The row over the issue of Antarctica warming continues. After a number of articles appeared at the Air Vent, Lucia’s, and Climate Audit, Dr. Steig responds at RealClimate with some accusations of his own. I offered Dr. Steig a guest post here, with no caveats, so that he could get maximum exposure, twice. He didn’t bother to respond.
This whole incident illustrates exactly why authors of competing scientific papers should not be reviewers of other papers critical of their own. This failure of peer review falls squarely into the lap of the Journal of Climate for allowing such nonsense in the first place.
But IMHO, Dr. Steig bears responsibility too, he should have said “no”, realizing what a conflict of interest this was.
He confirms in the latest RealClimate essay that he was in fact “Reviewer A”. He also complains that he wasn’t allowed to see the final draft. This is due to the fact that JoC had to bring in another reviewer to break the 88 page log jam created by “Reviewer A”.
The analysis of the difference between the 3rd and 4th (final) drafts at Climate Audit reveal this:
MrPete
Posted Feb 9, 2011 at 10:06 PM | PermalinkHere is a comparison of Rev 3 and Rev 4. All text changes are marked up — including totally minor changes. I hope this works for the reader. (Personally, I would primarily trust this to provide pointers to areas of change as it is not obvious how to reliably discern exactly what the old/new text was.)
To my admittedly inexperienced eyes, the changes appear relatively minor.
Perhaps one of the authors can speak authoritatively on a) whether Wm C’s question (about round 4 reviews) has any standing, and b) whether Eric Steig’s disclaimer (based on not having seen these changes) is appropriate.
So it seems Dr. Steig’s complaint is empty, and the situation mostly a result of his own doings. Still it points back to the failure of peer review at JoC. They should not have invited Dr. Steig to be a reviewer in the first place. had they not, this whole ugly row would be non-existent.
At CA, this commenter sums it up pretty well:
movielib
Posted Feb 9, 2011 at 5:03 PM | PermalinkEric Steig has replied to Ryan:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/odonnellgate/
There seems to be a lot of arm waving about O’Donnell being wrong about… well, everything.
There is what I’d call a personal attack against “O’Donnell, Condon, and McIntyre,” comparing them unfavorably with such “legitimate, honest commenters” as “Susan Solomon or J. Michael Wallace, or, for that matter, Gavin Schmidt or Mike Mann or myself [i.e. Steig].” You see, he thinks people like O’Donnell and McIntyre are not legitimate honest commenters. The compulsory word “deniers” is also thrown in.
Steig claims O’Donnell is going to “retract [his] allegations” against Steig. It’s very vague and I sure don’t know what he’s talking about.
He says he was a reviewer for the first three drafts of the O’Donnell et al. paper but not for the “markedly different” fourth draft so he hadn’t seen it before publication.
Curiously, Steig does not address the point that is the subject of this thread.
I’ll carry ODonnell’s statement here when he completes it, including making whatever changes/retractions he sees fit.
In the meantime, the Journal of Climate editors should probably be made aware of the mess they created by allowing this conflict of interest to occur in the first place.
The bottom line that has been lost in the fog of this war is that Antarctica isn’t warming as much as is claimed, and most of the statistically significant warming is confined to the peninsula.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Joel (the arrogant elitist) Shore sez:
“And, as for who has won and lost, basically every serious scientific authority on the planet has weighed in on that, ranging from the IPCC…[blah, blah, blah]”
Really? Seriously? You STILL consider the utterly, thoroughly and entirely discredited IPCC to be a “serious scientific authority”? Well, there goes any credibility you ever imagined you had.
As for the rest of the purely political bureaucrats purporting to represent the scientists who are members of their various organizations, click here and bust the single biggest LIE in the entire CAGW fraud.
Steig: “I’ve got some terrible emails from these awful people, and I’ll share them with you but only as long as you are someone I know personally and as long as you promise not to publish them”.
Laughing my ass off! Even my 10 year old has grown out of that nonsense. Incidentally, in all the complaints about McIntyre and fellow sceptics, I never so one email from Climategate that was forward from a sceptic within Team AGW that revealed the sceptics as being in any way unreasonable. Team AGW has made it all up in their own little heads, bless them.
SBVOR says:
I don’t know because I have no way of knowing if the problem was with the teacher, student, or some interaction of the two.
