With apologies to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, here’s a a comment worth repeating from the Hit and Misses thread.
What I find interesting about the entire email corpus is the focus on the minutia of the statistics and the different proxies. In none of the emails from the core team members do we see any physics of radiation. It seems that if it were your role to “prove” the positive feedback of CO2 you would want to actually do some physics of radiative and convective transfer of energy in the atmosphere. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It seems that the entire consensus group have taken an assumption (positive feedback of CO2 increase) and are going deeper and deeper into the details of the proxies in order to show what the results of their assumption are.
I think that this is why as a discipline, more and more physicists are dismissing AGW.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:09 pm
………….the patently unscientific manner in which they interact in public places such as R/C and SkS with scientists who call them out for their inadequacies, misrepresentations, errors, lack of compliance with publishing standards, misunderstandings and misbehaviour.”
R/C and SkS is somewhat akin to watching a Chinese movie – with ill fitting voice-overs and captions.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Dude, this is a group of people who study paleoclimates, what did you expect?>>>
Right on dude! Tell it like it is brother!
They’ve studied tree rings, reconstructed the climate of the last thousand years from them, deleted those periods in time when the tree rings didn’t show what they thought it should, agreed that data should be kept “well hidden”, agreed to “hide the decline”, and that 12 trees from Siberia represented the temperature of the entire globe over the last 1000 years. Oh, I forgot to mention the graphics program that sorts through climate data and weights the various data differently until it produces a hockey stick, and the agreement to “get rid” of the MWP.
Obviously all that produced results that clearly indicate that increased CO2 is warming the planet. No doubt about it. The logic chain is clear and precise. Thanks for pointing that out Rattus.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
I agree with Rattus that these guys are paleos, dendros etc. and the actual physics of climate are outside of their purview and expertise. Unfortunately, the most notorious of these paleos are so disconnected from physical reality that they do not consider the need for a temperature proxy to have some basis in physical reality. Hence the upside down Tiljander episode, the bristlecone pines, the Yamal “one tree to rule them all” and the divergence problem plus lesser travesties. In other words, if there existed a correlation between church of England attendance and the temperature record over a cherry picked calibration period, they could not resist including it in their reconstructions. Just hide the verification statistics and you are golden.
I swear by Gropthar’s Hammer that I got this email from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) after this thread started.
Colleagues,
The next Enterprise Chapter meeting is the last week of November and features a “hard core” scientist presenting his original analyses and findings concerning global warming. He has just published a book on these issues, now available through Amazon.
Note the meeting location is at Microcosm, Inc., in Hawthorne — see below left for location link.
If you wish to attend, please click on LINK Interested in Meeting below left and send e-mail with your name.
NEXT PRESENTATION
No CO2 Required
Sun, Wind and Water Need No Help from CO2 to Set the Earth’s Climate
The global warming ‘debate’ has become detached from its foundations in physical science and degenerated into an argument over belief in empirical pseudoscience. The observed increase of 100 parts per million in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since the start of the industrial revolution has had no effect on the Earth’s climate. This follows from an analysis of the time dependence of the climate energy transfer. The local surface temperature is always changing on both a daily and a seasonal time frame in response to changes in the total surface energy flux balance and local weather patterns.
The Earth has been warming gradually since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 18th century. There has been no increase in ‘extreme’ climate events. Sea level and polar ice extent are behaving normally. Hurricanes are near an all time low. The dynamic nature of the greenhouse effect has been conveniently ignored by many climate ‘scientists’. Their models assume a fictional average climate equilibrium state that can be perturbed using a technique known as radiative forcing. The result has been scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale.
Over a trillion dollars has been wasted on research to save the planet from a non-existent problem. The peer review process in climate science has collapsed and been replaced by flagrant cronyism. The large scale climate models have been fraudulently ‘hard wired’ to create global warming. Once this is understood, then the whole pseudoscientific façade of forcings and feedbacks and climate sensitivity factors collapses. A doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration can have no effect on climate. Sun, wind and water need no help from CO2 to set the Earth’s climate.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Roy Clark is President and Founder of Ventura Photonics. His over 30 years experience includes optical and spectroscopic sensors, combustion and laser diagnostics, and non imaging optics for illumination and solar concentrators, emphasizing product and process development for adverse environments. He holds 8 US patents. Past positions were with various aerospace and technology companies in S. California.
