Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
James Hansen has taken time off between being arrested to produce another in the list of his publications. It’s called “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“. This one is listed as “submitted” …
Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Here’s my sole reason for bringing this up. Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):
The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).
I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.”
And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.
Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …
You can see why Hansen’s “science” gets left off my list of things to read.
w.
PS—Upon further research I find that according to Loeb et al., 2009, they didn’t just tweak the dials on the CERES observations to get the answer they wanted, as I had foolishly stated above.
No, they didn’t do that at all. Instead, they used…
an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.
I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that it wasn’t just twisting dials, they actually used an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust their Procrustean Bed …
UPDATE: Some commenters have noted that my article implies that Hansen used those CERES satellite results in the study in question. Hansen did not use them, stating correctly that the uncertainties were too great for his purposes. —w.
It is indeed curious that when the observational data doesn’t match the model, the observations must be wrong. “Cause we all know the models are NEVER wrong.
Hansen does stuff like that all the time. It is my understanding, and correct me please if it is not the case, that GISTEMP where it is missing data for large portions of the surface of the Earth (particularly places like the Arctic) simply plugs in the values from the models. So we get a GISS map that comes into closer agreement with the models because the temperatures the models produce for certain areas are simply plugged into GISTEMP
The real problem is that his first choice of experiment, measuring the total ocean heat content, did not yield the warming he predicted. in reality, the Argo buoy network to measure heat content is a great scientific experiment. Dr. Hansen made a prediction of how much heat would build in the oceans, they deployed a well dispersed system of buoys to accurately measure the top 700 meters of depth in the oceans covering 70% of the globe and since you are looking at heat rather than just temperature, it integrates over long time spans so you get pretty accurate results. The problem is the very good measurements from a very good experiment is off by an order of magnitude. Does Dr. Hansen’s book examine the discrepancies in the total ocean heat content? Relying on satellites that can measure the earths albedo to a best 1% to obtain a measure of an energy imbalance that is likely less than 0.1% will never lead to any meaningful conclusions.
“…resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” -The Borg
Ah, the cultivation of insider code words and vocabulary. How good can you make, “We fudged it to suit our preferences” sound?
Or alternatively, James, oh James:
“I should warn you that your fly buttons are undone and your mind is hanging out” Wilbur Smith
Yeah well I had to (yet again) look up something in Willis’ post to understand what it means.
A veritable education booth in the Climate Expo full of charlatans selling their wares.
And I thank Willis (and Anthony) for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
Check out the the name of the arresting officer on that picture.
The raw data doesn’t agree with the sacred models, so we’ll just adjust the data. Gee, where have we heard of that happeneing before, I wonder.
Another eye-roller moment. Time for the good stuff … a good stiff shot of whiskey to soothe those bouncy eyes.
Classic.
Using model data to adjust satellite data to match model data.
Tadaah! Proven!
Willis, thanks and I understand your point very well. As i understand it, energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. Thus in energy, terms the earth energy budget, must be in balance all the time.. So where does the “imbalance” come from that he bases his “paper” on?
1 REM Objective Constrainment Algorithm
2 REM Copyright Climate Science
10 Load “data”
20 Load “model”
30 If model =/= data then data=model
40 Print “Data agrees with model.”
50 end
“I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest.” In this you are as wrong as Hansen. Hansen’s writings and the quoted statement is not science in the first place. It may make reference to empirical data, science and engineering but it is not science. You are therefore incorrect it is not climate or any other kind of science. It is misinformation, it is foolishness, it is ideology and it a host of things science is not one of them. As a scientist myself I object to anyone using the name of my profession in vain.
That said thanks for sharing since I probably would not have progressed beyond his first paragraph.
The source of my above comment is various discussions concerning GISS “extrapolating” estimated temperatures where it has no data and at least one posting I read, can’t remember which blog but it might have been CA some time ago, that said the estimate came from Hansen’s models.
I don’t know which is the most incredible: that he would fiddle the data to match his model or that he has the gall to say that’s what he did.
Heh. I just realized Hanson is being arrested by “Officer Green” in the above photo.
I wonder if I can get Hanson to do my taxes – and will the taxation department believe them?
“Yes sir, by this algorithm, I can show that my income was not $150K for the year – it was only $15K, which is inline with the financial model that I made last year. So my taxes will only be $1500 instead of $35000”.
@Graeme
“adjusted” taxes often don’t pass IRS peer review, Hansenization is not recommended
“COME ON!” <—Arrested Development lingo.
jiggered past participle, past tense of jig·ger
Verb:
Rearrange or tamper with: “jiggering with the controls was a mistake”. An objective constrainment algorithm.
an objective constrainment algorithm
The above sounded very familiar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole
Whac-A-Mole . . . (has) five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, . . .
It is so obvious I won’t bother translating.
@Dennis Nikols, Willis is being sarcastic
Wilis, does Hansen’s concept of missing heat include the difference between the Trenberth’s radiation window of 26 w/m2 ie 66 w/m2 (as admiited in an email to Dr Noor Van Andel) and 40w/m2 in his papers K&T 1997 and T F K 2009?
Isn’t this what science is all about? Fitting the data to the curve?
/sarc
It’s amazing how many people read “Hansen” and see “Hanson”.
@Jeff Alberts – yes I’ve noticed that as well, gave up correcting Hanson > Hansen – just too many – Anthony
Willis,
The context is that Hansen is describing the current limitations of the instrumentation. And he is describing what Loeb did, not what he did. The quote you gave from Hansen continues:
The atmosphere perfectly models the computer, ……
I’m gonna re-calibrate my thermometer to get temperatures in the range predicted by the models.
Once one piece of data is suspect, everything is suspect until proved otherwise!
Who checked the instruments on the satellite? Who checked the checker? Was the instrument against which the satellite instrument was checked, calibrated?
Grey lensman
“energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed”
You forget that it can be ‘adjusted’,
out of existence if necessary.
instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).>>>
Caller: There’s a fire in the building across the street!
Fire Department: What floor is the fire on?
Caller: I don’t know, 50th or so…give or take 10…
Fire Department: Or records show that building is only 20 stories tall.
Caller: Well I’m looking at it and….
Fire Department: Could give or take 10 really be give or take 30? 50 minus 30 would be 20.
Caller: No, I’m pretty sure its at least the 40th floor, probably higher….
Fire Department: So… you’re saying there is a fire burning in thin air, 20 stories or more above the top of the building?
Caller: No! I’m saying that the building is way taller than what your records show!
