In honor of Jeff Id closing The Air Vent, I’m going to take the day off and spend more time with my kids.
Be civil and keep the topics germane. Don’t make me come back here. – Anthony
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R. Gates said on Open Thread Sunday
January 23, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Correlation doesn’t prove cause. Prediction of an ice free summer based on a linear regression of non-linear behavior and saying CO2 is the cause is subjective speculation. All of the observations you have listed can be attributed to natural cycles associated with the evaporation/condensation and freeze/thaw of water that is controlling the transfer of energy. The global concentration of CO2 is being controlled by these processes. CO2 is just going along for the ride. If you believe you qualify, peer review these presentations. http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf. http//www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf. http://www.kidswincom.net/arcticseaice.pdf. I invite other readers to do the same, and let me know where I have made errors in my analysis. My contact information is on my website http://www.kidswincom.net.
Alan McIntire says: “if Delingpole had been quicker thinking on his feet, he could have said something like,
”Climate science is in its infancy, less developed than medical science was in 1790.
In 1799 George Washington was treated by the best doctors medical science had to offer. The consensus was to bleed him, thus killing him more quickly than if he had no medical treatment whatsoever””
Yes, you are correct. Delingpole could have said a lot of things, and I am rather surprised he was wrong-footed so easily. My suspicions are that if this tiny segment had not occurred, the BBC would probably have deleted the entire 3-hour interview rather than include any cool and rational argument from a “denier”. The whole point was to make him look as stupid as possible, and this has become almost the sole focus for all the reviewers in the pro-AGW press.
This was a classic BBC stitch-up, and it just proves to me how untrustworthy the BBC is on this issue, and confirms that I made the right decision last year not to be interviewed by any BBC staffer. They will delete everything if it doesn’t conform to their orthodoxy; Roger Harribin spent several weeks last year traveling and interviewing skeptics, and he must have recorded hours and hours of them, yet not one word has been published or broadcast of any of these interviews.
Anthony, no need to apologise – you seem to have gathered a group of mods who can keep things ticking over. To requote the old cliche – on your deathbed, you will not be saying ‘I wish I had spent more time looking after WUWT’. You have spent more than enough.
There has been some discussion about non scientists commenting on this blog. The most cutting one was along the lines of how we should spend at least half an hour dissecting whatever was posited before commenting.
Apart from the ‘leave it to us, we are scientists’ arrogance of this approach, it devalues the contributions of non scientists. I refer to the great former Australian Statistician, Ian Castles, who was one of the first to cast doubt on the IPCC doomsday forecasts. Castles was not an ideologue, but he looked over the IPCC modelling about economic activity and called it for a crock. He could not be ignored. I believe that it was the beginning of the end for the alarmists. No-one has ever disproved what he said. Stern and his pals are not fit to lick his boots.
Also, it has been very enlightening to hear from people who use modelling in various disciplines. Leaving aside the debates over details, none of them have much faith in the concept of forecasting climate in the long term.
I am guessing that you are thinking about the future of WUWT – like maybe splitting into two.
Whatever you do, remember John Daly and Ian Castles – coming up to Australia Day (Jan 26) here!
One of the best parts of this blog, and there are many, is the fact that many ordinary people who have a passionate interest can comment without fear of being looked down upon. I can honestly say that, having visited many science blogs , this is the most informative and mind opening site on the WWW. The questions posed and the answers given are excellent even when they are wrong because even wrong questions and answers have great value.
Often I see a question that has been bothering me answered by Lief or E M Smith and Enneagram and so many others that gives perspective and is often a launch pad for more research. The “big brains” elsewhere are often so dismissive and that’s plain wrong. Many ordinary but interested people want to know more. They are the real people who pay tax and vote and it is us who need to be convinced that we are doing the right things.
I would say that we all, around the Internet, owe Anthony Watts a huge vote of “kudos dude” for making it possible to add to what we know.
This is a great site.
This nice extreme skiing video starts with interviews about predicting the winter weather. Interesting comments.
Is there any way to have vimeo videos embed with a player rather than just show up as a link?
Regarding the James Delingpole interview – this is the first I’ve heard of it. Delingpole was an obvious target to attack – a journalist with strident views on the subject, and not a scientist either. It is tough on James – I am sure he will be going over and over all the things he should have said, and it’s a propaganda coup for the warmists, portraying sceptics as confused or even hypocrital.
It does no good to imagine what kind of response Richard Lindzen or Lord Monckton would have given, but you can bet it would be Nurse who’d be pleading for the filming to stop. But I guess the Nurse steered clear of those two.
