Rahmstorf's new heat wave cherry twisty

Yeah! This one is not a ” What If Study “. But alas another cherry picked Hockey Stick… 🙁

Diametrically opposed climate study conclusions. Does that have a human thumbprint or is it just a matter of natural variability?

Rahmstorf is becoming an asset!

As McIntyre often says, “You have to keep your eye on the pea” with the climate gang. My eyeball regression gives a cooling trend of -0.1 degrees if you start from 1890 (but R^2 < 0.01), in accord with Dole's no significant trend since 1890. But alas if you start from 1910, you get a 0.4 deg warming.
Always keep your eye on the pea. The shell game continues.

And yet, in this peer-reviewed paper (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010GL046582.shtml), this statement was made in the abstract:
“…Analysis of observations indicate that this heat wave was mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained a strong and long-lived blocking event, and that similar atmospheric patterns have occurred with prior heat waves in this region. We conclude that the intense 2010 Russian heat wave was mainly due to natural internal atmospheric variability…”
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L06702, 5 PP., 2011
doi:10.1029/2010GL046582
Oh, well. Let the battle begin…

80% probability? p=0.2?
What an incredible abuse of statistics.

Re Garrett says: 12:28….What sort of scientist are you?
Actually it was Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, who used the term “untrustworthy”. You ask what kind of scientist are you? (Pielke or Watts?) You seem to suggest we should all remain quiet while this disagreement is sorted out in the peer review process.
But that is not how science oriented blogs work. We are all free to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of any published paper, whether we are scientists to your liking or not. That is, in my mind, a wonderfully enlightening and refreshing way to participate in science,
Dr. Pielke, Jr says there are flaws in the Rahmstorf paper. You say there may or may not be flaws in it. What don’t you address the issue that Dr Pielke raised? Try it, I think you will find it’s rewarding. Certainly more rewarding than suggesting Dr. Pielke and we have no right to comment.

Amazingly these papers are published and these authors are still enjoying a career…

It looks like Pielke Jr. has Rahmstorf over a barrel at his blog and at RC. One commenter at Pielke’s found that McIntyre had already dissected the padding-smoothing issue of another of Rahmstorf “non-linear-linear-trend” thingy’s, which it looks like R. might have to come back with to try to explain why he didn’t include the 1880-1910 data, “because it’s not linear” or “there is no trend back then”, or something:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/03/the-secret-of-the-rahmstorf-non-linear-trend/
I’m getting the idea that in regard to the method the “science” of mainstream Climate Scientists employs, its stats are just about equivalent in value to its verbiage: anything goes and it always proves “or else we’re all gonna die!” Unprecedently!
sigh…”So much to shovel, so little funding remains…cursed Teapartiers!”

Careful selection of a starting point for trends is what IPCC types are trained to do. An NCAR group did the same thing to “prove” an increase in record max vs. min temps in the US, and here’s the response on WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/why-ncars-meehl-paper-on-highlow-temperature-records-is-bunk/
Starting their trend after the Dust Bowl was over was very clever.
Keep in mind the IPCC’s charter is not to scientifically discover if AGW is happening or not, but to document that it is happening so the policy dudes can transfer wealth in its name.

I really feel sad about “science” coming from my home country.
Ramstorf 2007 still hasn’t been retracted, though it is still quoted to justifiy gigantic financial expenses.

Interesting,
However, there were a lot of `heat waves’ around and pre-1900 in the graph, (Time series of July near surface temperature anomalies averaged over the area 50-60N and 35-55E. Anomalies are calculated relative to the period 1880-2009) in the NOAA paper. Maybe not quite as big but more frequent over a longer period of time.
Dr. P., What would happen if the experiment was turned around to see if there was a relationship between heat waves going back to 1880 and cooling? . There are actually quite a few hot years at either end of the figure and around 1940. Just visually, it almost looks like if you cut off the data set at 2000 and then used the series to 1880 (the exact opposite of what Rh did), you would get a strong relationship between cooling and heat waves.
Looks like the data set is dominated at either end by a bunch of extremes, a peak in the middle. Just looking at it that, to me suggests a cyclical event. Or even more reasonably, given the bunching of the highs at either end of the data, seems to me that one cannot draw any reasonable conclusion without at the very minimum another 50 years of data. I also note in the NOAA paper that they say there is no warming trend in this part of Russia. So the heat waves will be more frequent and larger due to warming but there is no warming????

We clearly fail to reject the null hypothesis that the russian heat wave was induced by AGW.
James

Wil says:
October 26, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Here’s what’s appearing on the CBC website today: Polar bear campaign seeks ‘last ice’ Arctic preserve. The plight of the polar bear is so dire due to the shrinking of sea ice crucial to its habitat that some scientists are musing about moving them to a “last ice area” in the high Arctic.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/10/26/pol-environment-polar-bears-relocation.html
______________________________________
Those bears are going to be totally P.O.ed at being moved from their readily available food source – GARBAGE DUMPS.

Willis Eschenbach says (October 26, 2011 at 12:35 pm): “In the same way, the R&C results verify that in a warming world, we’d expect to see more high temperature records broken … so what, we all knew that.”
But…but…NINE of the ten warmest years in history occurred in the last five years!

I note a warning by the said professor on Arctic ice melt is also currently being used by the ABC Drum which has been going gangbusters to try and reverse public opinion on the Australian carbon tax:
“Already at the end of this century, sea level could well be one metre higher than it is now, unless we act rapidly and decisively to curb our greenhouse gas emissions.
This is why we ignore the silent meltdown in the North at our own peril. It is a sign of global warming – and a grave warning sign for us all.”
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3601942.htm

I like how Rahmstorf et al used, as they say “…unadjusted station data (i.e. the “GISS combined Moskva” data)…”
Can you actually use the terms “unadjusted” and “GISS data” in the same sentence?

