments that you post at August 20, 2010 at 1:07 am.
You dispute two of my statements but your disputes are mistaken.
I wrote concerning the AGW hypothesis:
“The hypothesis predicts most warming of the air relative to the surface at altitude in the tropics.”
But you reply:
“In reality the hypothesis predicts most warming at high latitudes, particularly northern high latitudes. The hypothesis does so now and it did so when I studied climatology in an era the IPCC still had to be set up. The observations are conform hypothesis.”
Sorry, but the IPCC AR4 agrees with me and not you.
I took a look at the figures again and we can both see most warming at lower levels is in the Arctic, as expected (e.g. when I was student meteorology/oceangraphy around 1998-1992). In the figures this is de lower left corner. Red. I cannot make anything else of those figures. What am I overlooking?
Paulm says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:15 pm
“Mr. Watts,
This is quite confusing…are we experiencing GW now or not?
Is the warming we are seeing dangerous or not?”
Paulm, I’m not Mr. Watts, and I don’t speak for him. That said, can you name me a year in history that we didn’t have an extreme event some where on earth? Fact is, this has been a fairly quite year. Floods and droughts have been with us always. BTW, have you checked the hurricane count this year? If a bit of warmth causes all these “extreme events”, where are the hurricanes?
Flooding in Pakistan? Check their history, it isn’t an unusual occurrence. Bad things happening in Russia? It’s happened before. Paul, all of the things you are seeing today has happened already. Floods, heat, cold, storms, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, they been with mankind since the beginning. It is nothing new, and as far as I can tell, no one can quantitate any increase in frequency. Reporting is increasing in frequency. Attaching some vague meaning is increasing in frequency. Well, that’s not entirely true. People used to think extreme events were a sign of God’s or gods’ displeasure. Come to think of it, that hasn’t changed either, only Gaia get’s invoked more often.
You want to know what causing the minuscule bump in temp patterns? IDK, probably the same things that caused similar bumps in the past. Why would you believe warming could be dangerous? History tells us mankind thrives quite well in warmer climates. Colder climates? Not so much.
Dude, that facebook page is something else. Paul, if you surround yourself with that stuff, it is the only thing you’ll see. Don’t get me wrong, I think all should study the climate, given the laws our politicians are considering, we should endeavor to be well informed. But being well informed means to be informed of the many sides of an issue and not looking at the issues through a prism. You should peruse some of the other articles here, they may interest you.
Paulm says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Mr. Watts,
This is quite confusing…are we experiencing GW now or not?
Is the warming we are seeing dangerous or not?
What do you think is causing it and when do you think it will stop?
If it does not stop shortly how much hotter do you think it can get before the entire world starts experiencing extreme events like we have seen this year so far on approximately a yearly basis?”
What extreme events? Where I live you can brush aside glacial till and pick out some nice crinoid fossils. Now that indicates extreme events. You’re just worrying about weather.
Consult with Otzi The Ice Man. He’ll settle you down.
“Bill Tuttle says:
August 21, 2010 at 12:20 pm
SamG: August 14, 2010 at 5:56 pm
What’s a truck?
REPLY: A Lorry.
It’s also the round ball atop a flagpole.”
It was also the tokens issued by employers that could only be spent in the “Company Store” in lieu of real wages. The practice arose in the 15th Century and was made illegal in most trades in england by the 1831 Truck Act. When someone says they will have “no truck” i.e won’t put up with something, this is where the phrase derives from.
Now fake papers selling overvalued goods, what could that possibly have to do with CAGW…..:-)