One very strong piece of evidence that such things occurred is by comparing the numbers from this screen capture: http://climateprogress.org/2010/10/26/scientific-american-jumps-the-shark-online-polls-judith-curry/ to the final numbers. There is no way that such differences could be accounted for by random fluctuations…It shows that the distribution of the underlying population participating in the poll changed dramatically.
Of course, given the nature of the poll, there is no reason to take it seriously whatsoever. As you admit, it did not attempt to be scientific in any way. Worse than that, it is not even clear what underlying population they were trying to represent… Was it scientists themselves, was it Sci Am readers specifically, or was it anybody who found out from postings on various blogs etc. that such a poll existed and felt motivated to take it?
Democracy does not mean the everyone’s opinion on every matter is worthy of carrying the same weight as everyone else’s opinion. If you get sick, do you submit your symptoms to a website and have the public vote on what they think your medical problem is?
The idea behind democracy is everyone should have an equal vote in deciding things that are matters of competing values and interests. To suggest that democracies should not have policy decisions also informed by expert scientific judgment is a strange idea that I doubt you would accept across the board.
You think that the Oregon petition is a serious poll? Strange that a conservative would endorse a poll in the style of an old Soviet-style election: Bombard people with propaganda and then only count the votes of those who vote YES in agreement with it. (And, make no attempt to determine the qualifications of these people to weigh in on the subject.)
Here http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html is a poll that was done reasonably scientifically, although there are still issues with exactly who the sample is composed of. (In particular, it is scientists who are members of one or the other of the AGU or AMS but are not necessarily experts on climate science specifically.) It was also done by an organization that has a reputation of tilting toward the right.
Here is another study that was done with more of an attempt to ascertain the expertise of those polled http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf and to see how the opinions correlated to the expertise.
Yes, because it is perfectly logical to believe that the entire scientific enterprise has been corrupted and that climate scientists are just in it for the money and that we can’t trust any of the respected scientific organizations but have to instead to our trust over to right-wing and libertarian-think-tanks and advocacy groups (and the few scientists who agree with them that they promote), who the only ones willing to speak the truth.
Short answer: Correlation is not causation. In this case, AMO contains information about the global average temperature that linear detrending cannot eliminate. So, what the data is telling you is that the Atlantic is warmer when the global temperature is warmer, not the direction that the correlation goes. (See here for more: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/amo/ )
SBVOR says:
Yes, because an authority summarizing the scientific literature is discredited if you can find any paper in the scientific literature that reached a conclusion any different than what the authority reached because we all know that the scientific literature must be completely unanimous if you are to conclude anything. And, that authority is also discredited if any of the hundreds of statements it made (with various codified degrees of certainty attached) turns out to be wrong. The authority has to be correct on 100% of the statements, even those with the largest amount of uncertainty attached, in order to have an ounce of credibility. (Unless of course, that authority is arguing against AGW in which case one does not have to worry about the apparent contradiction of global warming being caused simultaneously by the sun, cosmic rays, AMO, PDO, not happening at all but rather just being due to urban heat island contamination of the data, …)
Yes, because it makes more sense to believe that all the major scientific organizations in the world have been taken over by bureaucrats that say things diametrically opposed to the rank-and-file that elected them than it is to believe that anything a right-wing think tank might say would be anything other than the truth.
Joel (the arrogant elitist) Shore sez:
1) “There is no way that such differences could be accounted for by random fluctuations”
A) Are we talking about temperatures or polls? LOL!
B) When the notorious propagandist Joe Romm posted his (possibly doctored?) screen captures, 738 people had allegedly responded and 56.1% indicated the IPCC was corrupt. That, in itself, is damning enough. But, as usual, your own “evidence” destroys your own case. One would think that after Romm alerted his lemmings to the poll that the ballot box would be stuffed by like-minded lunatics.
Instead, once 7,028 responded, the final tally indicated 83.8% thought the IPCC was corrupt. Now, if you think 10% of the vote can predict what the remaining 90% will say, then I cannot even begin to overcome your ignorance of statistics. LOL!
2) “Democracy does not mean… [blah, blah, blah]”
A) Ours is a Constitutional Republic, NOT a Democracy.
B) Your tyranny of the utterly corrupt elite is already in full swing (for now). The Far Left EPA bureaucrats are tyrannically imposing upon the American people what even a Far Left Dim Senate was unwilling to impose.
