"Science has been sitting on his critique of Dessler’s paper for months"

consensus of scientists=dead wood with axe in hand.

Dear Dr. Spencer: Looking back on Science’s performance over the past few years I an not surprised. I don’t know if it results from this recent spate of Post Normal foolishness, or just collective Cognitive Dissonance. They have cast their lot with those who are more interested in protecting their grants and advocating for some cause or another, all to often the fundamental components of sound Popperian (Is that how it should be spelled?) Science are being lost.
What is most disconcerting about attacks by Brickmore and the other under-informed wags, is how far from the mark they can be. In the case of your book, I would personally be flabbergasted if Brickmore actually read it. I looked at his blog. He obviously did not understand it, assuming he read it. On the matter of Science, I simply boycott them. They publish so little ground braking stuff in geology that I can get away with that. Not everyone can or should. In that respect the best way to bring science back to is philosophical grounding is probably example.
It is obvious the editors at Science are boycotting your blog, WUWT and my philosophical musings too. Otherwise they would surly know better. In my case it is not so much a boycott, as ignorance of my existence. They are in good company on that score.

Re: Peer Review, Pal Review, and Broccoli
February 17, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach
The greatest danger in the current peer/pal review system is that important papers can get buried or delayed through excessive review comments and/or ultimate rejection. Yet, there are good reasons for a blind or double-blind peer review process.
Willis: \\We need a system where we can see what the Editor is doing, because at this point, I don’t trust them one iota //
To protect authors from adverse delay, to partially open the peer review process, and to protect the business interests of the journals, I propose this middle ground:
30 days after a journal accepts a paper for peer review
The Journal should catalog online the Paper Title, Author, Abstract,
and Review/Acceptance/Publication status.
+ This protects the author with a date of work claim. The Abstract is public giving some connection of the author to the idea.
+ There is no change in the process if a Journal rejects papers within the first 30 days. It is not cataloged.
+ Within the first 30 days, the Abstract should reach publication acceptance or the paper should be rejected outright.
+ The cycles of peer review and revision leaves a public trail.
+ The Journal has a list of “coming attractions” with anticipated publication date. Anticipation of an Abstracted paper should be a win-win for Author and Journal.
+ The Journal is protected because only the Abstract is cataloged, but the paper is still held until published.
+ The Improvement in the quality of Abstracts would be an expected result.
http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/209/~/track-the-status-of-an-accepted-paper

Jack says:
April 2, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Have you reviewed this. Apparently, this has been supressed also.
http://www.omsj.org/corruption/physicist-proves-co2-emissions-irrelevant-in-earth%E2%80%99s-climate
Always mistrust anything which claims to “prove” that AGW doesn’t (or does) exist.
The paper you referenced is the Miskolczi paper which, coincidentally, Roy Spencer has commented uopon here:
http:/www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/comments-on-miskolczi%e2%80%99s-2010-controversial-greenhouse-theory/

As you assume sciencemag (etc) to be biased, wouldn’t it be more reasonable (for you and for lindzen) to go to a different journal. For example one of the egu-open-access-open-review-ones?

“In the meantime, I will not be wasting much time addressing blog criticisms of my work. The peer-reviewed literature is where I must focus my attention.”
You are Superman. Thanks for checking in. We do love you.

As I stated here, Dessler made a fundamental error in his reasoning about feedback. He thinks that, if he plots cloud cover versus temperature change and finds a positive slope, then he has positive feedback. That is incorrect. It establishes only positive correlation, not positive feedback.
The orientation of the phase plot is very much dependent on the phase lag in the system. To see this, plot cos(theta) versus cos(theta+phi) for theta between -pi to pi and choose phi to be a constant in that range. Try different values. Can you make the plot tilt in either direction? If you followed the instructions, yes you can.
Positive feedback can, however, usually be determined by the direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) of the loops, because a positive feedback induces a leading phase (phi is positive), while negative feedback induces a lagging phase. Counterclockwise encirclement strongly suggests negative feedback. Spenser found counterclockwise encirclements. Ergo, the feedback is almost surely negative.

Your work is the most important work in climate science at this time. I pray that God showers you and your work with unbounded Grace and Blessings. Success in your work will follow quickly. Thanks for informing us about what you are doing.

Smokey says:

Dr Spencer hasn’t been picking the taxpayers’ pockets while hiding his data and methodologies. BTW, where is Mann’s MBH98 data, anyway? Been 13 years now.

He didn’t hide anything. Those are all just excuses. What you really don’t like is the results. The rest is basically just trumped up nonsense.