With publication of the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Roy began to study climate change. He could not find a quantitative explanation of carbon dioxide induced global warming. Through original analysis, he discovered that it is impossible for the resulting 1.7 W.m-2 increase in the downward infra red flux from a 100 ppm increase in carbon dioxide concentration to cause any climate change. He has now published a new book that summarizes this research: The Dynamic Greenhouse Effect and the Climate Averaging Paradox.
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm
“We now have inexpensive LCD tunable filters that are capable of wavelength resolution down to the 0.1 nanometer scale. We could easily fly one of those on the ISS using the downward facing scientific window designed for this purpose and do an experiment and get results of far better quantitive and qualitative value than our simple student experiment of the 1990′s.”
What would the hardware package for this device cost? What would it cost to get it built, debugged, added to an ISS resupply launch and get it installed and operational on the down looking window?
Thank you for the interesting perspectives!
I have submitted several experiments for consideration that would measure specific model parameters, no USAF interest. No one wants to open Pandora’s box.
Tom Davidson says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:20 pm
CO2 absorbs energy from all directions, and re-radiates that energy in all directions. The main difference between CO2 and other gases, besides the absorption spectrum, is that CO2 has a slightly higher specific heat than the other components of air. Physically this means that it takes MORE energy to raise the temperature of the air a given amount if more CO2 is present.
In planetary physics this makes CO2 a (mild) form of thermal ballast, reducing fluctuations.
‘Greenhouse’ gases only work in greenhouses – structures designed to inhibit convection.
To that you have to add that as water vapor (feedback?) increases as a percentage of a volume of air so the enthalpy of that volume increases. So the heat energy required to raise that volume of air increases by up to ~10 times. BOTH ‘green house gases’ therefore make it more difficult to raise the atmospheric temperature as their concentration increases.
This is why it is a data-type error to measure atmospheric temperature and use it to quantify atmospheric heat content.
Mac, alot of spectral studies were done using balloons to reduce cost. My guess would be that updwelling spectral data collected against a deep space background would be better then trying to deal with the down dwelling issues.
Actually, the experimental physics to AGW, are made available to us, by the most excellent lab team of Al Gore and Bill Nye. The data produced… robust.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
Perhaps you should discuss your proposal with them? 😉 GK
There’s no butter on that side of the bread. You will need to present the experiment in such a way as it looks to be a shoo-in to validate AGW. You position it that way in order to get the funding, pretend that you are out to validate the hypothesis and then once it is done, publish what the data show.
The Team practiced no physical science at all and they do not to this day. What they did is select some types of tree rings because they had been used in the past as proxies for temperature. In the past, the selections had not been justified in accordance with scientific method and The Team did nothing to justify them.
“Hide the decline” is the clearest case of this failure to do physical science. They discovered that after 1960 their readings from some kinds of tree rings began to diverge from past readings and from thermometer measurements. At this point, physical scientists would have asked what caused the divergence. Not The Team. They hid the divergence.
Physical scientists would have done empirical research to discover the physical laws that govern tree ring formation in the environments studied and would have used those laws to explain the tree ring divergence from 1960 to 2000. Not The Team. Briffa published an article or two around the year 2000 and explained that he had no idea why the tree rings changed. To this day, there is no article that explains the changes in accordance with scientific method. (Rumor has it that Briffa is working on one – just ten years late.) The Team was never interested in such matters. The Team has always been interested in nothing but finding strings of numbers associated with some natural proxy for temperature and using those strings to support the claim of rising temperatures. There is not one of them that has the instincts of a genuine scientist. Having forty years of divergent data, a genuine scientist would have said “This is our big discovery and this is what we must publish, namely, that tree rings are worthless as proxies for temperature.”