3) “You think that the Oregon petition is a serious poll?”>
You still playing that tired old smear campaign propaganda card?
Obviously, you did not bother to read the thorough debunking of your pure unadulterated CRAP!
You can lie and lie and lie until your teeth fall out — it will NEVER change the FACT that the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world do NOT support your tyrannical move to regulate CO2. I am one such scientist.
4) “Here http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html is a poll that was done reasonably scientifically”
The primary conclusion (in the very first sentence) is that “eight out of ten American climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming”. I’m surprised it is that low. As I indicate in my post on the subject, I agree with that conclusion. The problem with purely political propagandists such as yourself is that this conclusion is typically conflated to presume that each of these scientists ALSO believe CO2 should be regulated. I notice your poll did not even ask that most critical question — the Oregon petition addressed precisely that (and, that is precisely why you purely political propagandists are so inclined to dishonestly smear the Oregon petition and anybody who gets near it).
5) “Here is another study that was done with more of an attempt to ascertain the expertise of those polled http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf”
Once again, the polling did not address the central question — should CO2 be regulated. See my comments in the previous section.
6) “Yes, because it is perfectly logical to believe that the entire scientific enterprise has been corrupted”
Not the entire scientific enterprise, primarily climate science. Isn’t it amazing what $100 BILLION can buy?
If only Exxon could have matched that purchasing power — alas, they were NEVER even remotely close to being in the same ballpark. You see — Exxon provides humanity with an enormously useful product. The Climate Science cabal is — for the most part — a blood sucking vampire threatening to destroy and enslave all of human civilization.
7) “So, what the data is telling you is that the Atlantic is warmer when the global temperature is warmer”
Are you seriously arguing that AGW drives the AMO? If so, you’re nuttier than I thought!
8) “Yes, because an authority summarizing the scientific literature is discredited if you can find any paper in the scientific literature that reached a conclusion any different than what the authority [the IPCC] reached”
Typical propaganda — characterizing a preponderance of evidence (there are currently 36 posts under that link) as a one off mistake.
HELL! The so-called “leader” of the IPCC has NO academic background in ANY branch of science!
9) “Yes, because it makes more sense to believe that all the major scientific organizations in the world have been taken over by bureaucrats that say things diametrically opposed to the rank-and-file”
Sorry…
As a scientist, I rely upon data. And, there is no data to the contrary. The only available data indicate that the bureaucrats issuing the various (all over the map) statements regarding AGW do NOT represent the views of the scientists who belong to their organizations. If you have evidence to the contrary, SHOW ME!
Joel (the purely political propagandist) Shore sez:
“You think that the Oregon petition is a serious poll?”
No…
I think it is a serious petition. If you don’t know the difference between a poll and a petition then I don’t know where to begin in even assessing the profundity of your level of ignorance! LOL!
“Strange that a conservative would endorse a poll in the style of an old Soviet-style election: Bombard people with propaganda and then only count the votes of those who vote YES in agreement with it.”
Again, petitions — by DESIGN — only count those who sign it! Are you seriously suggesting that every petition is “Soviet-style”? You would be hilarious if you weren’t so damn scary!
Again, click here to thoroughly debunk your tired old smear campaign. Also, see my previous comment for more thoughts on your desperate attempts to smear the profoundly “inconvenient” results of this PETITION!
SBVOR says:
And, yet you have used this petition to somehow conclude that “the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world do NOT support your tyrannical move to regulate CO2”. How exactly did you get from the petition to your conclusion?
Well, what I would say is that petitions are pretty much meaningless. However, when they solicit signatures by a mass-mailing of the petition along with a letter signed by a former very elderly head of the National Academy of Sciences along with a “paper” that is formatted to make it look like a paper from the Proceedings of the NAS but is in fact just a bunch of deceptive propaganda that would never be published in a serious journal, then yes, I think that “Soviet-style” is an apt description.
Below is a discussion of the process by which the Oregon petition was circulated written by Robert Park in his “What’s New” column read primarily by fellow physicists. Park is the founder of the American Physical Society’s Office of Public Affairs, author of the book “Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud” and, while certainly opinionated, his opinions are motivated by a desire to defend science wherever he sees it attacked and he regularly takes on both conservatives and liberals.