Fire Department: That’s not possible sir. Are you aware that there is a substantive fine for calling in a false alarm?
Caller: What!? Are you kidding me? I can SEE the damn fire! Are you guys coming or not?
Fire Department: Since the fire you are reporting is impossible, we see no reason to attend. We have however dispatched a police cruiser to your location….
Michael Palmer said:
December 20, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Check out the the name of the arresting officer on that picture.
————————————
Hah! The green police! 🙂
Now there’s no more travesty.
Borne, Born Jiggered, jiggling, – Phew
That Cop in the capturing Hanson is not the only police around today. The spelling police are out in force.
Sean says: “…Relying on satellites that can measure the earths albedo to a best 1% to obtain a measure of an energy imbalance that is likely less than 0.1% will never lead to any meaningful conclusions.”
True. I get a putative imbalance of about 0.24%, but your conclusion still applies. I doubt very much that we know the effective albedo of the earth within 0.24%. The supposed imbalance is only about 5% of the estimated upward convective heat transfer rate. We don’t know that within 5%, either. Too much guesswork going on in a field that has huge economic consequences. Charlatans, pseudoscientists, Lysenkoists, phrenologists and witch doctors are running the show, and the media look on fondly.
Should be easy enough for figure out the albedo of the Earth if you have an observation station on the moon. Look at the Earth, measure the brightness. Done.
Satellites are probably too close unless they are in geosync orbit.
“Grey lensman says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Willis, thanks and I understand your point very well. As i understand it, energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. Thus in energy, terms the earth energy budget, must be in balance all the time.. So where does the “imbalance” come from that he bases his “paper” on?”
I don’t know where the energy “imbalance” comes from, but I can tell you who has a direct link to it. My grandchildren. They wear me out.
Yet more proof (if proof were needed) that climate science is not as other science. If he tried this sort of shenanigan in real science, say, electronics, at least the rest of us would get regular laughs when his circuitry went bang and let the magic smoke out.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
— Arthur Conan Doyle (“Sherlock Holmes”)
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
— Jessamyn West
This does not look good. Next is some press releases from The Ministry of Truth; The world is Doomed, because CERES says so. And that means; Science says so.
Nick Stokes says:
December 20, 2011 at 9:44 pm
Thanks, Nick. I was aware of that. However, my point still stands, which was that the idea of simply adjusting the satellite results to fit the output from Hansen’s previous model runs is a joke. Hansen doesn’t even begin to address that issue.
w.
crosspatch says:
December 20, 2011 at 10:28 pm
You’d think so at first blush, but it’s nowhere near that easy. The problem is that from any single point in space (either the moon or a satellite) you can only measure the amount of sunshine reflected back to your observation point. But there’s lots and lots of other light that is reflected in a host of other directions away from your observation point. To measure them accurately, you’d need a swarm of satellites surrounding the earth so they could all measure the reflected light at once.
Since we don’t have that flock of satellites, you have to do some plain and fancy footwork to convert the brightness readings to total albedo. Of course, the position of the observation with regards to the location of the sun is one of the largest factors in the conversion, but there are a number of others. Typically the image of the planet is broken into gridcells and analyzed, and the cloud type and land type and distribution is taken into account in the calculation of what’s going on in each gridcell. Then these are further adjusted and then a weighted sum is calculated of all gridcells, with adjustments for sun angle, for the final answer.
w.
The f factor is a well known factor whereby the result you obtained is multiplied by factor f in order to derive the result you expected. Factor f is of course the fudge factor (in case anybody was thinking of another f word).
Since we don’t have that flock of satellites, you have to do some plain and fancy footwork to convert the brightness readings to total albedo.>>>
Wouldn’t it be easier to use a large number of surface weather stations over a long period of time to see if the surface temperature is rising or falling and from that extrapolate the energy balance? Oh…they did that? And it matches the models? Oh…. it matches the models after adjustments.
OK, so we’re back to square one again.
I know! How about we take temperature readins from the oceans at various depths and all over the world? From that we could determine changes in ocean heat content and that in turn would allow us to extrapolate energy balance. Oh… they did that? And it matches the models? Oh…. it matches the models after adjustments are made to the temperature of the ocean in places where it can’t be measured.
There’s a pattern here….
Willis, that is quite a large adjustment there. How large is it? According to Hansen it is almost half the amount needed for a LIA! I’ll let Hansen explain it himself. Almost exactly one year ago …
Jim Hansen > Jim Hanson ?
Because in the public’s mind, the name Jim Hansen properly belongs to the
man who created many of the beings populating Sesame Street.
The conflation comes from both men being involved in fantasy and sock muppets.
That means, of course, that the satellites are adding nothing to the game. They’ve been calibrated to agree with the machinations of the modelers. Imagine if the calibration has been left to the Monty Python troupe. Now that would be interesting and every bit as useful. As it is, it isn’t even funny.
I wonder why no platoon of constabulary in the US has called upon Hansen to better understand where his nonsense issues from.
Indeed. Nothing in climate science is that easy. This should make it one of the most exciting areas of human intellectual endeavour to work in. Instead, the politics appears to intrude into every calculation, as this ‘fitting’ of CERES-measured real-world energy imbalance down to 13% of its original value to agree with unverified climate models again shows. How dire that must be, driving out the good and honest researcher, leaving the field to the charlatans.
One and one is two, and two and two is four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it.
–Mae West
One thing I have a problem with is using Mauna Loa as our CO2 monitoring station. This location leads to the same sort of problem we see here with Hansen.
Imagine CO2 levels were to take a drop because of global cooling. The problem with Mauna Loa is that it sits on top of an active (though currently dormant) volcano.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/Estimating%20Volcanic%20CO2%20Emission%20Rates%20from%20Atmospheric%20Measurements%20on%20the%20Slope%20of%20Mauna%20Loa%20%282001%29.pdf
The current Mauna Loa station must constantly adjust to remove the CO2 from the volcano from the amount reported as atmospheric. Should we take a sudden drop, they might conclude that isn’t “plausible” and jigger the adjustment. We should be taking atmospheric CO2 measurements from a place a long way away from volcanic CO2 emissions. Pikes Peak, CO or Mt. Washington NH might be better places to measure atmospheric CO2.
I don’t trust measurements taken for atmospheric CO2 that must be adjusted by removing local CO2 generated by a volcano. There is too much temptation to adjust the adjustment to keep the “signal” the same.
