Tom Nelson points out these three related items. It seems the “pretty good proxy for climate change” is proxying the wrong message this year.
Overheated Arctic update: Nenana ice was gone by this date in 1940, but still 41 inches thick this year
21-Apr 41.4 Inches
Nenana Ice Classic Breakup dates
20-Apr 1940 1998
The Ice Classic has given them a rare, reliable climate history that has documented to the minute the onset of the annual thaw as it shifted across 91 years. By this measure, spring comes to central Alaska 10 days earlier than in 1960, said geophysicist Martin Jeffries at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks — and that trend is accelerating. “The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century,” Dr. Jeffries said.
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* That great phrase coined by Kate at Small Dead Animals
[UPDATE] I hope Anthony won’t bust me for adding a graph of the Nenana breakup dates over time. The error bar (95%CI) shows the error for the Gaussian average.
You can see the changes due to the PDO in the data.
w.
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P. Solar writes,
“OK. Name one funny warmist blog.”
I could name many, but your asking that confirms you read only [snip. Don’t use that insult here. ~dbs] blogs, or else have no humor.
“RealClimate is a joke. ”
No, they’re real scientists. But you didn’t get “Fracking Methane?”
Gneiss says:
April 23, 2011 at 5:52 am
<blockquote?
P. Solar writes
“RealClimate is a joke. ”
No, they’re real scientists. But you didn’t get “Fracking Methane?”
Sorry, “real scientists” permit debate. RealClimate deletes anything they don’t want to hear (or more likely don’t want the world to know). That is why their site IS a joke. Even the name is a joke , a satire of what science is all about.
If they called it RealClimateBogots I may be able to take it more seriously.
No idea what you methane reference is about.
Ice width/depth data …
http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/Ice%20Measurement.htm
RealClimate reminds me of countries with “democratic” in their name. Any country that is democratic has no need to use the word “democratic” in their name.
Tim Folkerts says:
April 22, 2011 at 1:27 pm
The trend is to break up 0.07 days earlier each year, or 7 days earlier now than when the contest started ~100 years ago. That trend seems to be accelerating.
This 100 years is cherry-picking. The entire edifice of AGW is built on cherry-picking a period of natural cyclical climate warming over several wavelengths of normal climatic oscillation.
How about the last 10,000 years? The trend here is definitely downwards. This will be accelerating downwards in the coming decades.
Jim G says:
April 22, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Another proxy, 36 degrees F, 40 MPH winds and snow in the warmer part of WY right now, where I live, and it is usually so nice this time of year. ( I am prevaricating through my clenched teeth.)
Spring has sprung,
No sign of sun,
The snow still flies,
While I tell lies,
So don’t move here,
Too many already so near,
Try Texas if you will,
East and west coast voices are too shrill,
Outsiders tend to vex us,
But our climate does protect us.
The spring is sprung, the grass is riz
I wonder where the birdy is?
Some say the bird is on the wing
But that’s absurd – the wing is on the bird
(The Goodies, BBC, 70’s or 80’s)
Gneiss, not one of those FL locations is actually in central FL, though the one with no trend is closest. If you are going to attempt to disprove something, it helps if you offer evidence that is at least supportive of your counter-argument. As it stands, you actually offered aid to your opposition. It takes a special sort of cleverness to do that while declaring victory.
Mark
ferd berple says on April 23, 2011 at 8:32 am
An astute observation. I suspect it applies to political parties as well, eg, The Democratic People’s party of Judea.
Hey Gneiss, I hope you appreciate the free continuing education classes offered by WUWT.