Joel Shore says:
(And, just to be 100% clear here, I am not saying that you [Roy Spencer] should have been subjected to such things … I am just saying that others shouldn’t have either.)
=====================================
What a complete breach of logic if there ever was one!
So you are saying an honest scientist should get the same treatment (or lack thereof)…as a dishonest one?
For shame…coming from a physicist. Tsk tsk.
Keep whining, though. Its entertaining.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

P. Solar says:

But your comment is totally irrelevant as a reply since he is not complaining about being “unfairly treated” in the blogosphere.
His is complaining about biased and obstructional behaviour of major journals in reviewing papers (not just his own) for publication.

This was the paragraph that I was responding to (which happened to be the opening paragraph of this piece:

One of the downsides of going against the supposed “consensus of scientists” on global warming — other than great difficulty in getting your research funded and published — is that you get attacked in the media. In the modern blogging era, this is now easier to do than ever.

P. Solar says:

This is not a “poor little me, they are being unfair” whinge , it a serious condemnation of malpractice that is preventing the proper functioning of science on a topic that is supposed to justify reorganising the world.

To a first approximation, everybody who has papers rejected from journals is going to complain that the rejection occurred not because the paper was flawed but because there was a bias against them. And, when I look at the “AGW skeptic” papers that have found or have not their way into peer-reviewed journals, the question is not how some brilliant papers haven’t found their way in but rather how some papers that were at best flawed and at worst ridiculous have found their way in.

Smokey says:

I call myself a scientific skeptic because unlike you that is what I am.

You seem to fall hook-line-and-sinker for lots of ridiculous scientific arguments for a skeptic…and then refuse to change your views even when it is patiently explained to you why they are wrong.

And glad to see you admit that the alarmist clique distorts, spreads falsehoods, and is unable to produce their fabricated “evidence” when called on it.

Sorry, but the “also” referred to what some people who call themselves skeptics do in addition to what you mentioned (“scientific skeptics simply ask questions, and request all underlying raw data, methods, etc.”). It was not referring to what climate scientists do. (I am not going to claim that all scientists who are on the consensus side are perfect and faultless in all of their actions, but that was not what the “also” referred to.)

In Mann’s case he knowingly used bad data, and hid data that would have falsified his conclusions. To real scientists that is misconduct.

And here, you provide an example of exactly what I was talking about. When you last made specific charges in regards to this (Tiljander, “censored” directory), I gave evidence that these charges appear to be completely baseless. You did not rebut the evidence (other than to make a totally-unsupported claim about the date on the supplementary part of the NAS Proceedings paper) and yet you continue to repeat these charges.

Finally, it doesn’t matter who claims that Michael Mann’s taxpayer-funded work product belongs to him alone, and not to the public that paid for it. That is just being an apologist for intellectual theft.

Well, it kinda does considering that the NSF is the organization who was funding Mann’s work. If you don’t like the current laws regarding intellectual property, then you are welcome to campaign to change them. However, calling the accepted law “intellectual theft” is just setting yourself up as judge and jury and making a decision that has no actual basis in real jurisprudence on the subject. At any rate, Mann has since been going well beyond what NSF requires of him.
[Note: The NSF was only one of many organizations funding Dr. Mann’s work.]

Both “Science” and “nature”, under their current editorial control, are guilty of multiple instances of aiding and abetting science fraud.
A famous one from the mid 1990’s was their enablement of william Stanley to falsely claim credit for discovery of an important seismological method to predict the eruptions of many volcanoes.
Stanley and his student not only stole credit for the technique, but he had just finished ignoring the same technique and gotten a substantial number of his colleagues injured or killed in the volcano called ‘Galeras’ in Colombia.

@joel Shore
I should make the amendment that the jealous guarding by Mann et al. of their source data is not something so uncommon in science so as to be used to say they are “bad people” or “bad scientists” under normal circumstances, just resistive or hardened (and thus needing others to come along and pull them out of their boxes, as a counter balance). They did eventually give out the data as they should, and as is required in all science, so it appears (if there is still some yet hidden, I have not heard of it). People do naturally resist releasing what they see as their own, even when it is not. For, the vast majority of the time, such deep probing by others is not necessary.
I think they were just acting normal, and didn’t realize they were getting into a matter that required they act far and above normal. Nothing intentionally malicious beyond simple human nature. But, that is what I personally feel from evaluating what has gone on and what has been said on all sides.

Ged says:

Even with research done in universities, the product of ones research is not ones own, but belongs to the University. Mann working for a government agency means all his work is owned by the public through the government. That is the law and rule. It does not belong to him personally. This covers ALL his data, methods, and materials pertaining to his research. Only a patent can change that.

This statement, if meant to apply to the computer code, is simply wrong. The NSF has been very clear on this point. Yes, the data and methods must be disclosed…but there are limits to what has to be disclosed and, in particular, the release of the actual code itself is not requires. See footnote 4 here for the e-mail from the NSF explaining this that was sent to McIntyre: http://www.realclimate.org/Mann_response_to_Barton.pdf

This is regardless of the philosophical aspect of science which states that all data and methods must be open and known and offered up for evaluation for any piece of work to be regarded as science in the first place.