(from http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn080803.html )
I see there was a problem with my formatting in my next-to-last post. Let’s try it again with fixed formatting:
SBVOR says:
If they are drawn randomly from the same distribution, then yes, the results from the 738 respondents and the 7028 respondents should agree to within the margin of error given by the statistical error, which for 738 respondents is already down to a few percent. The fact that these results disagree so violently show that the poll is not even close to being scientific but that the later respondents were a completely different population than the earlier respondents.
And, by the way, it is not correct to assume that the data that Romm captured is correct either, since the poll was likely already contaminated by respondents outside of the original population it was presumably intending to sample (Sci Am readers). However, it is very likely that the data from Romm’s screen capture is at least less contaminated than the later data.
You are making a claim that you have provided absolutely no support for. (Hint: The fact that a tiny fraction of the world’s population who have at least some minimal scientific training have signed a petition proves very little…Certainly not what you seem to think it proves.)
The poll also shows that “41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.” Do you agree with this?
And the poll finds that, “Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ rates better than any traditional news source, with 26% finding it ‘very reliable’ and 38% as somewhat reliable. Other non-traditional information sources fare poorly: No more than 1% of climate experts rate the doomsday movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ or Michael Crichton’s novel ‘State of Fear’ as very reliable.” Do you agree with this?
I suggest you actually read tamino’s post. The basic point is that the AMO is basically correlated essentially perfectly with North Atlantic SSTs…and North Atlantic SSTs are, of course, correlated with global temperatures. Thus, one is seeing a high degree of correlation but it does not indicate what drives what.
The leader of the IPCC is not the one who is doing or evaluating the science. Furthermore, Pachauri is head of the IPCC only because the respected American climate scientist who was the previous leader, Robert Watson, had the support for his nomination to be head of the IPCC withdrawn by the Bush Administration after Exxon asked them to withdraw the support for Watson: http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3925&method=full
Where is the data that shows that the Republican Party isn’t being run by green unicorns? What you do is demand endless data for the things you don’t want to believe and believe whatever you want to believe (like that the Oregon petition shows where the majority of the world scientists stand) on the basis of no data whatsoever. You aren’t driven by data…Everything on your entire website and in your entire posts here shows you are driven by ideology and you just selectively cherrypick data to try to desperately support that ideology.
Joel (the purely political propagandist) Shore sez:
“And, yet you have used this petition to somehow conclude that “the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world do NOT support your tyrannical move to regulate CO2″. How exactly did you get from the petition to your conclusion?”
First, let’s remember that the question is whether a majority of scientists favor the regulation of CO2.
Again, as a scientist, I rely upon data — not conjecture, rhetoric, propaganda, bureaucrats dishonestly purporting to speak for scientists, etc.
The fact is that the preponderance of data support my conclusion (as does the absence of data to the contrary).
You see…
If you had data to the contrary, you would cite it. Lacking such data, you resort to cheap smear campaigns in a pathetic attempt to discredit the unassailable (and enormously “inconvenient”) data which demolish your purely political propaganda.
Furthermore…
If you truly believe that the cream of the crop of American scientists can be as easily duped as you suggest, then you must have a pretty low opinion of your fellow scientists — an observation which only serves to further confirm your arrogant elitist attitude (typical of all so-called “Progressives”).
Click here for some basic climate change science.
Click here to debunk the hysteria topic by topic.
SBVOR says:
That seems only to have become THE question because I haven’t found a scientific poll of scientists that asked that specific question. I am sure if I had, then something else will be the question. Ideologues like you are nothing if not flexible!
Nonsense. That data doesn’t support your conclusion at all. That you think it does just reveals how utterly divorced some conservative ideologues like yourself seem to have become from the reality-based community. You live in a world not just of different opinions and philosophies but of completely different facts, created by fellow travelers. By basically using the word “bureaucrats” to poison the well regarding any objective unbiased authorities, you are left with fellow ideologues as the only authority who you find legitimate. And, you are actually surprised that your supposed data leads you to the conclusions they lead you to? The fact is that it is your ideology leading and data and science completely subservient to that!
First of all, who said that they are the cream of the crop? If you bombard hundreds of thousands of scientists with such a petition and a few percent agree to sign it, my guess is that those you are getting are, in general, quite far removed from the “cream of the crop”. (There are, of course, a few exceptions like Freeman Dyson, who are accomplished scientists in other fields.)
