UPDATE: The StataSphere server can’t handle the load of interest, I’ve take the images offline from this article, and disabled the link to it. Once he gets the server up and running again I’ll put them back – Anthony
Readers may recall this quote from Dr. Phil Jones of CRU, by the BBC:
Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
A: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
A.J. Strata has done some significance tests:
CRU Raw Temp Data Shows No Significant Warming Over Most Of The World
Published by AJStrata at StrataSphere
Bottom Line – Using two back-of-the-envelope tests for significance against the CRU global temperature data I have discovered:
- 75% of the globe has not seen significant peak warming or cooling changes between the period prior to 1960 and the 2000′s which rise above a 0.5°C threshold, which is well within the CRU’s own stated measurement uncertainties o +/- 1°C or worse.
- Assuming a peak to peak change (pre 1960 vs 2000′s) should represent a change greater than 20% of the measured temperature range (i.e., if the measured temp range is 10° then a peak-to-peak change of greater than 2° would be considered ‘significant’) 87% the Earth has not experienced significant temperature changes between pre 1960 period and the 2000′s.
So how did I come to this conclusion? If you have the time you can find out by reading below the fold.
I have been working on this post for about a week now, testing a hypothesis I have regarding the raw temp data vs the overly processed CRU, GISS, NCDC, IPCC results (the processed data shows dramatic global warming in the last century). I have been of the opinion the raw temp data tells a different, cooler story than the processed data. My theory is alarmists’ results do not track well with the raw data, and require the merging of unproven and extremely inaccurate proxy data to open the error bars and move the trend lines to produce the desired result. We have a clear isolated example from New Zealand where cherry picked data and time windows have resulted in a ridiculous ‘data merging’ that completely obliterates the raw data.
To pull this deception off on a global scale, as I have mentioned before, requires the alarmists to deal with two inconvenient truths:
- The warm periods in the 1930′s and 1940′s which were about the same as today
- The current decline in temperature, just when the alarmists require a dramatic increase to match the rising CO2 levels.
What is needed out the back end of this alarmist process is a graph like we have from NCDC, where the 1930′s-1940′s warm periods are pushed colder and the current temps are pushed higher.
[image offline]
People have found actual CRU code that does this, and it does it by smearing good temp data with inaccurate proxy data (in this case the tree rings) or hard coded adjustments. The second method used by alarmists is to just drop those inconvenient current temps showing global cooling, which has also been clearly discovered in the CRU data dump.
I have been attempting to compensate for the lack of raw temperature data by using the country-by-country graphs dumped with data from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The file is named idl_cruts3_2005_vs_2008b.pdf, which tells me this is the latest version of the CRU raw temp data run in prep for a new release of the latest data (the PDF file was created in July 2009).
I am very confident this data is prior to the heavy handed corrections employed by CRU and its cohorts. The fact is you can see a lot of interesting and telling detail in the graphs. Much of the Pacific Ocean data has been flipped since 2005 trying to correct prior errors and you can see the 2008 data trend way downward in most of the graphs. In addition, the 1930′s-1940′s warm periods have not been squelched yet. The alarmists have not had a chance to ‘clean up’ this data for the general public (which is one reason I think it was in the dump).
Before we get to actual examples and my detailed (and way too lengthy) analysis, I need to explain the graphs and how I used them (click to enlarge).
[image offline]
In this graph we see the primary data we have available from CRU. This is a comparison of the 2005 runs in black and 2008 runs in light purple/red. At CRU all the data is blocked into quarters. This graph is MAM, which stand for March-April-May, for Argentina.
The love of trend lines and averaging by CRU and other alarmists is quite telling here. The ‘raw’ quarterly data is noted with the blue arrows, It is the highly variable lines from which the (much less accurate) trend lines are generated. I point this out to note that fact that to create a quarterly value for a country for a given year means the raw daily temp data has disappeared under a mountain of averaging already. Day/Night temps must be combined into quarterly temps by location and then combined into a country wide figure. Even with all this inaccuracy added in the ‘raw’ data is quite dynamic, which makes me wonder how dynamic the true sensor data is. CRU and others believe the trend lines mean something significant – but really all the do is mask the true dynamics of nature.