That philosophy has always recognized that a balance must be struck. Yes, you are supposed to release enough information that scientists can replicate your work. (Although in practice, I would say that many of the papers that I have refereed in physics have not done this to the degree that I think is necessary. I am often asking for clarifications on such points.) However, you are not required to release so much that you give up all your intellectual property, such as the years invested in writing a piece of computer code used in your research. [And, in this regard, you should remember that much scientific research is even done in the private sector and then published in journals…and companies tend to be very protective of their code. During the 13 years that I spent in industry, I published several papers and I could have been fired for releasing the code to other scientists, as it was a intellectual property of the company that I was working for. In other cases, scientists use commercial software where the code is a propriety product of the company that they bought it from and even the scientists themselves don’t have access to the source code.]

The trials Mann et al. have faced publicly are not only due to their science in and of itself. I believe that is the point being made.

Well, you may make that claim but some of us find it rather implausible, since even when Mann now publishes papers where he releases all the code, going well beyond what the NSF requires, he is still faced with these attacks. Some people seem to be motivated by the fact that they do not like the scientific conclusions of his research and most particularly the policy implications.

The extreme scrutiny this field faces on all sides is good and important. For subject matters of such consequence, it could be argued as critical.

There is a difference between scrutiny and witchhunts. Even the Republican Chair of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert, felt that the letters sent to Mann and colleagues by Joe Barton (the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) crossed the line.

Joel Shore says:
April 4, 2011 at 1:32 pm
“Even the Republican Chair of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert, felt that the letters sent to Mann and colleagues by Joe Barton (the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) crossed the line.”
Why is it I have a sneaky suspicion that Sherwood Boehlert was not exactly as extreme as the adverb “even” implies? Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say… Hmm. Suspicion confirmed.
Nice thread hijack anyway, Joel. Do you have anything to say about water vapor and cloud feedback?

Robin says:

Joel seems to be sure that Dr Mann has put all his data into the public domain, together with (almost) all of his methodology. Would he perhaps like to provide a link to the data?

It is really not my job to spoon-feed you everything you need. But, here is the link to the supplementary materials for Mann’s 2008 paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental See also here: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/tools/tools.html
If you want to try to dig and find the data to the 1998 paper, then be my guest…although the science has moved on in the 13 years since then.
And, now that I have provided you with that, maybe you could return the favor by giving me the links to all of the programs that Spencer and Christy use to analyze the satellite data?

Joel Shore says:
No…I am saying that if you are the one who gets to decide who is honest and dishonest and then to treat people accordingly, that may not be the best sort of justice system. Just look at the former Soviet Union and other oppressive regimes. Do you think they oppress their people by taking people who they admit are innocent and mistreating them? No…They always have very good reasons for treating the people the way that they do. It is just that their reasons are based on their own biased reality because they don’t have any sort of independent judicial system.
====================
Huh?? Wha??
The Joel Shore shell game continues.
Even if the ball is shifted under another shell, or two, or three…the argument just gets more askew and remote as time goes on.
Interestingly…I’ll bet when it comes to actual equations and physics…by design…they disallow the good physisct from performing such sleight there, no?
I’ll bet when the good physicist is doing his work, the math and the data rules, otherwise it would all fall apart.
The same should be true of logic and debate.
Should be, that is.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Barry: I read quickly through your link and the “mathematical proof” of the purported inadequacy of Spencer’s modeling. I don’t blame Spenser for not responding – it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying little. On the mathematical “proof”, equation (15) is incorrect. There is no independent A0 term. It is equal to T(t0) – Te, where t0 is the initial time. Every first year controls student would see the solution at a glance:
T(t) = Te + (T(t0)-Te)*exp(-(t-t0)/tau) + convolution-integral-from-t0-to-t
If you take t0 to be the infinite past, as the author did in his convolution integral, then the exponent has decayed to zero. If you take t0 to be some finite time, and assume T(t0) = Te, then the term is again zero (you see, he mixed the start time to be zero for the external exponential A0*exp(-t/tau) term, and -infinity for the convolution integral, ending up with a bollixed result).
The rest appears to be a rant about Spenser’s supposed mistakes based on the author’s interpretation.

Bart – I’m not sure why you call that a “mistake” – you can treat T(t0) or A0 as independent parameters. Substitute A0 = T(t0) – Te in the following equations, and everything still applies.
In particular, Roy chose a very peculiar starting temperature T(t0) for his “model” – as I reviewed in further detail in my follow-up post:
Roy Spencer’s six trillion degree warming.
If you believe Spencer’s model, the medieval warm period was in fact very very cold 🙂
The real point of my analysis was to show that Spencer’s model was, as you note, trivial, solvable by any first-year control student. I wanted to make that painstakingly obvious. Do you think Spencer understands this? Did he understood it when he touted solving it in his book?