Allanj said
“Actually it was Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, who used the term “untrustworthy”.
No, Anthony said that Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says exactly what he thought, i.e. untrustworthy. Dr. Pielke does not use the word “untrustworthy” in his post, though he does insinuate it.
“You seem to suggest we should all remain quiet while this disagreement is sorted out in the peer review process.”
No, I don’t think you should all remain quite. I think that Watts and Pielke Jr. should not be so quick to draw conclusions and call a paper untrustworthy. Why are they so quick to refer with zeal to Dole’s paper, which Rahmstorf showed to have a significant flaw in it (using annual average urban heat island correction for individual months)? Flaws don’t make a paper untrustworthy, they make them open to improvement.
“But that is not how science oriented blogs work. We are all free to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of any published paper, whether we are scientists to your liking or not. That is, in my mind, a wonderfully enlightening and refreshing way to participate in science”
Scientific blogs are indeed very refreshing. However, Pielke has now indicated on his blog that he will be using the RC11 paper in his “graduate seminar next term as an example of cherry picking in science”. He’s bringing his own personal convictions into the classroom, which I feel is not very ethical.
“Why don’t you address the issue that Dr Pielke raised?”
Because I wanted to comment on his way of raising an issue, rather than the subject matter of his issue. Also, I’m not a climate scientist, so I’m not sure I could bring much to the table. I’ve quickly scanned over the RC11 paper and my first impression is that it’s quite complicated and somewhat out of reach of non-specialists. However, I can say this much. It’s divided in to two parts: the statistical model and the applictions. Pielke did not raise any issues with the statistical method, which forms the core science of the article. His criticsm lies with the Moscow data inserted into that analysis in the latter part of the paper. The choice of 1911 is simple: it allowed for a 100 year time period for the initial analysis. In the Moscow application, results are given for the following periods: 1911-2010, 1910-2009, and 1880-2009. So the entire GISS dataset was used. There was no cherry-picking. For some reason, Pielke still thinks that the 1880-2009 data was not used for the Moscow figures, but the RC11 paper explicitly states that it was.
Cheers

Rahmstorf has used ssatrend for his nonlinear trend (see his RC post); he seems to be a big fan of that, having used it already in Rahmstorf 2007 (a paper about sea level rise); he got it from Aslak Grinsted. Aslak showed up here recently in a Willis Eschenbach thread about a paper by Aslak that projects sea level rise to the year 2500 (two thousand five hundred, that is.)
http://nierenbergclimate.blogspot.com/2009/04/duplicating-rahmstorf-2007.html
Without knowing more about ssatrend (and I know nothing about it) it is impossible to say whether any data before an arbitrary date in the past actually has any influence on the present value of the trend. Rahmstorf himself says it makes nearly no difference whether he starts his analysis in 1880 or 1910.
(This implies that the big warm extreme in 1890 is simply swept under the rug. Ein Schelm, der böses dabei denkt.)

The title of Rahmsdorf & Coumou’s PNAS article is “Increase of extreme events in a warming world.“ Since we demonstrably do not live in a warming world this reduces it to an exercise in numerology. In fairness to those who are unfamiliar with the arguments for lack of warming I will give a brief outline below. Most of it is based on my book “What Warming“ with some updates. First and foremost we must establish a valid temperature curve. Unfortunately global temperature curves from NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office cannot be believed because of obvious falsifications they contain. The most serious of these is fabrication of a non-existent “late twentieth century warming“ in the eighties and nineties. It is shown as a steady rise in temperature that satellites simply cannot see (see figure 24 in my book). What satellites do see in the eighties and nineties is not warming but a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for twenty years. This oscillation is caused by the ENSO phenomenon in the Pacific that has global climate influence. According to the satellite data the only global warming within the last 31 years was a short spurt that started with the super El Nino of 1998, in four years raised temperature by a third of a degree, and then stopped. It is responsible for the very warm first decade of our century. It was oceanic, not greenhouse in nature. Any phenomena like wildlife migrations etc that are attributed to global greenhouse warming are consequences of this step warming. This still leaves Arctic warming for us to explain which is very real. Opening of the Northwest Passage, reduction of summer sea ice, permafrost melting, Greenland glaciers breaking up and polar bears in trouble are all attributed to Arctic warming. And collectively they are said to prove the existence of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately Arctic warming has nothing whatsoever to do with the greenhouse effect. It began suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century, paused from 1940 to 1970, then resumed, and is still going strong. Before this warming started there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling. It is impossible for the greenhouse effect to be its cause because there was no concurrent increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The absorptivity of carbon dioxide in the infrared is a physical property of the gas and cannot be changed. If you want to start greenhouse warming you must put more carbon dioxide in the air and this did not happen. The true cause of Arctic warming has turned out to be warm water brought into the Arctic Ocean by currents. It started with a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century. Proof of this will appear in a paper in press, scheduled for release in December. Direct measurement of Atlantic water temperature reaching the Arctic Ocean shows that it exceeds anything seen within the last two thousand years. Because Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming it follows that no observations of Arctic warming can be used as proof that carbon dioxide greenhouse effect exists. This eliminates greenhouse warming from the last 31 years but the remainder of the past century still needs to be considered. Twentieth century warming happened in two parts of which the step warming of 1998 was the second part. The first part of twentieth century warming started in 1910 and ended with the beginning of World War Two. A good case can be made that its cause was solar activity. During the fifty years between these two phases of warming global temperature stood still while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. Anyone wishing to claim the reality of greenhouse warming will first have to explain this non-warming interval. And don’t try aerosols, they are innocent.