Anyway, now let me explain how I derived (by eye – ugh!) the two primary pieces of data I used to test my hypothesis that the 2000′s are not significantly warmer or cooler than the pre 1960 period (when CO2 levels were drastically lower). Here is how I measured the Peak-to-Peak change in each of the graphs (click to enlarge):
![[image offline]](http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/P2P_Calculation.gif){kind=link}
I simply find the highest pre 1960′s peak and the highest point in the 2000′s and subtract. I know this is subjective and error prone, but it is good enough for a ‘reasonableness test’. I would have preferred to use actual data and define min/max points for each time period and compare. But this is what happens when you don’t share the raw data, as true science demands.
Note I am using the 2005 trend line. I have noticed many graphs where the 2008 would given my hypothesis more strength, and maybe some day I will compute that version. I also know there were higher peaks prior to 2000 (especially around 1998). In fact I found myself averaging the slide from 1998 into the 2000′ many times. I tried to err on the alarmists’ side (my hypothesis to prove after all). Also please note that the ‘raw’ yearly data bounces around well beyond all trend line peaks – so I am not too concerned with fact some peaks are skipped. The next calculation will better explain why.
The P2P data is captured in my results file [offline] as shown (click to enlarge):
![[image offline]](http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/P2P_Dataset.gif){kind=link}
Note: I am trying to find a way to get a clean spreadsheet up so folks can copy out the data.
Anyway, what I did was compute the P2P value for each quarter for each country, and then averaged those over the full ‘year’. Then I applied three significance tests to see if the P2P value is (1) less than -0.5°C, (2) within the +/- range of 0.5°C or (3) greater than +0.5°C.
I decided used this significance test because of another file dumped with the CRU data which clearly showed where CRU stated its measurement accuracy was typically 1°C or greater. Here is the CRU report from 2005 containing their accuracy claims, along with their own global graph of temperature accuracy:
In my original post on these files I went into great detail on the aspect of measurement accuracy (or error bars) regarding alarmists claims. I will not repeat that information here, but I feel I am being generous giving the data a +/- 0.5°C margin of error on a trend line (which contains multiple layers of averaging error incorporated in it). Most of the CRU uncertainty data, as mapped on the globe, is above the 1°C uncertainty level.
What that really means is detecting a global warming increment of 0.8°C is not statistically possible. If I had used their numbers none of the raw temps would have been significant, which is why people do these back-of-the-envelope tests to determine if we have sufficiently accurate data to test our conclusions or hypothesis.
===========
Read the conclusion here: CRU Raw Temp Data Shows No Significant Warming Over Most Of The World
h/t to Joe D’Aleo
Ian W says:
Surely all this misses the point – temperature especially ‘average temperature’ is the wrong metric.
The entire AGW hypothesis is based on trapping HEAT. Heat does not equal temperature
Even worse than that, temperature is an intensive variable, so can not be averaged at all, yet it is. There really is, practically and theoretically, no such thing as a ‘global average temperature’. It is a fiction, and not even a polite one.
What should be being measured is the ‘heat content’ of the atmosphere which requires knowledge of the humidity as well as temperature. Given hourly figures for humidity and temperature the hourly heat content could be totaled into a day’s heat content.
Absolutely, but since they can’t do that, they do something meaningless and useless instead that is guaranteed to produce a load of error band; then ignore the error band.
David A. Evans says:
You’re flogging a dead horse mate. I agree with you but no-one else seems to be listening. 🙁
I am… and talking about it too:
For one thing, we measure at airports almost exclusively now for GHCN, and that’s just a giant mistake:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/airports-a-tarmac-tale/
but the bigger problem, I fear, is just that kind of ‘temperature as a proxy for heat’ “small decision” that addes up to a major error. The “Tyranny of Small Decisions”:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/small-tyrants-large-tyrannies/
As for the local climate isn’t World climate argument. The World climate, (if indeed there is such a thing), is made up of lots of local climates. Mine has done nothing unusual & I don’t know anyone else whose local climate has done anything unusual, so it’s probably a load of balls!
Well, in the Western USA it’s been darned cold. Late end to ski season last year, early start this. Australia has been cool and wet. Both Australia / New Zealand and South Africa had great skiing seasons last year, as did Europe. As near as I can tell, what’s going on is that the cold cycle has begun, but it will take about a decade to suck down the ocean temps. During that time we’ll get a load of added rain and snow as the whole things cools. It’s a 30 year or so half cycle, so we’ve got a ways before the numbers all line up to cold everywhere. Until then it’s a fools errand of averaging what can not be averaged to make a fictional number while ignoring the error bands.