There are in Climategate 2 some emails from prominent scientists explaining to members of The Team that what they are doing is not science. Professor Daly is most prominent among these. He tells The Team pretty much what I have said here and he admonishes them that they should try to embrace the scientific method. Of course, Team members are livid at such a put down even though it is spot on.
Jeff Id has done some excellent work on his website addressing other articles in which The Team showed the same poor judgement that they showed in the “hide the decline” matter. I highly recommend that you visit Id’s site and put yourself through his highly depressing but enlightening account of just how unscientific The Team was in its practices. This is all new material not found in Climategate 1.
Some say that Climategate 2 is a yawn. BS. It is crammed with context and detail that surpass “hide the decline” in all ways.
Perhaps the paucity of physical content is due to the political nature of the “debate.” Any actual science was not put in emails, but quietly passed from cubicle to cubicle in plain manila envelopes.
Deekaman says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Dude…I expect some basic science with the study of paleoclimate…like, “does this meet the bounds of physics?”
################################
paleo climate does in fact help us constrain the boundaries of the ECR.
See the LGM
Shorter term paleo, say the MWP, doesnt help to constrain the ECR, at least at the current level of understanding.
Rattus is correct, largely.
However if you look in the first batch of mails from a fellow named Rind Or if you grep
Judith Lean you will find things of note.
Read people.
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Apparently you CAN form a rudimentary lathe, ……… 8^D Great movie and great post
“GeologyJim says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Not the slightest curiosity about what part is attributable to multidecadal processes (ENSO, AO, PDO, AMO, solar radiation, etc.)”
There actually was some curiosity and even trepidation about this. The following is from 1682:
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”
Smokey says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:48 pm
If everyone will read the emails carefully I think you will come to agree with me that Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower. (Though the whistle blower is most likely a team, given the skills possessed.) No, I have no proof but permit me to explain my hunch.
In the emails, 1 and 2, Briffa is treated very badly and is the only member of The Team who is treated very badly. In more than one article, Briffa’s work on data is replaced by truly shoddy work over Briffa’s protests. Time and again, Briffa protests that the claims made by The Team go beyond anything that can be justified by the data. Remember that Briffa is the chief data collector.
Go to Jeff Id’s site and read about that The Team putting together an article in which they once again throw Briffa overboard for more Exciting but far less reliable data. The detail is wonderful. The story is devastating to The Team.
Sean Peake says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:11 pm
So, Michael Mann’s father or grandfather was an actor. Who knew?
Steven Mosher;
paleo climate does in fact help us constrain the boundaries of the ECR.
See the LGM
Shorter term paleo, say the MWP, doesnt help to constrain the ECR, at least at the current level of understanding.>>>
Mosher that’s a little bit better than your usual drive by snark remarks about skeptics not being skeptical, but of what use is it? What does ECR stand for? What does LGM stand for? We’re supposed to google search the acronyms you use to figure out what they heck you’re talking about? Bottom line is that the paleo studies have been held up as “proof” of AGW, but the only thing that paleo studies can POSSIBLY show is how the temperature of the planet has been changing. Even IF the studies are correct, that says NOTHING about CO2’s effect on the temperatures.
Steven Mosher;
Rattus is correct, largely.>>>
Bull. He’s trying to hijack the thread by making the desperate claim that the emails were stolen and hence mean nothing. He adds to that bullsh*t by claiming that since they are paleo scientists, there’s no reason for them to be talking physics. Double bull sh*t. They’ve held up their studies as “proof” of AGW without a single solitary study linking their results to the effects of CO2. They might as well have studied pebbles on a beach and announced them as proof that CO2 is warming the planet. TRIPLE BULL SH*T!
Steven Mosher;
However if you look in the first batch of mails from a fellow named Rind Or if you grep
Judith Lean you will find things of note.>>>
Nice. Now you are arguing from authority but don’t have the decency to post a link, or take a few moments to explain what it is you are talking about and why it is important? We’re supposed to google ad naseum until we find the specific emails that you have in mind? How do we know that when we come across something of “note” that it is the same thing of “note” that you are talking about? Or are you just gambling that some of the readers of this thread will accept that your comment is relevant and credible because you said it was? Are you trying to get a job at the CRU?