If I were interested in knowing the exact value of albedo, that is true. If I am looking for a trend, that is not true. If I have a station near the center of the moon and I take a brightness of the Earth and compensate for known variations such as phase of the Earth, distance to the Earth, and distance to the Sun, all I am looking for is the signal, not the absolute value.
So say I come up with a value of 10 units. Over a period of 10 years, I see that the number is gradually increasing or decreasing. I don’t need to know what the total exact number is. For example, I don’t need to know the exact candlepower of a lamp in order to know if it is getting brighter or dimmer over time.
You’re putting too fine a point on it.
Sean:
The results from Argo are another gaping hole for those working for ‘The Cause’. Easier to avert one’s eyes and gaze heavenwards I guess.
Instead of sending up CERES at great expense, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to use an exisisting telecommunications sattelite and just bounce the computer model results of it.
From Wiki: Ground and in-space calibrations agree to within 0.25%.
Looks like NASA’s calibration system isn’t woth a fried dog turd.
Another way is to look at the Earth facing side of the moon every month during the new moon from a satellite in Earth orbit. The moon’s albedo doesn’t change (much), the earth’s does. Measure variations in the reflected Earthshine on the surface of the moon gives you a “good enough” measurement of Earth’s albedo if you are only interested in the anomaly and not the absolute value.
My eye can’t measure the exact output of a light bulb in lumens but I can tell if a light is getting brighter or dimmer without knowing the exact number.
If over a 20 year period I see a trend, that’s all I need to know.
http://www.bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/
Hansen has got a bit of a problem. ‘Back Radiation’ can do no thermodymamic work. It’s Prevost exchange energy, a measure of the impedance to IR of the atmosphere – temperature convolved with emissivity.
Any engineer or physicist with process engineering training looks at what climate science [and Aarhenius] have done and shout ‘WTF’.
This is the most elementary of radiation physics’ mistakes and invalidates the whole subject.
jorgekafkazar:
So is there an article somewhere about this discrepancy on instrumentation accuracy? Not that I’m disputing you, Hansen claimed that 2010 was the hottest year by about 0.01C where I remember instrumentation accuracy can vary by about 0.5 degrees. I remember reading that his error bars where +\- 0.3 degrees.
Like- “Hey Jim! The data is off from your latest model again. What rural stations do you want to omit this time?”
Willis writes “the idea of simply adjusting the satellite results to fit the output from Hansen’s previous model runs is a joke.”
And probably more frequently than he thinks, I completely agree with him.
Just another classic example of why ‘climate science’ is not comparable with real science.
Where in real science would this be standard practice: The observations are wrong, as they don’t fit current models, so we shall stick with the results from the models,”
If NASA weren’t run by overpaid lawyers and bureaucrats, this guy would have been shown the door a long time ago – but then again, if it wasn’t for his scary stories Congress might reduce their funding further.
“However, my point still stands, which was that the idea of simply adjusting the satellite results to fit the output from Hansen’s previous model runs is a joke. Hansen doesn’t even begin to address that issue.”
He does, emphatically. He says:
“There can be no credible expectation that this tuning/calibration procedure can reduce the error by two orders of magnitude…”
What more could he say?
It was Loeb who did whatever was done, not Hansen. And to find that out (paywalled AFAICT), you need to figure out what Loeb is doing with his “objective constrainment algorithm”. It might even make sense, if you look at it carefully.
crosspatch says:
December 20, 2011 at 10:28 pm
Should be easy enough for figure out the albedo of the Earth if you have an observation station on the moon. Look at the Earth, measure the brightness. Done.
Satellites are probably too close unless they are in geosync orbit.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The biggesr problem is that it is in constant flux as there are changes in cloud patterns, ice extent, vegetation, river flooding just to name a few of the natural events that change daily or from season to season.and are not the same from year to year.
Exactly right which is why one can’t really look at changes on the annual scale, they need to be on the decadal or longer scale. It would take 10 to 20 years of data to show a reliable trend. Thing is, Earth is prone to huge swings in climate in that period of time. The entire warming from both the Younger Dryas and the 8.2ky event were done in less than 50 years. We probably went from glacial to interglacial temperatures in less than 100 years but the last of the glacial ice pack probably didn’t finish melting until about 8000 years ago. That is likely the cause of the 8.2ky event. A huge glacial lake burst in Canada that drains North into the Arctic probably happened as the last of the glacial ice from the ice age gave way and flooded the Arctic ocean with fresh water.
I have not yet had an opportunity to properly read his paper still less to think about. As Nick Stokes observes, it is dangerous to make a comment without having read the paper. I do note that Hansen states:
“We conclude that the slow climate response function is inconsistent with the observed
planetary energy imbalance. This is an important conclusion because it implies that many
climate models have been using an unrealistically large net climate forcing and human-made
atmospheric aerosols probably cause a greater negative forcing than commonly assumed”
The implication of that statement requires some thought and for example on the impact upon Figure 1.
Nick writes “What more could he say?”
He describes many of the deficiencies of measurement actually. But that doesn’t stop him concluding…
“The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 ± 0.15 W/m2 during the 6-year period
2005-2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global
climate change.”
When you do get the Loeb paper (Volume 22 of Journal of Climate) see
4. Uncertainties in global mean TOA fluxes
on page 752
At first glance at the Loeb paper, it seems to me that the adjustments are reasonable. They are due to instrumentation and optical issues though I am not an expert with optics. It has to do with angles and apertures and the like causing the instrument to read an artificially high value such as:
You couldn’t make this sort of stuff up!
Oh…wait a minute, that’s exactly what they do.
Science you won’t hear:
We have used an “objective constrainment algorithm” to adjust the raw data from the LHC to show the Higgs Boson is really at 10 Gev, just where our back-of-envelope calculation published in ‘Dodgy Science Letters’ said it would be, and nowhere near the 125 Gev recorded by the unadjusted instrumentation. This result is NOT preliminary and no debate is allowed. Er, can we have our money now please…
TimTheToolMan says: December 21, 2011 at 1:24 am
“But that doesn’t stop him concluding…”
But that inference is based on ocean readings, not satellite measurements.
Quote: Should be easy enough for figure out the albedo of the Earth if you have an observation station on the moon. Look at the Earth, measure the brightness. Done.
You’d think so at first blush, but it’s nowhere near that easy. The problem is that from any single point in space (either the moon or a satellite) you can only measure the amount of sunshine reflected back to your observation point.