Second of all, it is not such a low opinion of scientists to believe that some scientists outside of their field of expertise can be duped by something like this. Scientists are generally a trusting lot and can be naive when it comes to people who are actively trying to deceive them. And, fwhen many of the signatures were gathered more than 10 years ago, knowledge of the topic by scientists outside the field was quite a bit less than it is now (and, in fact, the IPCC reports were more circumspect in the attribution part of the global warming issue). Hell, in 1997, I would not have been able to tell you what exactly what was wrong with the claims made in the deceptive manuscript that accompanied the petition. And, it still takes quite a bit of research to debunk many of the claims.
Your respect for your fellow scientists is in fact much lower than mine. You believe that scientists are such dupes that they elect people to represent them in their scientific societies who do not reflect their views on important scientific issues of the day and then continue to re-elect these people or elect similar people even once these leaders have express views that they supposedly overwhelmingly disagree with!
My hypothesis requires only that a tiny minority of scientists, most well outside of their field of expertise, be misled or be ideologically-predisposed to believe some deceptive materials. Yours requires mass deception of the entire scientific community across the world.
Just out of curiosity, what sort of science are you actively engaged in?
Joel (the purely political propagandist) sez:
1) “First of all, who said that they are the cream of the crop?”
Answer: Lawrence Solomon of the National Post (as reposted in the Financial Post):
“Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who’s who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity.”
2) “That seems only to have become THE question [do a majority of scientists favor regulating CO2] because I haven’t found a scientific poll of scientists that asked that specific question.”
Uh, no…
As it happens, that is the 45 TRILLION dollar question — by FAR the most relevant of all! But, count on that estimate being low by at LEAST a full order of magnitude.
Didn’t we waste ENOUGH money on the Kyoto insanity? Hell! Even the New York Times admits Kyoto was an abysmal failure.
And now, you MORONS want to utterly, totally and completely WASTE $45 TRILLION in the ludicrous belief that we can micromanage climate change? Are you NUTS?
Face facts! Your totalitarian political religious cult is DEAD & BURIED! The AMO created it and the AMO killed it!
3) “Nonsense. That data doesn’t support your conclusion at all. That you think it does just reveals how utterly divorced some conservative ideologues like yourself seem to have become from the reality-based community.”
Still resorting to your pathetic smear campaign? I have presented my data as well as the quantitative debunking of the typical bogus claim from your team.
WHERE is the data which proves YOUR case? Oh, sorry, you’ve GOT NONE! That is why time after time after time you stoop to the pathetic, childish smear campaign — it’s ALL YOU’VE GOT!
Does not say much for the 26% or 38% given that we now know (regardless of our views on AGW) that the movie is just theater, not documentary. As the old saying goes – “You can fool some of the people all of the time…….”
Joel (the purely political propagandist) sez:
“The poll also shows that ‘41% of [climate] scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.’ Do you agree with this?”
1) These are absurdly meaningless questions. The climate is constantly changing and those changes constantly present challenges (aka dangers). But, relative to the last 423,000 years or the last 600 million years, the next 50 to 100 years will — without a doubt — be one of the most climatically STABLE periods in the history of the planet. Whatever climate change will be witnessed will be entirely beyond our control — Kyoto proved that.
The AMO cycle ensures that the flat temperature trend of the last 16 years will continue roughly through 2018, at which point we will see a substantial multidecadal cooling trend similar to the period from 1945 through 1979.
And, yes…
That multidecadal cooling trend will present challenges and dangers.
2) Again, this poll deliberately ignores the 45 TRILLION dollar question — should government regulate CO2? Why do the pollsters ignore the single MOST important question? Because they KNOW the answer — NO! All of the available evidence points in that direction.
3) Click here to understand why climate scientists (supposedly) respond as they do. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Again, the ONLY scientists qualified to OBJECTIVELY evaluate the climate science are those who are NOT financially dependent upon perpetuating the single greatest fraud EVER perpetrated upon the human race!
Click here for some basic climate change science.
Click here to debunk the hysteria topic by topic.
SBVOR says:
Some questions that a true skeptic might ask:
(1) How many people are listed in the American Men and Women of Science and so, what fraction of them have signed?
(2) Were only people listed in that book allowed to sign? If not, how many of the signers are so listed?
(3) What are the qualifications of the signers? How many have published in the peer-reviewed literature in climate science? How many in another field that is at least somewhat related (e.g., radiative transfer)?
As I have pointed out, your argument about the AMO is garbage.