Al Tekhasski says:
What is the “coverage area” of one station, Steve, from physics standpoint?
For example, the Weather Station Handbook requires distances from obstacles and paved surfaces to be about 100ft from sensors. I would infer that this is the actual physical radius of “coverage”. Outside this area you have no information and have no rights to extent anything over wider area. Area weighting has no physical justification. I think this “dealing with challenge” is pure self delusion.
I’d make it about the size of the thermometer stem… Topology is fractal, so the size of the ruler you use will change the measurement. Temperatures depend on the topology, so temperatures are fractal. Want a different ‘average temperature’? Change the number or location of thermometers… I’ve got 20 F more or less variation inside 50 feet measured (and the reality is it was more like 3 feet if I’d wanted to put out another thermometer…)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/an-example-of-fractal-temperatures/
We ASSUME and HOPE that a screen or box does some kind of valid averaging of the surface temperatures. It doesn’t, because it can’t. It just slightly standardizes the size of the ruler we use, so we get a slightly more consistent meaningless result.
Like trying to answer the question “How long is the coastline of England?”, there is NO right answer to “What is the average temperature of England?” and it depends on the size of the ruler (or thermometer) you use.
Yet we argue endlessly about how best to calculate the number of angels that can fit on the end of the thermometers… and the best statistical techniques for estimating them…
Again: How’s the weather in England?, I’m curious if you have snow on the ground there related to another post I’m doing. – Anthony
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11852488
27 November 2010 Last updated at 08:53
Fresh heavy snowfalls and icy roads affecting the UK
Snowy scene in Paisley (pic: Vassilis Manoussos) A blanket of snow added to the Biblical scene in Paisley on Friday night
Severe weather warnings are in place for most of the UK with more heavy snow already falling in some areas.
Up to 15cm (6in) could fall in parts of Scotland and north-east England, while 2-8cm (1-3in) is likely in areas such as the Midlands and the south-west.
Norwich airport is closed and warnings are also in place for icy roads in Northern Ireland and Wales.
Wintry weather on Friday caused school closures, flight disruption and a 26-mile tailback on the M4 in south Wales.
Some weekend sporting events have also been cancelled.
The UK has seen the earliest widespread snowfall for 17 years and forecasters say it could last for two weeks.
One of the coldest place overnight on Friday was Trawscoed, in west Wales, where -10.2C (14F) was recorded. Dalwhinnie, in the Highlands, recorded -8.2C (17F), and Chesham, in Buckinghamshire, -7C (19F).
———————————————
We are told we are in for very heavy snowfalls in the south of the country next week.
MET office
Latest Snow Reports
Outbreaks of snow are continuing to affect many parts of the UK and have spread to many parts of central England overnight. Heavy snow showers have also spread across Northern Ireland, central and western Wales and also parts of southwest England. Latest reports we have are of 4 to 5 cm of snow in Cornwall with one report of 20 cm near Truro. Elsewhere reports of 6 cm at Maldon, Essex, 8 cm at Fakenham, Norfolk and over 10 cm in Preston have been received. Reports also suggest there over 30 cm in eastern Scotland and over 35 cm in parts of Northumberland. If you have had recent snow, especially in these areas, please let us know using the link below. Issued at 0701 on Sat 27 Nov 2010.
It it also severly cold much earlier than is normal in Scandinavia with November records close to being broken. The official winter seasonal forecast in Norway is for a mild winter overall, but, as there has been in the UK, there is considerable debate about it. http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/snow-in-uk-scandinavia-freezes-but-mild-winter-is-forecast/
Steve Mosher:
It would be really helpful if you could provide a list (or link) showing exactly how the Met Office/CRU/or you! adjust the raw readings. What are these adjustments for – in plain English? What is their magnitude? How are they worked out? How are they applied?
From my perspective, it seems that we are trying to measure annual global temperature anomolies that are far smaller than the likely measurement errors. Is that where the statistical magic is necessary?
Many thanks (and apologies if these questions have been exlained elsewhere.)
RobB
Anthony Watts, might very well own an electric car, etc. but he is probably wasting a lot of time with all this conspiracy theory and his notions of debunking. What’s it all for?
Global warming might or might not be real. But you need only to look at the benefit to Los Angeles residents of the Clean Air Act, or similar in London decades earlier, to realize that the industrial society needs substantial re-thinking before it can approach anything near sustainability.