——————————————————————————————————————————
Surely the albedo that matters is the ‘effective’ albedo of the earth facing the sun only? Thus sort of as in measured from one direction? So, if measured from one more or less equatorial in-line position it must be a pretty good estimate, probably much better as a practical result than other convoluted methods? Why would one need complete surrounding measurements? Surely the albedo measured from a polar direction is meaningless since sunlight does not arrive from that direction. One would need a series of measurements covering one rotation of the earth in order to allow for changes in topography, and short term changes in cloud cover during that 24hr period would detract a little from the result, but it still sounds if there would be merit in it. Sorry to sound so practical… 🙂
“Surely the albedo that matters is the ‘effective’ albedo of the earth facing the sun only?”
If you are looking for a trend over time for something like climate change, the trend facing the sun will be the same as the trend facing the moon and the reading obtained during “full earth” (new moon) is with the Earth facing the sun.
@crosspatch:
Your idea of having a satellite measure the earth’s albedo as it brightens the moon has some merit. But James Hansen and I are much smarter than you. We know that the observed brightness of the moon will not be accurate until those readings are adjusted to compensate for the shadow cast on the moon by the satellite itself.
That adjustment might be very very large.
“The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 ± 0.15 W/m2 during the 6-year period
2005-2010, confirms …”
Now, I right a lot of technical reports and am well used to weasel words, but ‘inferred’ and ‘confirms’ in the same sentence (especially when the inferred value is model-derived and bears no relation to the original observed data) is an absolute classic.
The only conclusion that could reasonably be drawn was that the satellite data was in error by some unknown amount and therefore could not provide any meaningful information regarding the energy imbalance of the top of the atmosphere (given the magnitude of the looked-for signal).
Continue… I do see that this method would probably not be adeqaute as an ABSOLUTE measure of reflection… but for comparative and trend analysis it should work.
GabrielHBay;
Surely the albedo measured from a polar direction is meaningless since sunlight does not arrive from that direction. >>>
The problem isn’t that sunlight arrives from that direction, the problem is that reflected sunlight might LEAVE in that direction. Angle of incidence = angle of refraction. Since the bulk of the sunlight does not hit TOA at a right angle, but at increasingly sharp angles as one considers higher and higher latitudes, the sunlight would “leave” for the most part at angles that could NOT be measured from direct reflection at the equator. Then consider the scattering effects because the atmosphere is not uniform, the earth surface is not uniform….
Nick writes “But that inference is based on ocean readings, not satellite measurements.”
Well yes.It wouldn’t work otherwise would it. I wonder how the slopes compare.
As I recall (someone correct me if I’m wrong) (like this site needs prompting in that regard, lol) what happened at Three Mile Island was due in part to operators deciding that the readings from the safety systems were “implausible” and decided to bypass them instead of letting them safely shut the plant down.
crosspatch;
At first glance at the Loeb paper, it seems to me that the adjustments are reasonable. They are due to instrumentation and optical issues though I am not an expert with optics.>>>
Reading through the excerpts you’ve posted, it seems to me that the reason that adjustments are needed is sound. But are the adjustments themselves sound? My impression remains that they applied adjustments based on matching model results. If the reasoning behind the need for adjustments is sound, then the only reasonable course of action in my mind would be to base any adjustments on that reasoning and see what the result is. Instead, they seem to have used the reasoning as a basis for justifying the need for adjustments, and then calculated the adjustment needed from the results of computer models. If so, what value was there in putting the satellites up in the first place if any measurements derived from them are going to be adjusted to match the models anyway?
Apparantly, even the “Green police” do not support Hansen.
R.S.Brown says:
Jim Hansen > Jim Hanson ?
Because in the public’s mind, the name Jim Hansen properly belongs to the
man who created many of the beings populating Sesame Street.
Actually, the Muppets guy was Jim Henson.. with an “e”
crosspatch:
At December 21, 2011 at 1:44 am you say;
“At first glance at the Loeb paper, it seems to me that the adjustments are reasonable.”
You then provide a lengthy quote from the paper.
But your quote does NOT indicate that the “adjustments are reasonable”.
Please consider what each para. you quote says.
Para. 1.
Says the TIM instrument is more accurate than the other used instruments. But the difference is not stated and it is likely to be very small because all the instruments would have been calibrated prior to use.
Importantly, the para. does not say the degree of compensation adopted for this, but there should be NONE because accuracy is not precision. The reduction to accuracy would increase the error bars on the measurement result but would not alter the result.
Para. 2.
Says “a correction for light diffracted into the cavity” was applied. It does not explain why this effect was not present during the calibrations of the instruments.
Importantly, if the calibration were improperly conducted so this effect were not present during calibration, then the effect could be expected to be small. And the degree of the applied compensation for it is not stated.
Para. 3
Begins by saying;
“While these explanations do not account for the entire 4 W m^2 difference in solar irradiance, …”
That is certainly true because those “explanation” probably “do not account” for more than a trivial proportion of the difference. If they did then the instruments are so faulty that they should not be used.
And it is not clear why this para. says the difference is “4 W m^2″ when the adjustments in the paper are made to “a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009)”
Para. 4
Says;
“Another positive bias is associated with how the global average solar irradiance is calculated. It is common practice to assume a spherical earth when averaging TOA insolation over the earth’s surface. This gives the well-known So/4 expression for mean solar irradiance, where So is the instantaneous solar irradiance at the TOA. When a more careful calculation is made by assuming the earth is an oblate spheroid instead of a sphere, and the annual cycle in the earth’s declination angle and the earth–sun distance are taken into account, the division factor becomes 4.0034 instead of 4.”
This is the only compensation which your quotation quantifies so it can be assumed to be the most significant (i.e. largest) compensation.
It adjusts the unexplained difference in solar irradiance from 4 to 4.0034 W m^2. In other words it is so small an adjustment that it makes NO CHANGE to the measured value within the inherent measurement errors.
(To put this in context, if one had a 40m tall building then a similar adjustment to its height would be less than provided by putting 2 Mars bars on its roof.)
Para. 5
Begins saying;
“The spherical earth assumption causes a 1 0.29 W m22 bias in net TOA flux.”
But that needs to be considered together with the statement in the previous paragraph that says ;
“the division factor becomes 4.0034 instead of 4”
It means the total TOA flux is orders of magnitude larger than the observed discrepancy of 4 W/m2.
And the para. continues by saying;
“Similarly, assuming a spherical earth in determining the global average SW and LW TOA fluxes (by using a latitude weighting in geocentric instead of geodedic coordinates) results in 10.18 and 20.05 W/m^2 biases, respectively.”