Sorry I bought your book. I want my money back.
Mac the Knife says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:41 pm
“What would the hardware package for this device cost? What would it cost to get it built, debugged, added to an ISS resupply launch and get it installed and operational on the down looking window?”
———————————————————–
I’d suspect a hell of a lot less than is p*ssed away by most developed economies in a single hour due to CAGW scaremongering.
“Ian W says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:57 pm
To that you have to add that as water vapor (feedback?) increases as a percentage of a volume of air so the enthalpy of that volume increases. So the heat energy required to raise that volume of air increases by up to ~10 times.”
This is too high. The percent water vapor in the atmosphere can vary from close to 0% to about 4%. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.0. Let us assume the specific heat capacity of water vapor is 2.0. So if the air has 4% water vapor, the average specific heat capacity is 1.04. I know the molar mass of water is 18 and not 29, but if we just assume they are the same, then the mass of the atmosphere with 4% water vapor is 4% larger than if there is 0% water vapor. (I am also generously assuming water vapor exists evenly throughout the atmosphere and does not condense out.) Then applying mct(moist air) = mct(dry air), we find that the mc for the moist air is 8% larger than for dry air. So to balance things out, the dry air has to have a temperature change that is 8% larger than the moist air. In other words, if moist air goes up by 1.00 degrees C, the dry air, with the same energy input, would go up by 1.08 degrees C. So unless I am missing something, I would say the difference is 8% at the most.
Theo Goodwin says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Smokey says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:48 pm
If everyone will read the emails carefully I think you will come to agree with me that Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower. (Though the whistle blower is most likely a team, given the skills possessed.) >>>
That’s probably the first “whodunit” theory I’ve seen that actually makes some logical sense! I’ve had this nagging feeling that someone on “the team” has quietly switched sides for a while now.
On the lighter side, my vote for whistle blower goes to Michael Mann. He’s running out of excuses and legal manouevering room. I’m waiting for him to announce that he is the whistle blower, and everything he did was to help out the human race by exposing the scoundrels, and he should be exonorated as a result.
Hmmmm…. I don’t actually think he’s the whistle blower, but wouldn’t it be a hoot if he tried that argument? Given the absurdity of the rest of his excuses, he might just try a stunt like that!
The most basic premise of “climate science” – that the Earth is heated 33K by the atmosphere – is totally wrong. This value is derived by assuming that the Earth is flat disc with uniform albedo that receives uniform insolation.
In reality the Earth is an oblate spheroid that receives 1340W/m2 solar Top of Atmosphere radiation at the Equator and 0W/m2 at the poles. The surface temperature varies by as much as a massive 149K (-88C to 61C). The albedo varies from 0.05 (water) to 0.85 (fresh snow).
I wouldn’t go that far. But I will say that Briffa has my respect and is one of the few in all of this that seems to posses some scruples. Briffa might have been an influence but I don’t think he did it. Maybe he did, though, no idea. My guess is that it had to be done by an IT staffer or with the assistance of one. I would hope one had to have “root” access in order to obtain these files but I have seen mistakes where all users were placed in a “mail” group of a Unix server that held a mail store owned by “mail” user and “mail” group with group read/write privs. I also believe the trail isn’t completely electronic. I don’t think they will ever find an electronic trail of how the data got from point A to point B. I believe it was likely carried by hand at least a portion of the way.
My prediction for posterity is that the real story, if it ever comes out, will shock and amaze.
davidmhoffer:
LGM = Little green men
EGM = Enormous green men.
Hope that helps. Sometimes things in climate science move at a rather glacial pace.
As the Lawyers say: “If you have the law, argue the law. If you don’t have the law, but have some facts, argue those. If you neither, obstruct and litigate until the other side wears down and caves.”
So, the alarmist AGW crowd has no physical law, they want to argue statistics, and knowing that tact is “thin ice,” they have become extremely proficient with obstructing and litigating.”