The most likely outcome of Mr Watts’ efforts are to provide fuel for the corporations like Exxon and BP that are prime offenders in making the world a less hospitable place for future generations.
Key issues associated with global warming are:
– Reduction of biodiversity (life species) on land, sea and air
– Pollution
– Exhaustion of finite resources including forests and fossil fuels
– Insufficient government regulation and control of corporations
Global warming – whatever it means to you – is merely an early warning of major problems that must be addressed. It’s easy for us to say “let’s deny all that, and if adjustments are needed let’s put these off for a generation or two,” but for those who would say that, consider the following.
The changes proposed by Al Gore are needed whether he is right or wrong. You oppose him now, but in 50 years from now, if he is right, will you have the courage to look your grand children in the eye and say “I had an opportunity to help fix this mess, but I was too interested in my own personal comfort. Now you will do my suffering as well as yours.”
Alarmist? Hell yes, because that’s what it takes to move people out of their complacency.
I’m not much into labels, because I think that diminishes the value of what people are saying, but if I were to label those that oppose global warming theory I’d call them, including Mr Watts, ‘the hedonists’.
The most important question, with which we should all be immediately concerned, is what will we do to adapt to a less hospitable world with fewer resources? How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)
onion says:
November 26, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Are you trying to imply that Anthony and the Mods don’t know their onions? If that is the case it is self evident from the replies that they recognise you for what you are. Now run along, there’s a good troll.
tonyb says:
November 27, 2010 at 12:16 am
“Listening to the UK Farming today programnmes are instructive. Just in the last few weeks we have a farmer-encouraged by the govt-who planted Apricot trees 10 years ago and is now grubbing them up as they don’t ripen”
I remember this story well. It was as I remember a substantial interview backed by camera shots and pushed by the BBC reporter as final proof, if any were required, STUPID people, of the incontravertible fact of AGW. He was if memory serves me, also growing olive groves!
Putting your money where your mouth is should be undertaken with great caution: putting your money where other peoples’ mouths are is foolhardy in the extreme.
He joins a long list of dupes including those who swallowed the govt. renewables deal in Spain.
“Steven Mosher says: November 26, 2010 at 4:33 pm
You are most likely seeing the effect of the TOBS adjustment. This adjustment is required. the raw temps are wrong without it.”
So, at what point in time was the TOBS adjustment applied to the ‘raw’ data?
As I understand it, the McMillan blinkers are all the stations in those states, as downloaded in July09 and Nov09. It is my further understanding that the datasets were not labeled as having changed, let alone having been massively ‘corrected’ for TOBS ‘bias’.
I had the impression that the great homogenizers were hard at work on V3 in that timeframe, and that the TOBS and other adjustments had been out long enough to become old hat, if not an embarrassment.
Would not the agency have announced with great fanfare, the deployment of a big correction like TOBS across a reference database?
McMillan has fulfilled the requirements you placed on others; ‘data provenance’, and ‘the code’, which in this case is ‘plot the raw data’.
Your supercilious dismissal of the McMillan blinkers seems rather flip…
RR
The instrumental record prior to 1979 is a joke. Coverage was spotty and largely confined to industrialized nations in the Northern Hemisphere with coverage getting worse and worse as you go back in time. 70% of the earth’s surface (ocean) had virtually no coverage at all. Consistency in instruments, placement, and recording was sloppy for the most part and was never in anyone’s wildest imagination designed to discover a global average temperature no less discovery it with accuracy and precision to a tenth of a degree. Temperature determinations by proxy are of course even worse than the instrument record.
The only reliable global temperature dataset is the satellite record beginning in 1979 and even it has weaknesses such as inability to measure temperatures nearer the poles.
Every figure and graph purporting to represent global average temperature prior to 1979 with better than 1 degree of precision and accuracy should be taken with a grain of salt. That also applies to AJ Strata’s analysis which is based upon the same ridiculous notion that the temperature record prior to 1979 (raw or adjusted, instrumental or proxy) is adequate.
I used to be a TOBS denialist myself, but now am a True Believer. See
http://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/
However, rather than using the arcane but well-intentioned Karl et al model to guesstimate the TOBS adjustment, I would now favor just treating any change in TOBS as a new station, with a new offset to be determined by something like RomanM’s “PlanB” method.