Again, this means the total TOA flux is orders of magnitude larger than the observed discrepancy of 4 W/m2.
In conclusion, the quotation from the para. which you provide does NOT indicate the “adjustments are reasonable”. On the contrary, the quotation indicates thart the adjustments are very unreasonable.
It could perhaps be argued that the quotation justifies increasing the inherent errors of the measurements such that they are larger than the observed difference from models’ results of” 4 W/m^2″.
But the quotation certainly does NOT indicate that it is reasonable to adjust the measurement results from
“a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009)” … “to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009)”
But that is what the paper says it does.
Richard
crosspatch notes (amongst other things) “Another important factor is diffraction. Most instruments prior to TIM did not make a correction for light diffracted into the cavity. ”
And I have to wonder how they calibrated it in the first place. Surely they cant have got it so wrong here on earth before sending it up? I mean the diffraction problem should have stuck out like proverbial dogs balls with any testing they did.
Watts, December 19: “Smearing and innuendo is hardly fair play”
Eschenbach, December 20: “Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list”
Nick Stokes is correct.
Hansen’s point (which is plain in the article) is that the calibration uncertainties in the CERES data are so large as to place no constraints upon aerosol forcing. For this reason, Hansen’s article takes care to ensure that precisely none of its conclusions and recommendations depend upon the CERES data correction that the WUWT post is complaining about.
Thus, Hansen and his coauthors have already done precisely what WUWT’s guest poster (Willis Eschenbach) suggests they should do.
Therefore, I respectfully suggest that (1) Eschenbach should read Hansen’s article more carefully and in its entirety, and then (2) Eschenbach should amend his WUWT post to retract his unfounded criticisms.
Michael Palmer says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:33 pm
“Check out the the name of the arresting officer on that picture.”
The irony is that, if you truly wanted to be green, you’d want *more* carbon dioxide, not less.
I thought the usual practice of calibrating instruments used as measuring devices was to use actual measurements to calibrate them. How can anyone think calibrating to “model” output will do anything but make the instrument mimic the model?
Anyway, if you assume, as I do, that short of all out nuclear war, humans cannot cause “climate change”, what is the purpose of all this? It all reminds me of the medieval philosophical argument of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
I’m glad to see Hansen has adopted a more rigorous approach to quantifying the alleged “aerosol forcing” than before. Modellers have been coming up with various ad hoc theoretical estimates for this for decades, and it has been highly contentious, especially considering the experimental data is highly ambiguous. Indeed, much of the disagreement between the models is due to this factor.
However, Hansen came up with an inspired scheme…ask his grandkids to pick a number (see Figure 2).
I’d say the various GCM developers are kicking themselves that they didn’t think of it! 😉
Climate Modeling after the fact.
Did you know James Hansen is a great guy at modeling lottery numbers as well? After the draw and using an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust their lottery model they can come up with the exact same numbers drawn. Who else could claim this? The man is a genius.
from a climate scientist
(so-described by other climate scientists)
.
.
The measured data was obviously incorrect,
because it didn’t match our models
But once we adjusted it,
it fitted our models quite well.
Proving that our models are correct.
DOH !!!!!
I’m sure the other CAGW consensus scientists will applaud Big Jim for his brazenness, and follow in his footsteps, adjusting where adjusting is necessary for The Cause.
All hail the UNFCCC.
Running my comment through an “objective constrainment algorithm” yeilds:
“Hansen is a very “tricky” person.”
Perhaps the constrainment is a little too restrictive?
Can’t we issue a press release with the photograph of Hansen’s arrest, using as its caption the sentence hihglighted by Willis, and adding the remark “arrested on suspicion of scientific fraud”?
R.S.Brown says:
December 20, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Jim Hansen > Jim Hanson ?
Because in the public’s mind, the name Jim Hansen properly belongs to the
man who created many of the beings populating Sesame Street.
The conflation comes from both men being involved in fantasy and sock muppets.
==============================================================
Jim HENSEN = Muppets
Next there will be a new model that will predict we are doomed, DOOMED I tell you. (Unless you deposit several $Trillions of unmarked bills in a paper bag in the garbage can at Monk’s Restaurant, that is) Why measure anymore when the models already tell us everything we need to know?
@ NIck Stokes:
As you noted, Hansen et al discard the results of the adjusted satellite measurements as insufficiently accurate. With this post, Willis is apparently criticizing Hansen’s failure to condone the merit of using the model output to adjust the measurements. The point is lost in the hyperventilating….
“Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations.”
Hansen et pals are admitted activist scientists and seem to have manipulated science to fit the meme, “catastrophic warming.” I can appreciate the sentiment of this post. However, patience being a virtue, it would be more effective to wait on writing this post until Hansen actually relied on the admittedly flawed data to defend his model.
It would be interesting to see the Loeb paper to understand the context of that work. Seems fishy, but it would make an interesting read.
Grey lensman says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:38 pm
SAIP, but energy cannot be created nor destroyed “in a closed system.” That last part is often left out. The Earth’s atmosphere is not a closed system, so while we may not have actual creation or destruction of energy in the atmosphere, we ALWAYS have energy entering and exiting the system we call the atmosphere. The rate and amounts of those exchanges is a debate for another post. It’s not as simple as just stating that it can’t be destroyed, therefore it has to be going somewhere (i.e. missing heat being stored in the depths of the ocean). That’s why they have to fudge the observations to meet the models. The models are programmed incorrectly. But what do I know. I don’t travel the world getting arrested for my activism while supposedly working for taxpayers…
As usual ‘a physicist’ completely misses the point. He needs to read Josh Grella’s comment on taxpayers being defrauded by the scofflaw, self-serving, and always wrong James Hansen.
And Alan Statham says:
“Watts, December 19: “Smearing and innuendo is hardly fair play”
Eschenbach, December 20: “Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list”
Preferring to deal only with scientific papers is not ‘innuendo’, at least not in my world. If that’s the best Statham can come up with, he’s already lost the debate.
Do my eyes deceive me in that picture? Is J. Robert Oppenheimer still among us? “I have become Death…” and all that?
By the way, there is no “fudge” in genuine “instrumentation calibration” factors.
This basically says the satellite data is worthless. It produced an impossibly large number so instead of going back to the drawing board to figure what went wrong they simply applied an arbitrary correction to it.
Imagine if a nurse takes your temperature in the hospital and the thermometer reads 107F. She notes to herself you’re not dead or even showing any signs of fever so she concludes the instrument must be wrong. She blithely records 102F on your chart because that about as warm as a human can get without showing any overt signs of fever.