Bart,
At first I didn’t understand what your point was, exactly, but Arthur was kind enough to explain it to me. As I understand it, you were saying that A0 ought to be zero… which is what Arthur and I both said in our critiques. So in essence, it seems you agree with at least some of our criticisms of Spencer’s work?

One more thing: “I’m not saying he did that–he says in his book that he got his answers on the first try–but a “statistical” technique that can give an infinite number of solutions is absurd.”
Even if this were true, it is a criticism of form over substance, and I do not see the point, except to get up on a box and shout “Me smart! He dumb!” But, more to the point, it appeared to me that it was YOU who separated Cp into two components, leading to the ambiguity you decry. (If that is not the case, I don’t care. As I have shown above, your discourse is so crude, and seemingly calculated to score cheap points with your choir, that I have no desire to delve further and teach you things you should already have learned when you set yourselves up as authorities).

Bloody… this popped up in between my posts. Really, this is the last.
“As I understand it, you were saying that A0 ought to be zero… which is what Arthur and I both said in our critiques. So in essence, it seems you agree with at least some of our criticisms of Spencer’s work?”
Based on what? Was T(t0) at equilibrium, or is it now?
In the absence of that knowledge, it is fully reasonable to use it as a parameter to fit the data. It doesn’t say that is TRUTH, but it does say it COULD be. And, the burden is on the AGW fanatics to prove it isn’t, or at the very least, to explain RIGOROUSLY (not, “oh, we just don’t think so, and we’re real smart”, or “we don’t know any reason why it would be” – those are ad verecundiam and ad ignorantiam arguments) why it is unreasonable.

Bart,
By 1900 the temperature had been pretty stable for at least 50 years, according to the HadCRUT data set Spencer was using, so it seems reasonable to assume that if any period in that temperature record was near equilibrium, it was then. In contrast, the period Spencer chose to normalize to was 1961-1990, which had a strongly positive trend.
So why did Spencer choose that as his base period? The only reason he gave in his book was that the climate experts who put together the temperature series chose that base period (even though their choice had nothing to do with any assumed “equilibrium), and he made a big deal of it being right in line with his curve fit! Fitting a model with 5 adjustable parameters just isn’t impressive, however.
You keep accusing Arthur and myself of blustering to make ourselves look smart, but the fact is that in my critique I explained in some detail why Spencer’s choice of equilibrium temperature had nothing to do with reality. You just failed to read (comprehend?) what I said.

You guys have got me all worked up now. I really should follow Spencer’s example, and just stop. And, I will. But, there is one more point I wanted to make. Arthur stated ‘I’m not sure why you call that a “mistake”’ in equation (15). Arthur, look at our equations. There is another key difference beyond your subsuming the initial temperature anomaly into an arbitrary parameter. And, that difference is the start time in the exponential term and the convolution integral. Your equation is wrong.
Your latest comment popped up when I came back to explain this: “Can you think of any valid justification for Spencer’s choice of temperature in 1900?” Yes, certainly. It fits the data. It does not mean it “governs the behavior of his model until almost the middle of the 20th century” at all. It means that, with the given model, that is how the system would have evolved from that point onward. It is, in essence, a curve fit to the data based on a particular 1st order linear lag model involving the parameters T(t0), Te, tau, et al. Crying foul on it makes as much sense as saying the slope on a linear fit to temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century has no meaning because it accounts for the bulk of the upward movement.
You are still treating having trouble with the concept of when the convolution starts. It starts at the point t0 (tee-zero), which you have set to zero in the exponential term (examine my equation again if this confuses you). When the upper limit becomes less than the lower limit, the integration turns negative. In order to propagate back from that time, you must have a really, really, really precise record of the integrand, because the backwards propagation is unstable. That does not generally work because any small initial error, and any error in the data, will cause rapidly diverging results. In light of these considerations, when you say “low starting temperature could only be appropriate if the PDO was exceedingly negative for most of the 19th century”, I seriously doubt you have demonstrated it (and I’m not going to do the legwork to explain whether you have or have not – to say that you have failed to inspire me with confidence in your methods would be kind, and I do have productive uses for my time).
Don’t even get me started on the infamous tree ring proxies.

“You just failed to read (comprehend?) what I said.”
You know, I’ve been nice. Given the shoddy work and ignorance, not to mention bravado, you two have displayed, it’s been difficult to show as little snark as I have. But, if that’s the way you want to play it, well, I was leaving anyway, and you two can go stew in your own effluvia and snuffle your armpits to your heart’s desire for all I care.

“Therefore, Arthur got it right.”
I can scarcely imagine a more damning quote. It is laughably wrong, which only a cursory examination by someone who knew what they were doing would show.