You might also want to check this out:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_FloridaUSA.htm
One excerpt:
“A study of Florida’s climate by Florida State University Professor Morton Winsberg [ http://www.floridatrend.com/article.asp?aID=74738929.7299137.655837.79720802.29349702.748&aID2=50440 ] showed that: “the hot season in Florida has gotten a lot hotter — and longer — in some places, but not at all in others. The change, however, is unrelated to global warming … it’s a function of the lesser-known phenomenon of local warming. … the most notable climate changes along the state’s southeastern coast, where development and wetlands drainage have been heaviest … Winsberg and FSU meteorologists to blame the hot spots on local land-use changes that accentuate the urban “heat-island” effect — the pools of heat that large, dense concentrations of people produce in their local climates. Cutting down trees, draining wetlands and pouring concrete all make a place hotter”.
P. Solar says:
April 23, 2011 at 4:11 am
Yeah, that’s mine. I collated the messy html linked by Anthony above, partly by hand and partly by Excel.
w.
Gneiss says:
April 23, 2011 at 5:49 am
Source? The source is logic. Try your method with a slow sine curve and tell me what you get. It has also been discussed at WUWT, but I can’t find it right now. The point is that the method is not used because it is totally dependent on the choice of the final point. By picking that point properly, you can “prove” anything … which of course means the method is worthless.
Nope. I’m just pointing out the general trends, not making any mathematical evaluation. In addition, the trends (unlike your method) do not all end at the same point.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 23, 2011 at 11:31 am
“Yeah, that’s mine. I collated the messy html linked by Anthony above, partly by hand and partly by Excel.”
Care to share it somewhere?
thx.
Humor? I find Gneiss funny, ‘cos he don’t get the joke.
Gneiss guys finish last.
Hyuk hyuk hyuk
When the ice goes out in New Hampshire lakes there’s an interesting phenomenon where, within a day or two, the water in the lakes flips over. It occurs because fresh water is less dense at 33 degrees F than at 34, and less dense at 34 than at 35, but right around 35 it starts behaving more normally, and water at 35 is more dense than water at 36.
Therefore, when the surface reaches 35 or so, it all sinks to the bottom, pretty much all at once. Sometimes you can see bits of dead pond-weed churned about, the day it happens.
This doesn’t happen with salt water, and in trying to learn why not, and at what point salt halts the flipping-process, I managed to give myself a pretty good migraine. It taught me what a fascinating substance water is, and that it is no joke modeling the behavior sea ice, or what happens when fresh water enters salt water at a delta in an arctic climate.
Seems like a good subject for your restless and relentless mind, Willis.
phlogiston says:
April 23, 2011 at 8:55 am
“This 100 years is cherry-picking. The entire edifice of AGW is built on cherry-picking a period of natural cyclical climate warming over several wavelengths of normal climatic oscillation.”
Indeed, there is some artful deception in the IPCC’s choice of making statements about climate change in the “latter half of the 20th century”. It sounds like a reasonably chosen period. A nice round number , ends at the end of century, first half or second half, no bias or cherry picking going. Sounds fair. No need to justify why that period was chosen , it’s an obvious choice. Even though science is not based on choosing round numbers , no one will question it.
Of course the slight of hand is that this just happens to be a trough to peak sample of the dominant climate cycle. This adds >0.2C/50a to your slope.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
It’s similar if you look at the whole of 20th c. , to get a fairer idea of the long term trend you’d need to measure peak to peak ie. 1875-2003 but 1900 is near the trough in 1910. So you just “average” over the 20th century and you get another 0.2C for your money without anyone suspecting some cleaver cherry-picking of the sample period.
Your point was that trends are meaningless with cyclical data. Something Gneiss does not apparently understand. A sinewave has an infinite number of “trends” with slopes ranging from -1 to 1. With discrete time data, the number of possible trends is reduced to a finite number, but there are still a lot of possiblities.
Mark
P. Solar says:
April 23, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Glad to, that’s science. It’s here as an Excel spreadsheet. My gaussian function isn’t included, probably should be. Ah, well.