Then she goes on to the next room to take the next patient’s temperature and automatically subtracts 5 degrees from them all.
This is essentially what Hansen has done. He’s taken a flawed instrument, applied an arbitrary correction, and then pretended the instrument is fine for continued use.
Incredible.
Even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn.
Nice find, Willis.
There’s good news, Willis … you’ll sleep even better as you learn more about how NASA actually calibrates its satellite data.
James Hansen is right to foresee that, with further advances, it won’t be long before we have multiple, accurate, redundant satellite measurements of earth’s energy balance.
This process of steady improvement can only make climate change science steadily stronger … which is the main goal of rational skepticism too, eh?
By now it’s clear that Willis Eschenbach and James Hansen actually are natural allies, in that Willis and James both recognize the urgent need for higher-precision satellite measurements, in service of the long-term goal of strengthening climate-change science.
So keep up the good work, gentlemen! 🙂
Hansen does this all the time in his papers.
Speaking of data distortion, can someone review the new Ocean Heat Content paper by
Von Schuckmann and Le Traon 2011 that Hansen is using as one of his primary metrics, the energy imbalance and how much is being absorbed in the oceans.
http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/8/999/2011/osd-8-999-2011.pdf
This is pea under the thimble discussion because they are quoting a rise in OHC from 0 to 2000 metres of 0.52 10X8 joules/m2 from 2005 to 2010. Can anyone convert this data into W/m2/year going into the oceans 0-2000 M. I’m getting lower values than are being quoted by Hansen and around the net – closer to the numbers Josh Willis is quoting. It seems the data in the paper were purposely stated in numbers and in a way that would confuse people.
This is a continuation of the attack on remote sensing (the thermometers they don’t control). The last thing these guys want is more satellites.
Matthew w @ 4:56.
Sorry. It is Jim HensOn.
Regarding instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009)
We should remember, Dr.Nicola Scafetta´s lecture:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eed.nsf/vwpsw/360796B06E48EA0485257601005982A1#video
barryjo says:
December 21, 2011 at 6:29 am
Matthew w @ 4:56.
Sorry. It is Jim HensOn.
=================================
Yep !!
Now let’s work on the Hanson Brothers !!
http://www.hansonbrothers.net/
Heh. I just realized Hanson is being arrested by “Officer Green” in the above photo.
Oh – the irony!
.
Penicillin was discovered because Flemming took the time to discover why his observations did not match his expectations. Many, many other advances in science has followed this path.
Climate Science on the other hand, when observation does not match expectation, changes the observations to match expectations. This guarantees that no new discoveries will be made in Climate Science, and that the science is indeed settled. ti is the modern day equivalent of book burning.
It would appear that the IPCC and Climate Science use the general form of the the Procrustean solution in their statistics:
In a Procrustean solution in statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, one first chooses the line one wants, then selects only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to “prove” some idea. It is a form of rhetorical deception made to forward one set of interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins and the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
Hi Willis,
I tried to find your email but I have not been possible. With permission from the audience, I would like to ask for a post that you put before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/26/in-which-i-go-spelunking/
The link you put in the data is not available. It posible to obtain it. So I will know how you do the analyze of data. And how metodology you use to convert several dataset of diferent speleothems to one column dataset.
Thanks a lot,
A. PhD
This one reminded me of the stunt U. Colorado at Boulder pulled with the rate of sea level rise. When the satellite measured rate declined from 3.2mm per year to 2.85mm per year, they decided to “adjust” the numbers by changing the averaging algorithm and adjusting for sea volume. The bulk of the adjustment was for “volume” on the theory that the additional weight of the water was depressing the sea beds, thereby morphing a chart that continues to be labeled “sea level” into something else entirely. That “volume calculation” was about as arbitrary an academic exercise as I ever saw, but the result magically restored the rate of rise to (you guessed it) 3.2mm per year. Anyone who believes that the additional weight of 2.85mm of sea water will depress the underlying sea bed by 0.35mm should see me about a bridge I have for sale.
Sean says: “The real problem is that his first choice of experiment,”
The real problem is a lack of spine at N.A.S.A. Top level management should have fired Hansen for his unprofessional behavior and non-science activism. There is a solution. The American people, through Congress, insist that top-level management at National Anthropological Scamming Agency be fired for failing to manage, and failing to stick with their mission of Space exploration.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:36 am
I find it odd you were able to grasp the Hansen and Loeb papers but were not capable of grasping the post about exaggeration in a press release concerning walnut trees.
This is a joke, right?
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 6:19 am
recognize the urgent need for higher-precision satellite measurements, in service of the long-term goal of strengthening climate-change science.
Climate Science has by and large destroyed the space program by diverting funds that should have gone into space exploration into the study of the earth. Those of us that were around in the 70’s will remember the re-tasking of NASA from space exploration to near earth observation.
The Argo buoy system provides a precise measure of the change in the earth’s energy imbalance. The problem for Climate Science is that Argo shows no imbalance. It shows that the oceans are incredibly stable. That if anything, the oceans are cooling.
However, the tools available to the layman to validate this are not user friendly, so we get puffed up reports from Climate Science to support their own preconceived ideas. Since Argo isn’t showing warming, the latest Climate non-Science is that warming must be occurring where Argo isn’t looking (below 2000 meters).
This is non-Science because it rests on the preconceived idea of unusual warming. The Argo data is consistent with the observation that outside of urbanized and farmed areas, there is nothing unusual about modern climate.
Bill Illis: In the final paper of Schuckmann and Le Traon, they write: “The GOHC estimation shows a significant 6-yr increase, with a rate of 0.54 ± 0.1 W m−2 (0.38 W m−2 for the Earth’s entire surface area, Fig. 5b).”
I don’t understand how Hansen gets that to be 0.59 W m^-2, maybe he used an earlier version of that paper, because if I add his estimates for non-ocean, southern ocean and abyssal heating, I end up with less than 0.55 Wm^-2.
I encountered a similar problem with a large set of drill hole data for a precious metals mine in S. America. Due to extremely hard and abrasive mineralized zones, the core samples down 300-m holes ended up with as much as 100 meters of deviation by the end of the hole. But since a down-hole orientation tool hadn’t been used to measure the deviation, I had to initially assume the holes were straight.
The variograms (3-D statistical correlations) produced from these holes indicated a poor level of correlation (which alerted me to the probability that something was seriously wrong with the data) and my preliminary mineral model was anything but precise as evidenced by high estmation variances between samples and block values.