Bart – Let’s make something very clear here: what we are discussing is temperature *anomaly* – difference from some reference temperature. You can pick anything you like as the reference temperature, and the curves *look* the same, just shifted up and down a bit depending on what the difference is between your choice of reference temperature and mine.
However, you cannot pick anything you like as Te in Spencer’s model, because that has a very special meaning – it is the “equilibrium” temperature the model exponentially returns to after it has been perturbed by some forcing (PDO in Spencer’s case). This is due to his definition of “feedback” (eq. 2 in Barry Bickmore’s original post) as proportional to delta-T. And when you pick a starting temperature T(t0) for a particular point in time (say, the year 1900) then you are asserting something about the difference between that starting temperature and the equilibrium temperature.
That is, if you choose a temperature T(t0) = Te, you are making a (reasonable) assumption that before the start of your model simulation, the temperature was in its equilibrium state. If you choose a temperature T(t0) = Te + 0.1 C, say, then you’re saying it started slightly out of equilibrium on the positive side. If you choose T(t0) = Te – 0.1 C, you’re saying it started slightly out of equilibrium on the negative side.
In Spencer’s analysis, he chose to use a starting temperature in 1900 T(t0) = Te – 0.6 C – so his starting climate state was very significantly out of equilibrium. There is no evidence that climate in 1900 was way out of equilibrium – as I presented, what evidence we have shows it should have been close to equilibrium or above, not significantly below.
So – the point is, whether he did this by a “curve fit” or just picking convenient parameters for some purpose, the resulting fit is highly unphysical given his stated claim to be showing that temperature can be modeled as resulting from changes in the PDO index. For the first half of the 20th century, his modeled temperatures are mainly a result of his choice for T(t0) – Te. And as Barry has shown, it’s not just his T(t0)-Te that was bad – he had an infinite number of choices for his other parameters, and happened to end up with ones that required a hugely unphysical portion of the ocean to be participating in Earth’s short-term heat capacity. But conveniently his choice showed low sensitivity. Other parameters which would have given an equally good fit (as Barry and I showed) allow for a much more reasonable heat capacity and much higher climate sensitivity.

Wow Bart. Anthony, Roy, is this the type of dialogue you encourage?
Bart, if you have anything real to contribute, state it clearly without the insults.
T(0) is not a free parameter in my equation, so by definition my equation (18) gives T(0) = T(0). More specifically:
T(0) = Te + A0 + β Q(0)/c h
For physical reasons as you described earlier, the exponential term A0 really should be zero. Or you can think of it as a correction to whatever the estimate is of the starting value for the convolution Q at time 0. If we agree A0 = 0 (to avoid 6 trillion degrees etc), then the starting value for Q must be:
Q(0) = c h (T(0) – Te)/β
Since Q here comes from Spencer’s model as a 30-year convolution of PDO, the choice of T(0) – Te implies something about the PDO for time t before 0 (before 1900 in the case of Spencer’s fit). Spencer chose T(0) – Te to be highly negative – which would require the PDO to have been at its extreme negative limit for many decades before 1900. There is no evidence this was the case.
Or if you want to think about it another way, what Spencer’s model does is model temperatures through a dependence on PDO values several decades into the past. But he starts modeling at a particular year (1900) without any source of data on the PDO many decades into the past. Therefore his model cannot be considered a valid representation of the effect of PDO on temperatures until you have run it many decades after the start point, to get rid of transients. And it doesn’t actually match the rise in temperatures in the second half of the 20th century very well at all.

Actually, it can work that way, with a proper rearrangement of terms and splitting up of the integral. But, then you have destroyed your claim that A0 should be zero. And, you have no means of evaluating it, because you have to integrate Q from minus-infinity to zero, and you do not have that information.

“Spencer chose T(0) – Te to be highly negative – which would require the PDO to have been at its extreme negative limit for many decades before 1900. There is no evidence this was the case.”
No! By your accounting, he chose T(0)-Te-β Q(0)/c h to be highly negative. You are mixing and matching your terms. As you shift your definitions to keep up with my criticism, you have to reevaluate everything you have previously done.
On this level, you are wrong. And, on the forest level, it is immaterial.

“I am getting wrapped around the axle trying to explain reality to an unsympathetic duo who will never see beyond their own noses.”
And, that is precisely why Dr. Spencer was right not to wade into your fever swamp with a reply.

“But, even so, the values of Te and tau and all the other parameters are partial derivatives, which hold in a particular local operating regime, but may have to be shifted over time to continue matching reality.”
Please note, in addition, that as partial derivatives, these are slopes. They are sensitivities. They do not necessarily correspond directly with physically meaningful quantities. If you do not know how differential equations are commonly linearized about a set operating condition, do some reading.