P. Solar says:
April 23, 2011 at 3:40 am (Edit)
I use my own method of smoothing. Mannian smoothing is a joke, and as far as I know, I was the first person to point this out. I wrote a paper on it and submitted it some years ago to GRL, I probably should post it up. They said I was being too mean to poor Michael …
Nope. I use my own method, which also bridges short gaps in the record (if there’s long gaps I use loess smoothing). What I do is I calculate how much of the data is missing and increase the value by that much …
The result is a fairly small error bar at the end. I haven’t found any method to beat mine, it gives the smallest error of all the methods I know of (which can be directly calculated for any given dataset).
Finally, the error at the end is roughly “trumpet shaped”, with the error increasing as you approach the end of the dataset. This means that the error decreases to a small value fairly quickly as you move away from the end.
So I run it all the way out. I could (and likely should) put an error bar at the end, but it is generally fairly small. Hang on … OK, the error of my method in this dataset (95%CI) is ±3.5 days. I’ve updated the chart in the head post to show the error.
w.
Willis, there’s a minor but clear calculation mistake in your graph, you might want to fix that as well.
Don’t play games, it isn’t Gneiss. Point out the calculation, and if it’s legit, Willis will fix it because he values truth and he’s a stand-up guy. Science doesn’t work by secrecy. Well, except for grant-fueled climate ‘science.’
Willis writes,
“Source? The source is logic. Try your method with a slow sine curve and tell me what you get.”
So when you said “bad math,” you didn’t actually mean bad math, but some other objection? Because temperature follows a sine curve, or something?
“The point is that the method is not used because it is totally dependent on the choice of the final point. By picking that point properly, you can “prove” anything … which of course means the method is worthless.”
Not sure what “method” you think I have here. I didn’t pick any end points. In the Nenana example the end point is 2010 because that’s all there is. The Florida data, as I said in my post, are just something I happened to have on hand. Which ended in 2008, because that’s when that job was done.
The pattern of recent northern hemisphere warming over the past century+ is well known: cool in the early 20th century, warming about 1920 to 40, level or cooling 1940s through 60s, modern takeoff starting in the 70s. So with any unfamiliar climate series over this time scale, I’m curious to see whether it also has that pattern. Comparing century-scale with 1970-to-present trends is a simple first check.
Tim Folkerts says:
>>The trend is to break up 0.07 days earlier each year, or 7 days
>>earlier now than when the contest started ~100 years ago.
phlogiston says:
>This 100 years is cherry-picking.
I don’t see how you could consider this “cherry picking” when I used every single data point available.
Tom Nelson, on the other hand, specifically chose 1940 because it was tied (with 1998 by the way) for the earliest break-up on record. Now THAT is cherry picking!
Now, if the record went back 200 years and I started ion 1917, then you would have reason to question my choice. And as P. Solar points out, if a specific period is chosen because it artificially highlights a desired result, that would also be cherry picking.
Mark T writes,
“Your point was that trends are meaningless with cyclical data. Something Gneiss does not apparently understand.”
I didn’t understand that because it’s false. Real data often have both cycles and trends.
Willis , thanks for the excel data and the explanation of your technique. I’ll have to examine that in more detail, looks useful.
To illustrate the point about starting points, I decided to do a least squares straight line fit to each 50 year interval in the HadCrut3 dataset and plot the 100 year slope given by looking at each period. This is a layman’s guide on cherry-picking your start date.
hadCrut3 50 year slopes
If you want to show there is minimal slope you pick cherries from 1867 or 1926. If you want maxed out warming trend you pick 1902 or late 50’s as your starting point.
As I pointed out above, the latter choice could be innocently presented as “latter half of 20th century”.
One other thing that seems to come out from this plot is the clear 60y cyclic nature , which is even clearer in this presentation than it is in the original data. If I smooth it , it’s damn near sinusoidal plus linear.
I’ll have to reflect on what that means but it’s interesting.
BTW I did the linear fits with gnuplots fit command which uses “an implementation of the nonlinear least-squares (NLLS) Marquardt-Levenberg algorithm”.