Despite your assurances about CRU, I’m highly skeptical of its thirties-noughties warming, given its heavy reliance on airports. Here in Ohio, 8 out of 10 stations used by CRU are airports (if you count Cincinnati as being in Ohio), despite the available of 26 non-airport USHCN stations (at least a few of which are not terrible). Is CRU just measuring the growth in aviation over the past 80 years?
Another factor that concerns me is Sensor Blackening, http://climateaudit.org/2007/10/20/sensor-blackening/. Anthony pointed out long ago that this is an issue with Stephenson Screens, but I am also concerned that the MMTS readers, which apparently receive no maintenance, get dirty over time and therefore absorb more solar heat.
Hu McCulloch says:
(if you count Cincinnati as being in Ohio)
—————————–
Yikes! Don’t listen to him, he’s a Brown’s fan! 😉
Cinci is in Ohio. Isn’t the part of that urban area that is in Kentucky called Newport?
P.Skilz says: November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The most important question, with which we should all be immediately concerned, is what will we do to adapt to a less hospitable world with fewer resources? How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)
You mean with the onset of the next ice age soon to come? After all we have been cooling since the Holocene Optimum(or Maximum). Ever wonder why it is called
“optimum/maximum”?
There’s an interesting editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal regarding Al Gore’s admission that ethanol fuel he promoted serves no useful purpose and does more harm than good. I am pasting the entire editorial below :
REVIEW & OUTLOOK NOVEMBER 27, 2010 Al Gore’s Ethanol Epiphany
He concedes the industry he promoted serves no useful purpose.
Anyone who opposes ethanol subsidies, as these columns have for decades, comes to appreciate the wisdom of St. Jude. But now that a modern-day patron saint—St. Al of Green—has come out against the fuel made from corn and your tax dollars, maybe this isn’t such a lost cause.
Welcome to the college of converts, Mr. Vice President. “It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Al Gore told a gathering of clean energy financiers in Greece this week. The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”
No kidding, and Mr. Gore said he knows from experience: “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”
Mr. Gore’s mea culpa underscores the degree to which ethanol has become a purely political machine: It serves no purpose other than re-electing incumbents and transferring wealth to farm states and ethanol producers. Nothing proves this better than the coincident trajectories of ethanol and Mr. Gore’s career.
Ethanol’s claim on the Treasury was first made amid the 1970s energy crisis, with Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress subsidizing anything that claimed to be a substitute for foreign oil. Mr. Gore, freshman House class of 1976, was an early proponent of what was then called “gasahol.”
The subsidies continued through the 1990s, with the ethanol lobby finding a sympathetic ear in Clinton EPA chief and Gore protege Carol Browner, who in 1994 banned the gasoline additive MTBE and left ethanol as the only option under clean air laws. When the Senate split 50-50 on repealing this de facto mandate, then Vice President Gore cast the deciding vote for . . . ethanol. That served him well in the 2000 Democratic primaries against ethanol critic Bill Bradley.
During the George W. Bush years, Big Ethanol adapted again, attaching itself to the global warming panic that Mr. Gore did as much as anyone to foment. Republicans in Congress formalized the mandate and increased subsidies in the 2005 and 2007 energy bills.
Meanwhile, the greens have slowly turned against corn ethanol, thanks to the growing scientific evidence that biofuels increase carbon emissions more than fossil fuels do. But the boondoggle lives on in dreams for so-called advanced fuels like cellulosic ethanol. Note Mr. Gore’s objection only to “first generation,” though we’ve been hearing that advanced ethanol is just a year or two away from viability for two decades.
At least on corn subsidies, we now have the makings of a left-right anti-boondoggle coalition. Major corn energy subsidies such as the 54-cent-per-gallon blenders credit expire at the end of the year, and Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are encouraging the new Congress to prove its fiscal bona fides by letting them die. Chuck Grassley (R., Ethanol) responded this week on Twitter: “WashPost reports 2 of my colleagues want sunset ethanol tax credit R they ready sunset tax subsidies oilANDgas enjoys?”
Messrs. DeMint and Coburn replied, essentially, make our day—and rightly so. Regardless of government intervention, the economy will continue to demand oil and gas, because they are useful. No one could plausibly say the same about ethanol, and maybe now that he’s had his epiphany Mr. Gore will join the fight against the subsidized industry he did so much to promote.
Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The most likely outcome of Mr Watts’ efforts are to provide fuel for the corporations like Exxon and BP that are prime offenders in making the world a less hospitable place for future generations.>>
How odd. Is a tent city in Darfur that consumes 0 oil a more hospitible place to live than a large city where courtesy of Exxon, BP and others we have heated homes when it is too cold, cooled when it is too hot, food frozen until it is needed, fresh fruit and vegetables delivered from which ever part of the world they are in season, and at a price that almost anyone can afford. Sounds like they are making the world more hospitable, not less.
Key issues associated with global warming are:
– Reduction of biodiversity (life species) on land, sea and air>>
Actually the geological record is quite clear that a warmer earth results in higher biodiversity as well as density. Plants can’t even live at CO2 levels below 160 ppm but they thrive at CO2 levels many times our current level, suggesting that much higher CO2 levels are the environments they evolved in and the current levels are constraining their growth, hence the use of CO2 to increase production in greenhouses, which I note, are usually warmer than the surrounding area and out produce it 10 to 1 or more.
– Pollution>>
You may want to reword that. You just claimed that global warming causes pollution.
– Exhaustion of finite resources including forests and fossil fuels>>
Uhm… forests are finite? And here I thought they grew back. As for fossil fuels, yup, gotta be some limit there. Burning what we got so far will take a couple of centuries during which a lot of new technology will come along, not to mention discovery of new reserves, and in case you hadn’t noticed, nuclear reactors actually do work. Even ultra-lefty France is building them like crazy.
– Insufficient government regulation and control of corporations>>
Global warming causes that? Wow. You know what increased government regulation and control of corporations causes? Its called a recession. Do you know what massively increased regulation and control causes? A depression. Do you know what total government regulation and control causes? The USSR. Oh wait, they collapsed didn’t they?
The changes proposed by Al Gore are needed whether he is right or wrong.>>
If he is wrong we need to do what he says anyway? What god like power he must have that we should do what he says even if he is wrong.
You oppose him now, but in 50 years from now, if he is right, will you have the courage to look your grand children in the eye and say “I had an opportunity to help fix this mess, but I was too interested in my own personal comfort. Now you will do my suffering as well as yours.” >>
Well if he’s wrong I get to look my grandchildren in the eye and explain why they have to go to be hungry tonight because there’s no food again, and they all have to sleep in the same bed to keep warm… What you fail to understand is the medicine proposed is magnitudes worse then the potential harm from something we don’t even know exists, is so small we can barely measure it at all, and appears to be coming to end due to a global cooling cycle. I’ll look my grandchildren in the eye all right, and proudly tell them that I lobbied hard to discredit alarmists screaming for action to fix a problem they invented to try and deprive you young uns of a future of comfort.
Alarmist? Hell yes, because that’s what it takes to move people out of their complacency.>>
So we should do what Al Gore says, no matter if he is right or wrong, and its OK to scare people to make them do it. Have you read any history books and can you identify the people you sound like? Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun….
I’m not much into labels, because I think that diminishes the value of what people are saying, but if I were to label those that oppose global warming theory I’d call them, including Mr Watts, ‘the hedonists’.>>
I don’t recall Mr Watts opposing global warming. I recall much evidence presented that debunks or calls into question the science that claims global warming exists and is causing the negative effects claimed.
The most important question, with which we should all be immediately concerned, is what will we do to adapt to a less hospitable world with fewer resources? How will we survive for another 50,000-80,000 years? (as tribal societies have done)>>
Well I can answer that. If we adopt the “Al Gore” approach, that is EXACTLY how we will survive. As tribal societies. As for your timeline of 50,000 years, puhlease. Just a hundred years ago we had no television, commercial air craft, internet, desk top computers, nuclear reactors, electric grids, cell phones… need I go on? We’ve enough resources for the next few centuries and you want to put restraints on their use now to protect people 50,000 years from now? And sentence them to live like tribal societies to do it?