Art – you are very confused. When I stated, and you agreed, that A0 = T(t0)-Te, then your equation was wrong. When you now stipulate that A0 = T(0)-Te-β Q(0)/c h, your equation works, but Q(0) in your notation, which is poor because it causes just this sort of confusion, is the convolution integral from minus-infinity to zero.
Thus, “implying A0 = 0” is non-sequitur. There is no information available which compels that T(0)-Te = β Q(0)/c h.
Let us focus on MY equation for a moment.
T(t) = Te + (T(t0)-Te)*exp(-(t-t0)/tau) + convolution-integral-from-t0-to-t
As you see, this eliminates confusion, because the start time and the current time are made explicit in all the important variables. Now, suppose I want to know what is happening in the past. Is T(-t) just
T(-t) = Te + (T(t0)-Te)*exp(-(-t-t0)/tau)
which diverges exponentially? No, it is not. It is
T(-t) = Te + (T(t0)-Te)*exp(-(-t-t0)/tau) + convolution-integral-from-t0-to-(-t)
The convolution integral is not zero, just because the upper limit is less than the lower limit. It is merely the negative integral from -t to t0. It is also unstable. So, to get a reliable estimate of the past, you have to have perfect information for the integrand, so that the instability of the exp(-(-t-t0)/tau) term and the convolution integral cancel out precisely.
Thus, your “six-million degrees” is farcical.

Arthur Smith says:
April 6, 2011 at 11:38 am
“Either way, Spencer’s model claimed to be explaining 20th centuries with PDO, but it does not.”
I do not know if it does or does not. You do not know if it does or does not. Your analysis is flawed for reasons I have presented. But, I do know that it matches up the amplitudes and phases for apparently nonsecular components fairly well, and that is good guide for whether he is on the right track in ferreting out a significant (at least) contributor to temperature variations in the 20th century.
You and Barry have lent your energies to those who would snuff the flame aborning. Instead of offering constructive criticism, you choose grandstanding and chest-thumping. That is not so surprising. Every great advance throughout history was resisted by vested interests and their toadies. But, I would not want to be one of the latter.
Joel Shore says:
April 6, 2011 at 12:14 pm
To tell the truth, Joel, I don’t really care. It is a sideshow for me. It or another mechanism to emerge will explain why the climate is not behaving as predicted. My main beef is when people with insufficient knowledge or experience to know what they are talking about, like Barry and Art, get up on a high horse and start calling other people dumb.
I care about whether the cloud feedback renders the overall water vapor feedback system negative. As you know, all the GCMs, either implicitly or explicitly, assume that the feedback is positive, and without this assumption, they do not predict a catastrophic temperature rise. My reading of Spencer’s evidence points to negative feedback.

Bart,
Actually, it was 6 TRILLION degrees, and Arthur meant it to be farcical.
I’ll let Arthur argue with you about the integrated form of the model, since he did that work. In any case, I still don’t understand what any of your criticisms have to do with anything I said in my original critique, since I was using the non-integrated form and numerically integrated it. (And I checked my results against Spencer’s to make sure I was getting the same answers.)
Let’s step back from your point about the integrated form, and focus on the main issues I brought up.
1. Do you disagree with my assertion that there are an infinite number of “best-fit” solutions for alpha and beta? If this assertion is true, then the particular “best-fit” values Spencer obtained are meaningless, since he could have picked any number of other combinations, and gotten exactly the same results. And yet, Spencer assigned great meaning to the parameter values he obtained.
2. Do you disagree with my assertion that not only the starting temperature anomaly, but the equilibrium temperature, were effectively fitting parameters for Spencer? As Arthur pointed out, modelers always have to run time-series models for a while before they begin “production,” to iron out any kinks caused by arbitrary choices in starting conditions. This is true of climate models, molecular dynamics models… whatever.
3. Do you disagree with Arthur’s and my assertion that about the first half of Spencer’s simulation is dominated by his choice of starting anomaly and equilibrium temperature? If the assertion is true, the overall trend of his simulation in the first half of the 20th century doesn’t have much to do with the PDO.
4. Do you disagree with the assertion that Spencer’s model doesn’t fit the temperature data in the last half of the 20th century very well? I.e., it significantly under-predicts the temperature. If it’s true, then the first half of his simulation fits the data ok-ish, but the model trend doesn’t have much to do with the PDO, while the last half of his simulation is dominated by the PDO, but it doesn’t fit the data very well. And so Spencer’s model doesn’t do anything much to show that the PDO significantly affects global climate.
5. Do you disagree with the assertion that Spencer’s choice of ocean mixed layer depth is unrealistic? If he had chosen a more reasonable depth, he could have fit the data exactly as well, but his alpha value would have indicated a VERY sensitive climate system, and his beta value would not have matched well with what he estimated from satellite data.
You keep rehashing your point about the integrated form, but even if you’re right, I fail to see how it even puts a dent in the main criticisms of Spencer’s model.