Unfortunately, the data you have presented does not in any way support the conclusion that you have reached. The petition is not a scientific poll and just shows that you can get 30,000 people who are loosely categorized as “scientists” but who actually include categories (such as engineers) that altogether likely a few million American fall into to sign on.
As for the poll of TV weathercasters, while it is interesting to see how the views of this group differ so markedly from the views of the scientists in the field of climate science, I am not sure what it is supposed to prove. TV weathercasters are a diverse group in terms of training in experience. Some are basically “talking heads” who got assigned to the weather beat, others have various degrees of training as forecast meteorologists, and almost none are research scientists with any significant training or background in climate science.
By contrast, I have presented actual data from actual scientific polls of subsets of the scientific community, including the community with expertise in climate science.
PhilJourdan says:
“We” know this how exactly?
Most climate scientists who I know of have concluded that Al Gore’s presentation is not too bad. It certainly is not perfect and he glosses over some points, like the fact that the causal relationship between CO2 and temperature works in both directions, but compared to the other sources out there, it is overall pretty good.
SBVOR says:
Well, the latter is your own opinion, apparently not shared by most of the scientists, who believe the change will present moderate to very great dangers.
Nonsense…from beginning to end, including the temperature trend being flat for the last 16 years.
Yes, because people go into climate science for the lucrativeness of it. They don’t care about the science and will gladly falsify it so they don’t have to do something less lucrative like be a doctor, lawyer, or CEO of a multinational corporation.
Fortunately, there are the coal companies and right-wing think-tanks that have only our best interests at heart and can be relied upon to give us the scientific truth when the scientists won’t.
Like I said – fool some of the people. Guess you are some.
As for your “most”, name any of them. A court of law, not a PR outfit, ruled that the film was propaganda after hearing the case. he did not care who was right, just what was true or not. Go look at the film again, and then come back to me and demonstrate any science in it is more than just hollywood hype. And then list the “most” climate scientists.
Sea levels rising 20 feet, unprecendented warming, no polar ice cap, all glaciers melting, polar bears dwindling, etc.
Again, whether AGW is correct or not, the film is pure escapism, and not worthy of any scientists time. Only fools and englishmen (as the saying goes) believe in that clap trap.
But you are free to. It does kind of say who you are however.
Joel (the purely political propagandist) sez:
“Nonsense…from beginning to end, including the temperature trend being flat for the last 16 years.”
That (and more) is proof positive that Joel is a fringe lunatic denier.
Phil Jones (chief charlatan of the CAGW cult) is my source from right at a year ago and the current satellite data confirm — now that the 2010 el Niño is history — the flat trend continues.
Will you also deny the report from NOAA:
“The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the ‘ENSO-adjusted’ trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade.”
Peer reviewed science suggests that (owing to the AMO) the trend will remain flat through about 2018.
More peer reviewed science supports my multi-decadal view.
That’s (probably) my last comment for this thread. Joel is simply regurgitating the same tired old unsubstantiated purely political propaganda/rhetoric. There is no point in wasting any more of my time on a fringe lunatic denier of peer reviewed science and even the proclamations of the leader of his own cabal.
Joel Shore has drunk the alarmist Kool Aid, and his mind is closed tight.
Whenever I post a graph, Joel finds something wrong with it. So just to confirm his cognitive dissonance, a while back I posted fifty [50!] separate graphs. As expected, Joel objected to them all. Every one of them. That’s the response of a pseudo-scientist.
When cognitive dissonance takes hold [AKA: Orwell’s “doublethink”], its victims rarely escape its clutches. Fortunately, scientific skeptics are largely immune from CD, because skeptics simply ask the alarmist crowd to provide convincing evidence of their CO2=CAGW conjecture, per the scientific method; skeptics themselves have nothing to prove.
When Joel Shore starts demanding that Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Gavin Schmidt, and the editorial boards of every climate journal must publicly archive every bit of data, all methodologies, and all metadata used to support their position, he will begin rebuilding his credibility. But I’m not holding my breath.
SBVOR: Your last post is an extremely impressive example of how people who desperately want to believe something will produce junk science by cobbling together stuff in ridiculous ways! It is worth preserving for the simple purpose of being such a splendid example of this technique.