Don’t be daft.
tonyb says:
November 27, 2010 at 12:16 am
Its odd that Ms Pope would draw attention specifically to recent increasing heatwave and global warming in the UK, when short-medium trends give the opposite.
living here in London for the last 20 years the last “wave” that could be described as a heat based *anomaly* was some 7 years ago, and it wasn’t that spectacular
“”P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
Key issues associated with global warming are:
– Reduction of biodiversity (life species) on land, sea and air
– Pollution
– Exhaustion of finite resources including forests and fossil fuels
– Insufficient government regulation and control of corporations””
Sir/Madame,
You sound sincere in your argument, but. And your use of the word ‘hedonists’ does denigrate your argument somewhat. It speaks to arguments we’ve heard many times here: the anthropogenic source of climate variation. Do you believe we currently posses the technology to mitigate a catastrophic change in climate? Do you think we will have it 10yrs., 100yrs., or 1000+yrs.? Many have shown here and elsewhere that we do not and will not…it is smply too big and too chaotic, an we are so small.
The IEA has just published it’s outlook, they don’t appear to think so either, and they project that by 2035 only 8% of the global energy output will be generated by alternative technologies (I’m going off memory here it may be only 3%, but that may be wind energy alone), the link is provided.
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/WEO2010_ES_English.pdf
The biodiversity impacts you speak of are a non-issue given that 99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. There have been no increases in extinction rates of any species, see here:
http://data.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/html/Red%20List%202004/completed/figure3.2.html
Your point on pollution is well made and at least some of the $$BILLIONS$$ spent over the last few years on AGW cap&trade scemes should/could have been better spent on cleaning up some of the mess we’ve made.
Your point of more regulation of corporations? Really? Perhaps you’re not in/from the USA and are not aware of the current situation in CA, arguably the most “green” state in the union…they’re going bankrupt trying to “save the planet” by initiating environmental policies that are decades (IMO) premature, will not have any appreciable impact on GHG’s in the atmosphere, and are currently driving corporations out of the state. Maybe you were speaking on further regulating pollutants, BTW of which CO2 is not a polluting gas.
In fact the argument here is that:
1. It has not been proven that CO2 is causing/has caused any warming at any time in Earth’s history.
2. It has been proven that our ability as humans to even ascertain an accurate global average temperature that everyone agrees on is, at best, lacking.
3. Human technology will always be evolving away from carbon based energy sources with the full knowledge that fossil fuels on this planet are in a finite supply.
4. Extinction events will always take place on this planet and, long before we came along, and will continue long after we’re gone. To say repeatedly, as I have read, that, “scientists concerned that species that have not yet been dicovered are becoming extinct at an increasing rate”. Do you see the stupidity of that statement? Are these people that you can trust?
5. Forests are increasing, are not in danger, something that increased CO2 levels will accelerate creating more biodiversity.
6. Since we don’t fully understand why or how much the globe is warming, and given that there has been no warming for the past 15 years or more, do you feel that the $$BILLIONS$$ that have been spent on this charade might not have been better spent actually saving people lives: in 2000 the UN said that $175 billion would eradicate poverty on the planet…and they wasted that opportunity, and continue to waste that opportunity with my, yours and our TAX DOLLARS?
Just sayin’ Al Gore is wrong, not to mention that he has millions invested in cap & trade scemes all over the planet. Google his name and follow the money. This is not a guy you want to get behind!
P.Skilz says: November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
“Anthony Watts, might very well own an electric car, etc. but he is probably wasting a lot of time with all this conspiracy theory and his notions of debunking. What’s it all for?
Global warming might or might not be real. But you need only to look at the benefit to Los Angeles residents of the Clean Air Act, or similar in London decades earlier, to realize that the industrial society needs substantial re-thinking before it can approach anything near sustainability.
The most likely outcome of Mr Watts’ efforts are to provide fuel for the corporations like Exxon and BP that are prime offenders in making the world a less hospitable place for future generations.”
Science is science and when it is bastardized for political and monetary gain it is not good for “future generations”. Inability to, or lack of ability to pay, to heat one’s home or move people and goods from one place to another is also not good for future generations. LA is a fine example, along with all of the rest of CA, being unable to pay their own way given their save the earth mentality and expectation that the rest of the country will keep them from freezing to death or living in the dark. You left wingers never look at the social costs of making yourselves feel good by espousing and implementing foolish “green” programs.
The biggest problem with large corporations is not lack of government control but lack of shareholder control, which the government refuses to codify to prevent the theft of shareholder money in the form of outrageous CEO and executive compensation and also make executives and boards of directors responsible for the real damage they cause to the environment and to shareholders. I would note that even when socialists are in charge, these changes never occur, just a lot of high talk.