“…either way Q(0) is zero”
It is the weighted integral of the PDO from the infinitely remote past to time zero. You do not know the PDO from the infinitely remote past to time zero. You don’t even know how long this model is approximately valid into the remote past. You have no basis for this statement.
“When I do that with the proxy-PDO data…”
What part of “you have to have perfect information for the integrand, so that the instabilit[ies] … cancel out precisely” did you not understand? ANY imperfection grows exponentially. All you have demonstrated is that exponential growth is fast. Who’da thunk it?

Bart, you don’t have to integrate backwards to the year 1000, just integrate backwards to 1850 or so with an ensemble of different plausible values for the PDO from 1850 to 1900, and report back which PDO values allow you to have a reasonable 1850 temperature, and which do not. A simple choice would be to pick a constant PDO at some level, and see what it does. I assume we are in agreement that global temperatures in 1850 were not 3 or more degrees C below temperatures now.
You have the equations, you can download my R code. You do the math and see what values of PDO Spencer’s choice of 1900 temperature requires over that time period in order for temperatures not to blow up.
Yes, it’s true we don’t know precisely what they were. But presumably, as an oscillation, PDO stays pretty much up and down around where we’ve seen it.
I assert that, aside from the other problems Barry B. pointed out, Spencer’s PDO model does not realistically describe temperature from 1900 to 1950 or so – it requires an implausible starting value. And if you take that part of the temperature curve out, Spencer’s PDO fit to the last half of the 20th century doesn’t look very good at all.

“…you don’t have to integrate backwards to the year 1000…”
I take that as an admission that you realize now that your extrapolated claim of 6 trillion degrees was absurd, not for Dr. Spencer, but for the claim you were making. The punters are keeping score, and I intend to claim my beers, so I need your capitulation in writing.
But, you still don’t get it. I’m not going to bother accepting your challenge because it is a waste of my valuable time. Whether I could rise to it or not using a particular parameterization of this model, it means nothing. This model is a deterministic approximation/linearization of a complex nonlinear stochastic system. It provides a reasonable replication of the output temperature when driven by the PDO over a particular time interval. Any breakdown of that relationship at some point in time, plus or minus, likely enough means nothing more than that the equations need to be relinearized about a different state.
Or, the state could have been affected at some time by a one-off, transient event, such as the explosion of the island of Krakatoa in 1883, for which it is said:

Average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius in the year following the eruption. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.

Stop trying to prove the unprovable, or get serious about it and join one of those fringe groups trying to prove the non-existence of God. At least that concerns something important, even if it is as ultimately futile.

Erratum: Part of the quote from Dr. Spencer should have read “…sufficiently strong to justify devoting…

I have tried to post this several times – it seems to be failing for some reason. I’m removing links in case that’s the problem.
Bart, you say Spencer’s model “provides a reasonable replication of the output temperature when driven by the PDO over a particular time interval”. What time interval do you believe it provides a reasonable replication of temperature for, and where does it break down? See Barry Bickmore’s Figure 4 for instance. Do you believe it should work from 1900-2000 (the entire displayed range)? Do you believe it fails at 1900, and at 2000? Why would it work for an entire century (or whatever period you believe) but break down there? What has changed?
Science believes in finding the causes of things – an explanation isn’t complete unless it matches physical reality in some way. What is the physical reality that changed in 1900, or in 2000, that requires abandoning the fitted parameters of Spencer’s model that worked for that particular limited range of time?
In particular, if you believe it didn’t break down in 2000 but may continue to be valid, then you can use that model going forward, to predict global surface temperatures from 2000 to 2010, and even 2011 (since the PDO dependence is smoothed over 30 years into the past, you don’t even need 2011 data to make a rough guess – but it is available through February 2011 anyway).
If you think Spencer’s model is really giving a “reasonable replication” of temperatures, tell us how it’s doing for the past decade, and what does it predict for 2011?
By the way, I’ve recently done precisely this prediction exercise for 2011, 2012, and 2013 based on a not much more complex statistical fit here:
http://arthur.shumwaysmith.com/life/content/predicting_future_temperatures
using ENSO, sunspots, and stratospheric volcanos – *plus an underlying upward trend* (and you’ll notice from the graphs, it does way better than Spencer’s model in matching the temperatures). I’m willing to put my numbers out there for the world to see, and we’ll see how I do. Are you? Is Roy Spencer?

And by the way, Bart, I never asked you to fix my model… since I don’t have a model. I only explored the one Spencer proposed.