Re: Delingpole:
“Suppose you were ill with cancer would you wish to be treated by “consensus” medicine or something from the quack fringe?”
Classic “Have you stopped beating your wife” question. The choices given are between standard treatment and a “quack.”
That is the kind of “science” questions the BBC is reduced to asking.
Re: BBC, This is a must read: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349506/Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA-says-Peter-Sissons.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Peter Sissons: “For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?
In my view, ‘bias’ is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the pervading culture. The better word is a ‘mindset’. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left. … ”
Read the full article, it is very informative about how bias works in the media. Something Sissons has observed first hand for half a century.
Pamela Gray,
Is there any reason to think that CO2 is special in regards to heating? For example, let us say that the earth was heating not due to CO2 but to an increase (for whatever reason) in the temperature of the sun. Would the radiative cooling balance this heating? If so, how has the earth warmed to (for example) five degrees hotter than our current temperatures?
If this is not what you are getting at, I apologise.
Regarding radiative cooling generally, can you give me more information? My first thought was that it was the cooling through radiation into space, but then you talked about evaporation.
Regarding evaporation, four per cent more water is in the atmosphere, with two per cent more precipitation, so there has been an imbalance of two per cent. The water content of the atmosphere is abotu 12,900 cubic kilometres. Around two per cent of that is 260 cubic kilometres, or 260 trillion litres (check the maths on that, as I might have missed something).
That would take around 320 billion kilowatt hours to evaporate.
The area of the earth is around 500 trillion square metres. So that is 500 trillion watts, or (over the course of a year) about 4,380 trillion kilowatt hours. Thus, only a tiny fraction of this excess energy is going into evaporation – approximately .01 per cent. So it can effectively be ignored in any calculations.
Note: none of the maths here is exact. It also does not take into account some extra heat that would be used up in the various ways that water ends up in the atmosphere.
If none of this is helpful, let me know – I may be barking up the wrong tree entirely. 🙂
John M,
According to RSS: ” Channel TLS (Lower Stratosphere) is dominated by stratospheric cooling, punctuated by dramatic warming events caused by the eruptions of El Chichon (1982) and Mt Pinatubo (1991). ”
The lower stratosphere seems especially sensitive to volancoes, but there is a definite downward trend. The question was asked: what predictions associated with global warming have come true? Stratospheric cooling was a prediction; it is occurring.
If your argument is that there should be a monotonic decrease in temperature then that is not a prediction associated with global warming, given that a warming trend of between .1 and .2 degrees per decade can be overwhelmed for short periods by other effects (such as volcanos, as demonstrated nicely in that stratospheric temperature graph).
Smokey,
The troposphere is warming, as demonstrated by both UAH and RSS data.
However, I agree that it is warming less than expected. But the difference is not all that great. If you multiply the slope of the increase in the UAH data by 0.8 (necessary in order to correct for the fact that it is not surface warming and is expected to be higher than surface warming) and then map that against the natural logarithm of CO2 you get a slope of 2.14. Multiplying by .7 (the natural logarithm of 2) gives you a temperature increase per doubling of 1.7 degrees celsius, which is well within the range of IPCC projections even for equilibrium CO2 – the range for that is 1.5 to 4.5 degrees celsius.
However, as CO2 is not in equilibrium, the better projected number to look at is the expected temperature response to a doubling of CO2 in a non-equilibrium state, which is 2 degrees. So it is a little low, but within the ballpark.
The link to the IPCC statements on equilibrium and non-equilibrium (transitive) climate sensitivity:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-4-5.html
Transitive climate sensitivity is projected to be between 1 and 3 degrees celsius. So 1.7 sits well within the projected range.
My favorite Owl Box, as presented in Anthony’s Surface Station Project, is the beautiful one that sits on the asphalt, nicely fenced in just a stones throw across the street from the front door of the University of Arizona, Department of Climatism. A text book example by the Experts of how to build a well equipped Urban Heat Island Station.
Just think; every day for the last 150 years or so, some grad student, has walked across that street, and into that hallowed enclosure to open up the owl box and read the dipstick; twice a day, to get the max and min Temperature for the day.
(s)he takes those readings back to the department, where an undergrad student carefully enters the numbers into the department super computer; which performs the famous, Tm = (Tmax, + Tmin)/2 , algorithm on the data to come up with the true daily average Temperature.
Now Tempe Arizona is not known to be at the earth’s global mean Temperature of 288 K; maybe more like 305 K.