You basically misquote and take out-of-context a statement by Phil Jones, combine it together with a statement taken completely out-of-context by NOAA and then produce something that is diametrically in contradiction to the larger point that either one of them was making. You quote the part where NOAA discusses the 10-year trend and then leave out the part where they note that simulation with climate models forced by greenhouse gases show this same sort of variability in 10-year trends to be a common feature of the models. They conclude that:
The NOAA folks do say that the models don’t predict zero trends for intervals of 15 years or more and you seem to think that this along with Jones’ statement means that the data contradict the model predictions. However, you have completely misunderstood what Jones has said….He has not said that the data show zero trend over 15 years, which is good, since they very clearly do not show that. Here are plots of various data sets (over 16 years, so as to be consistent with your earlier claims):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:1995/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1995/plot/gistemp/from:1995/trend
All of them, including UAH show a serious warming trend. All that Jones is saying is that, due to the necessarily large errorbars in trend analyses over such short time periods, this positive trend has large enough errorbars that a zero trend cannot quite be ruled out at the 95% confidence level. (Although others like tamino have pointed out that it probably can be with somewhat more sophisticated data analysis techniques.) However, neither can a trend of presumably about double the amount observed, which would put us on a quite terrifying warming course. It is just a statement about the large uncertainties associated with trends in such data sets.
If you don’t understand the distinctions here, then you are utterly incapable of having even the rudimentary statistical understanding to analyze the data and yet that doesn’t seem to stop you from making ridiculous pronouncements on your blog.
I also love how you selectively use Keenlyside to support your point of view without an understanding that their whole paper (which, by the way, has received a skeptical reception by scientists in the field for excellent reasons) is predicated on the basic notion that the significant AGW is occurring and will continue to occur. However, you have uncritically accepted the part of Keenlyside that you like and discarded the rest, in the typical fashion of someone who is promulgating junk science.
You still haven’t answered my question of what field you are actually a practicing scientist in. Your posts have really made me question if you are at all…Certainly, it can’t be in one that requires any sort of serious quantitative data analysis.
It is really sad to see people with such ideological blinders that they find it necessary to attack science with nonsense and voodoo (as Bob Park would call it) in order to further their ideological ends.
Smokey says:
Smokey,
Frankly you wouldn’t know what true skepticism is if it came up and bit you in the behind. You are the furthest thing from a true scientific skeptic as one could possibly be and your abuse of the term to describe yourself is painful for any serious scientist to see.
I’ll give you this though…Cognitive dissonance is something that you must be a world renowned expert on from personal experience!
Joel Shore,
By denying the conclusions drawn from your own cabal, you prove yourself beyond ANY doubt to be among the lunatic fringe.
These, again, are the undeniable FACTS:
Even the alarmists at NOAA admit there has been no global warming since 1998:
“The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the “ENSO-adjusted” trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade.”
NOAA further admits that:
“The [computer model] simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends [in global temperatures] for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
Dr. Phil Jones [of ClimateGate infamy] has now admitted that there has been no statistically significant global warming in the last 15 years. Click here for a more technical description of this mathematical analysis from PhD physicist Dr. Luboš Motl.
Peer reviewed science suggests that (owing to the AMO) the trend will remain flat through about 2018.
More peer reviewed science supports my multi-decadal view.
Here is another FACT:
Your totalitarian political CAGW religious cult is DEAD and BURIED! All that remains is to reverse the tyranny imposed by purely political bureaucrats at the EPA. That too will come.
SBVOR: You are just repeating again the nonsense that you had in your previous post. Alas, it doesn’t get more sensible on repetition.
So, here I’ll try to keep it simple: The NOAA statement is a statement about the ***best-fit trend*** not being zero over a 15-year period. The Jones statement is a statement about whether the 2-sigma error bars in a quite strongly positive best-fit trend are nonetheless still not quite small enough to completely rule out a trend of zero. That is not a statement about what the best fit trend is…but a statement about the error bars surrounding that trend. You can’t equate one to the other…not even remotely. It is statistical nonsense.
By the way, computing the error bars for trends in correlated data is not trivial…and whether you can get better trends by trying to factor out some of the factors contributing to the “noise” on top of the trend is another thing. So, one can quibble about whether Jones’ statement about not being able to rule out a zero trend at the 95%-confidence level is even correct. However, even assuming that it is, you can’t cobble together what Jones said with what NOAA said to produce the conclusion that you have; Your conclusion is entirely an artifact of your poor understanding of statistics.