You guys are amazing. Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.
Art – I’m not taking any more questions from you until you admit your “6 trillion degrees” taunt was mistaken. In fact, at this point, I’m going to need a little groveling.
Barry – it’s irrelevant, except that it changes the entire meaning of what he was doing, what he was trying to show, and the relevance of your criticism. Not only do you guys have no clue as to the system you are criticizing, you’re arguing against an opponent which doesn’t even exist.
BTW, Barry, about your 700 m vs. 100 m concern: Spencer addresses that very point in the chapter and cites the paper “Warming of the World Ocean: 1955-2003” in Geophysical Research Letters, by Levitus, Antonov, and Boyer, published 2005. If you have a problem with it, maybe you should consult them. And, next time you set out to slander a respected scientist, try reading what he wrote first.

Bart,
If you had actually read my critique, you would have seen that I did address Spencer’s rationale for the 700 m mixed layer. Here’s what I said:
First, if a 700 m mixed layer is a physically reasonable value, then maybe my objections are moot. Here’s what Spencer says about it.
“By coincidence, this figure actually matches the approximate depth over which warming has been observed to occur in the last fifty years, which is something the model did not know beforehand. (p. 116)”
Even if the water temperature has been measurably heating down that deep, however, Spencer’s model assumes that the temperature is uniform throughout that entire 700 m, which is demonstrably false. The thermocline (i.e., the boundary between the warmer, well-mixed layer at the surface of the ocean and the colder deep ocean water is typically in the range of 50-100 m deep (Baker and Roe, 2009). In a simple model like Spencer’s that doesn’t account for upwelling and diffusion of heat into the deep ocean, one needs to fudge that figure a little higher. Murphy and Forster (2010) discussed previous work on this question, and it appears mixed-layer depths of 100-200 m (probably closer to 100 m) are reasonable for models such as Spencer’s. The irony, of course, is that Murphy and Forster were criticizing Spencer and Braswell (2008) for using only a 50 m mixed layer, which skewed their results. (Spencer provides the spreadsheet he used for the 2008 study here. Go ahead and plug in a 700 m mixed layer, and see what kind of nonsense comes out. You can compare it to what you’re supposed to get here.)
I’m sure you’ll tell me why detectable heating as low as 700 m is the same thing as a 700 m mixed layer, however. I’m on the edge of my seat.

And, Art, review the exchange with Barry. Read Spencer’s own words for the first time. Then, explain your argument again, and why it has any meaning. What, exactly, are you trying to prove?

Bart, honestly, nothing you have stated here is not already covered in mine and Barry’s posts, but perhaps we didn’t explain clearly enough there. I have tried carefully to uncover any actual remaining problem here in dialogue with you, but so far everything that you have claimed that is of any quantitative nature is in agreement with what we both originally posted. It’s a little hard to tell if anything is getting through, or whether this dialogue is completely pointless.
Rather than telling me what to do, can you try to explain what you actually think about Spencer’s model, fitting temperatures to the sum of an exponential and the PDO? You stated up above that it “provides a reasonable replication of the output temperature when driven by the PDO over a particular time interval”. Do you still believe that? What time interval? Can you state any conclusion about the physical system of Earth’s climate that you might conclude from this “reasonable replication”?

Someone didn’t close his tag.
Barry sez… my objections are moot. Indeed, they are. For two reasons. One, as I have explained repeatedly, is that you are imposing a rigid interpretation on the physical meaning of the model without any appreciation for the underlying complexity of the real world system involved.
The other is that you are attacking Spencer’s self-described 3 days plinking at his home desktop computer, to get a ROM estimate of the narrow effects of PDO on cloud cover and temperatures, as though it were a full blown theory claiming to upend the entire artfully constructed edifice of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. In fact, it is merely the first step on a long road which would need to be trod to tease out the details of the underlying complexity to which I just referred.
But, you know this. I have stated both reasons repeatedly and in detail. The game is over. But, you are still in denial an hour after the last whistle blew. You lost. Suck it up and get ready for the next one.

And, when Art gets tired of dissembling, I am still expecting some groveling to atone for his most egregious error.

Art – “[W]ho’s quibbling”? Why, you are. If you see no correlation between the PDO index, whatever it represents, and global temperatures since 1900, then you are wearing blinders.
As for ‘Spencer’s model “needs work, and it may not end up accounting for the entire record of 20th century warming’, Spencer himself effectively said this. Of course it needs work. Spencer tossed it off in a few days at home. The establishment climate modelers have spent decades and hundreds of millions, and still don’t know what to make of the stagnation in temperatures for the last decade.
This is no departure from my position from the very first – read back through the thread and see. You’ve been in too high dudgeon trying thoroughly to vanquish your imagined foe that you never paid attention to his, or my, words.

Joel Shore says:
April 6, 2011 at 2:10 pm
I just noticed this comment. Most of what you had to say is irrelevant, and you can find the answers in the subsequent discussion. But, I will comment on this:
“…and believe his evidence that he claims points to the negative feedback…”
I don’t “believe” anything. I can see the evidence directly when I look at his plot, as I explained. I am not so timid as to doubt my own eyes when the information they convey goes against popular sentiment. You would do well to do the same.