Please excuse the typos in previous post ie, should be schemes, etc, etc. Hey I hod to GO bad! 🙂
E.M. Smith says:
November 27, 2010 at 2:12 am
Sorry Michael. I was too exclusive. I should have said few are listening, not “no-one else seems to be listening.”
DaveE.
“P.Skilz says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:43 am
The changes proposed by Al Gore are needed whether he is right or wrong. You oppose him now, but in 50 years from now, if he is right, will you have the courage to look your grand children in the eye and say “I had an opportunity to help fix this mess, but I was too interested in my own personal comfort. Now you will do my suffering as well as yours.”
There have been several excellent responses already, but I would just like to add this: If I recall correctly, Al Gore proposes carbon capture as one of his solutions. This is a total waste of money!! Our province has plans to spend 2 billion dollars on carbon capture over the next few years. And even if Al Gore is right about the catastrophic effects of global warming due to CO2, it would be better to spend every penny of that money on nuclear fusion research which will greatly mitigate that problem. If we get it to work, nuclear fusion will create much pollution free energy. And if that happens, I can look my grandchildren in the eye and say I spoke up for an abundance of good clean energy for all and not for throwing money away into the ground for no good reason.
At a physics conference I recently attended, speculation was that within 4 years we may get more energy out of fusion than is put in. Of course it would take longer to be commercially available.
Again I have to ask the Chicken Littles: If you believe AGW is happening and is a serious threat, why are you still using a computer? Or do you think that driving a Prius and changing to mercury-laden twisty bulbs is enough of a tithe and sacrifice, and now your conscience is clear, and your place in the green afterlife is secure?
Ah, but the green revolutionary leaders don’t want us to have clean, cheap energy. Just ask Paul Ehrlich:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992
Or Maurice Strong of IPCC:
“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. ”
I think Strong and his ilk think we’re already at that point, and are trying their best to make it happen. Somehow, thought, I think the collapse won’t apply to them, since they have to lead us through the coming dark times.
Werner Brozek says:
November 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
re; fusion power
Fusion generators aren’t going to happen. Even if they exceed breakeven there’s no known material that can withstand the heat and radiation in the fusion container for long enough to make it economically feasible. It would be like someone creating an automobile that gets 500 miles a gallon but the engine, which is made of exotic materials and is very expensive, needs to replaced every 10,000 miles. Sort of like electric cars actually which are wonderfully efficient in fuel consumption but need to have very expensive battery banks replaced every few years which totally wipes out the cost savings from the energy efficiency.
Liquid biofuels are the answer for transportation and photovoltaics in combination with traditional on-demand generators the answer for electricity. We won’t get away from combustion driven electrical generators in the near future but demand will be greatly reduced through decentralized photovoltaics satisfying demand while the sun is shining. Both of these are reduced to engineering challenges at this point in time – synthetic biology for the former and manufacturing technology for the latter.
The two keys problems with electrical generation that don’t get talked about much are storage and distribution. That’s why liquid fuel for transportation will be with us for the foreseeable future. No one has come up with an economically feasible way to store electricity so on-demand generation will be with us for a long time to keep the juice flowing at night and on cloudy days. The other problem, distribution, also works to limit electricity for transporation. Power grids are already running close to capacity. There is simply not enough unused capacity in the transmission lines for more than a token percentage of vehicles to use plug-in recharging. The cost of stringing up more electrical transmission lines is prohibitive. The infrastructure itself is expensive but worse is that the ground footprint taken up by transmission towers must greatly increase and that means condemning a lot of expensive real-estate and structures thereupon to make room for them. And nobody wants high tension wires spoiling their view or travelling overhead causing cancer clusters beneath them. It’s a bloody nightmare.
Werner Brozek says:
November 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
re; fusion power (con’t)
Here’s what -should- be our research focus for the ultimate source of energy instead of the great fusion boondoggle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
The only thing keeping this technology from getting off the ground (pun intended) is the cost of lifting mass to orbit.
But there’s a very promising technology (carbon nanotube cable) that could solve the launch problem real soon now and unlike fusion has actually been progressing by leaps and bounds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Japan appears to be leading the charge in the above effort which makes me very sad as an American but better them than no one.
How many is “every few years”? How would it compare to regular maintenance on IC engines? As the technology becomes more robust, the costs would come down, as they always do.
I’ve looked at AJ STrata’s stuff before, and I have a copy of the country by country graphs. Big props to him for his analysis, it’s about time.