So it was decided to down-hole survey the drill holes that could still be found (about half of them) and, because the geologist sitting the drill rig logged the mineralization of every hole, I was able to devise a fairly accurate correction factor (my “objective constrainment algorithm” that was tested with a procedure called “jack-knifing” on known holes) and apply it to those lost holes, resulting in a complete, corrected dataset which produced better variograms and much lower estimation variances on the block model.
But here’s the kicker–My reserve estimation based on the correctly oriented drill hole samples ended up with only half the ounces as the model generated from uncorrected drill holes because the “mineralization” was no longer as scattered, and to add insult to injury, the corrected mineralized zone was offset so the open pit determined by our mining algorithm was in a different location than the open pit based on the initial, uncorrected model.
So even though management wasn’t happy that I “lost” a bunch of ounces and had to re-design the whole mine, any straight-thinking engineer would obviously use the mineal model based on correctly oriented drill holes. He would NEVER use the uncorrected model just because it gave a rosier estimate of the value of the deposit. Why? Because eventually the deposit would be mined and a wrong model would cause disastrous economic consequences to the company (and my job).
By analogy, Hansen’s approach to this problem would be the reverse–he’d leave the drill hole data as it was initially–in other words, he’d rather use a false model and “adjust” the data according to it because it would support his agenda better. He’d be off the hook (and a favorite of management, too) until mining commenced.
There is always a judgement day.
“Continued failure to quantify the specific
origins of this large forcing is untenable, as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to
understand future climate change. We conclude that recent slowdown of ocean heat uptake was
caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar
minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era is readily accounted for by ice melt
and ocean thermal expansion, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate acceleration
of the rate of sea level rise this decade.”
Translation: We can’t explain what’s happening, but we’re pretty sure that you, and those fools that continue to pay for our “research”, won’t be able to tell that we’re winging it. Send more money.
http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
GIGO!
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 20, 2011 at 11:17 pm
The problem is that from any single point in space (either the moon or a satellite) you can only measure the amount of sunshine reflected back to your observation point. But there’s lots and lots of other light that is reflected in a host of other directions away from your observation point. To measure them accurately, you’d need a swarm of satellites surrounding the earth so they could all measure the reflected light at once.
As any photographer should know, you are describing the difference between incident and reflected light. A camera can only measure reflected light from the subject, whilst an incident meter, which uses an omnidirectional translucent dome, measures light falling on the subject. But I’d hate to see someone like Stephen Chu get wind of this, lest he propose building a massive Simpsons Movie-like pale dome over the entire earth, in the name of science and saving the planet of course.
Hansen freely admits to modifying data to obtain desired results on the GISS Personnel Directory.
“The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
Perhaps this link can explain the application of an “objective constrainment algorithm”
http://web.mysites.ntu.edu.sg/epnsugan/PublicSite/Shared%20Documents/CMODE.pdf
Yikes
Thanks, Crosspatch, for the interesting comments about variation in earth’s albedo. Ellis et al (JGR, vol 83, 1978) used monthly mean values which varied from a low of about 0.287 in September to a high of about 0.314 in May. I’m not sure how those values were obtained. There’ll be inter-annual variation as well and I can see why you suggest taking readings over a 20-year period or longer. It’s certainly not a constant.
First rule of ‘climate science’ if reality the models differ in values , its reality which is wrong, given that Hansens is merely follow the ‘Teams’ standard approach . Anyone want to bet that this passes through ‘review’ at the usual ‘Team’ only speed ?
Regarding earthshine to measure trend – is there enough spectrum preserved in earthshine to calculate energy in the important wavelengths?
“Y’er doin’ it backwards, laddie.”
A physicist says: “There’s good news, Willis … you’ll sleep even better as you learn more about how NASA actually calibrates its satellite data.”
From your link to the Mann/Gore/Hansen/IPCC blog (Real Climate) entry:
“Combined with a full implementation of an annually varying temperature correction,” & “found higher levels of scattering than they had anticipated, which was leading to slightly excessive readings”
Interpretation: a reversed engineered “temperature correction” of 4.95 W/m2; based on Mann’s graphing of Hansen’s climate modeling of IPCC’s lemon picked weather station data; after first deducting 0.05 W/m2 found and attributed to “scattering and diffusive light contamination”.
PS: I for one am not sleeping any better knowing my Tax Dollars are still being abused to fund climatologists’ pensions and a Gore inspired political agenda.
“Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …”
This is as disgusting as it can get. They are cheating right in front of the public’s eyes and telling the public that they should like it. The moral values traditionally associated with science after the work of Galileo have simply disappeared from the narratives produced by Hansen and people like him. The only ideology of the modern world to be so brazen is Lenin’s communism which taught that Leninism will enjoy the only intellectual victory possible because it will be the triumphant ideology. It is the ideology of the Last Word.
Thanks again, Willis, this is important.
Hansen just did another “Hansen” paper.
A Hansen: Scientific paper based on conjecture.
It’s pretty incredible how many WUWT readers — including WUWT guest author Willis Eschenbach himself? — have still not grasped that Dave’s description is the exact opposite of what Hansen and his coauthors have done.
Hansen and his coauthors carefully criticized and excluded the inadequately calibrated satellite data, and none of their conclusions depend upon this data … anyone who doubts this need only read Hansen’s article.
For this reason, it’s totally unclear what Willis Eschenbach (and dozens of other WUWT commenters) are protesting.
So perhaps this WUWT thread should be preserved, as a case study in how unfounded skeptical hysteria can inadvertently arise and spread?
We [Hansen et al.] predict that:
Y = 4 + X = 10
Observational data suggests that:
X = 12
But,
4 + 12 =/= 10
Therefore, we [Hansen et al.] insert constrainment algorithm:
X = 12 * 0.5
So that,
4 + (12 * 0.5) = 10
That’s a great picture.
Looking at the details I discovered the name of the officer holding Hanson.
His name is Green. Don’t you love it?
Hanson against the Officier.
I am fighting for the survival of the planet.
Are you Green?
Officer: Yes, I am Green, do you have a problem with that.
Now put your hands on your back so I can cuff you.
So the sat data is now adjusted to the models. That’s an entirely logic decision because if you adjust the models to the sat data you will lose that rising curve in your graphs.
Hanson will continue to undermine climate data until the last coal train leaves the station and the last coal mine is closed.