If they plot the daily average Temperature as they have for the last 150 years; somebody is bound to notice that it gose up and down; and somebody might do a Fourier transform of the data and come up with a frequency spectrum for that data.
Not surprisingly they will find a big spike at zero frequency of amplitude maybe 305 K; of course with error bars around it. There will be a prominent signal in a fairly narrow band around 1/365.25 days which a research team has concluded is found to correlate with an r^2 of 0.99 to the frequency of the earth orbit about the sun; which the team has tentatively assigned as a source for that signal. There’s an almost imperceivable signal hardly distinguishable from the noise, centered around 1/11 years, and a somewhat clearer signal at 1/22 years. Nobody has been around the department long enough to come up with a cause for these; but some perky frosh lady suggested it had something to do with sunspots. And then there is a signal at around 1/30 years, and a harmonic at 1/60 years, which are assumed to be related to the standard 30 and sixty year periods during which climatism theories are considered valid.
Moving up the scale, there’s a small line appearing about every 1/27 days or so, and this has researchers bamboozled. Finally there’s a very prominent line at 1/24 hours, which may be just a false noise signal due to the Owl box being opened twice a day to read the dipstick. Now of course the Fourier spectrum also has a background continuum of non descript signals of unknown origin.
Now the Profs at UA could just send this data (the dipstick readings) to Dr James Hansen at NASA to mix into his GUESSTemp algorithm; but that big spike of 305 K at zero frequency really sets Hansen’s alarm bells ringing; because he doesn’t like to see big and morove variabe numbers there from different stations.
So to sanitize the data at UA, the profs have come up with a “trick” to “hide the Temp”, so they noticed that for the period from 1960 to 1990 the average of all the daily zero frequency signals just happened to be 305 K +/- 2 deg C
So to please Dr Hansen; they arbitrarily subtracted 305 from their zeroi freuency signal, which made it zero +/- 2 deg C, and they stuck up a post it note with 305 K on it inside the Owl box; for future reference.
Now to be sure that Dr Hansen doesn’t get mixed up, and believe that Tempe has become a major ski area; they label the data they send him; not UA Temperature; but UA “Anomaly”, to warn him that it is not supposed to be zero Kelvins in Tempe Arizona. But of course every other station is sending Hansen similar corruptions of the data, with also near zero signals for the zero frequency signal; so he doesn’t suspect anything.
Now unfortunately, although it doesn’t rain in Tempe, you sometimes do get some high clouds at night which help to keep the place so damn hot during the day, and often in the early morning those high clouds block the sun, and make it colder than it is supposed to be, and as a result of these clouds comign and going, it turns out that the Tempe Temperature varies a lot faster than one cycle per day, and sometimes when they have lots of cloudiness; usually during some Goof Tournament, the Temperature can rise and fall several times during the day.
Well the problem is that that 305 K signal at zero frequency that is squished to zero +/- 2 deg C by the “trick” is the average of all the other temperatures, and it doesn’t give the correct average unless you read the thermometer at least two times per day; and you only get the right answer then under special circumstances which don’t apply to Temper, and particularly don’t apply when you have the much faster variations caused by the clouds and their come and go at random.
The twice daily samples ONLY contain sufficient information to correctly calculate the correct zero frequency signal, when there is no Temperature change data at frequencies faster than one cycle per 24 hours; because of their twice daily reading schedule.
As a result of the faster changes the average of the max and min no longer give the correct value for the true daily average Temperature; so the 305 K number is erroneous, and when you subtract 305 from the zero frequency signal you now have some unknown error, due to the improper sampling regimen. Other frequency signals have also been corrupted by the sampling errors, and together they combine to make the zero signal erroenous in a completley unknown fashion; and subtracting the fixed 305 number from the computed average does nothing to fix the problem; the “Anomaly” number is just as false as the original 305 K number is; so nothing has been altered by the anomalizing algorithm; the data is still junque, and if Hansen uses it, he is going to get rubbish as well.
the process of reducing the actual temperature data to an anomalousd Temperature number, does absolutely nothing as far as curing the lack of proper sampling methodology, and the anomaly is as corrupt as the original station average Temperature for the day was.
So you can use the Tempe number instead of reading the Temperature down at La Paz Mexic, 1200 km away; but the value oyu get is bound to be wrong; and anomalizing it won’t solve the problem.
Please put out the alert to watch for this likely Mann bashing:
“Tomorrow, I’m going to give my state of the union and it’s based on the rings of a tree.” -Glenn Beck, on tomorrow’s show.