O.T In the mean time E. M. Smith has put up a post about Australia temperatures.
He read some articles stating the now have the coldest summer on record.
Gisstemp tells another story.
A curiosity in Australia
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/a-curiousity-in-australia/
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
“Hansen and his coauthors carefully criticized and excluded the inadequately calibrated satellite data, and none of their conclusions depend upon this data … “
Whoosh, right over your head.
A) The data are still based on models and have no empirical confirmation
B) The results are in conflict with empirical data, ergo something isn’t right, and patching over the discrepancy is just guessing
Clear, now?
Anyone noticed the name of the copper that’s arresting Hansen !!
The lord moves in wondrous ways …
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
“It’s pretty incredible how many WUWT readers — including WUWT guest author Willis Eschenbach himself? — have still not grasped that Dave’s description is the exact opposite of what Hansen and his coauthors have done.”
Hansen and Schmidt have created their own conflation of model runs and measurements to arrive at the preconceived notion of an energy imbalance years ago.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1110252
They constantly go on building layers on this house of cards by citing themselves. It’s pretty incredible that you pretend not to know this. Physicist and all.
I look forward to the day when Hansen, Karl, Trenberth, Mann, Schmidt, Santer and their fellow travelers are brought to justice…
Holy crap, good eye you got there! Never noticed it myself.
I don’t know if God plays dice, but he sure has one helluva sense of humor.
@A physicist
I know you’ve claimed to be a scientist, but it’s getting harder to believe that. Your posts are amusing.
The issue is this: the satellite measurements say the energy imbalance is 6.2 w/m^2. Hansen and the paper before him are, instead of investigating this as a scientist should, saying “we won’t believe this because COMPUTER MODELS say it should be 0.82 w/m^2, so we will adjust or ignore the OBSERVATIONAL, EXPERIMENTAL data”.
That’s the problem. Willis is completely right. It doesn’t matter if Hansen used the adjusted data or not, the fact the experimental, observational data is ignored or adjusted at all to fit -models- (which are preconceived notions put into computer code) is ridiculous, and completely unscientific.
The satellites are the only true data we have. Instead of trying to understand them, we should ignore them? And the sentence you and Nick keep quoting is about -the range of the error of the observations after adjustment-. This is something I will give Hansen credit for, that he is unbelieving that he error range of the measurements would go down a whole order of magnitude after adjustment with this algorithm from the 2009 paper. That is, indeed, mathematically impossible.
But that is ALL that sentence from the paper is talking about. The fact adjustments actually happened is unscientific. The fact they aren’t investigating what the satellites are telling us is unscientific. If the observations are wrong, we need to know why, and if we know why and by how much, we can actually, scientifically, adjust the output to get the real observation (correction factor), instead of trying to constrain things to our ideas via models. That last part is not science.
Hansen , “Al Baby”, CRU Team: There are no words to express the deepest gratitude skeptics have for you .
You have contributed like none else for the dismantling of all the efforts of your bosses.They will surely take this into proper account.
I sure hope Hansen is not involved in animal husbandry.
Ged says:
December 21, 2011 at 9:57 am
Excellent post! “A physicist” is the worst kind of troll. He is neither physicist nor scientist. What you write to him clearly shows that he has no respect for empirical evidence and no understanding of its role in science.
DirkH, your assertion is wholly incorrect with regard to the facts.
A search of the Inspec database for scientific articles whose abstracts include “climate AND energy AND balance” finds 1,836 articles. A prominent early reference is Heinrich Flohn’s “Unintended and planned climatic changes” in Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (1971):
It appears that Prof. Flohn (along with many others) foresaw all the main themes of Hansen’s research … forty years ago! 🙂
So although Hansen and his coauthors cited more than 100 articles, I have to fault them for not citing Flohn’s early (seminal) analysis. If anything, James Hansen and his colleagues are late-comers to a vigorous scientific party that is now entering its fifth decade.
As anyone can verify for themselves, needless to say. 🙂
What Hansen and friends are well on the way to achieving is turning science into just another government cost center. They have succeeded in doing that with medical care, unless SCOTUS stops them, and now they are on the way to succeeding with academia. If they succeed then decisions about scientific or academic projects and funding will be made to serve the needs of the people who make up the administration at any given time. (One unforeseen outcome of this is that tenure for professors will disappear.) That means the death of the most important of Enlightenment Ideals. All of this is truly disheartening to those of us who support Enlightenment Ideals. We are watching a coup by homegrown Leninists.
Even ignoring the issues with the CERES data (which appears to have been only used for confirmation and not for direct data), the paper has serious issues. Hansen’s goal is to add up all of the total energy increase in the earth, subtract it from the incoming energy from the sun, and find the imbalance. He then declares that this imbalance must be caused entirely by aerosols. There is no consideration of non-aerosol causes such as unexpected albedo changes from land use or changing sources of cloud formation.
It’s a good paper for calculating the unaccounted-for energy, but it’s further conclusions regarding aerosols are piling inferences upon assumptions. That’s not science.
Let me get this straight…..the crystal ball said the number should be 0.85… actual measurement showed it was 6.5, so they just corrected the actual measurement to read 0.85.
Hansen would destroy a bridge if it was not on a map he drew to hide the error.
On digging a little deeper, we find that the main conclusions of the article by Hansen et al. were largely anticipated 30 years ago, by Herman Flohn’s Life on a Warmer Earth: Possible Climatic Consequences of Man-Made Global Warming.
This should ease the mind of skeptics who regard climate change as any kind of recent conspiracy. Because if it is a conspiracy, for sure it’s not a recent one! 🙂
More seriously, Flohn’s 1981 predictions have been well-confirmed by the warming seen to date, and are broadly consistent with Hansen’s more recent predictions. As anyone can check for themselves.
Since we don’t have the flock of satellites, you have to do some plain and fancy footwork to convert the brightness readings to total albedo. Of course, the position of the observation with regards to the location of the sun is one of the largest factors in the conversion, but there are a number of others.
Well, or one could, perhaps, just average and integrate from the moon. The moon swings through its orbit. In the process it samples all angles from nearly oblique reflection to grazing. The intensity of sunlight incident on the earth is well known. The geometry of the reflected light is well known. By simply running such an observatory for a year one could get a very accurate estimate of the total scattering cross-section and hence the albedo.
This is, after all, precisely what is done to measure scattering cross-sections for e.g. nuclear physics. You don’t put the detector at every possible scattering angle — you sample the scattering at discrete angles, usually along one or more planes. From the data one reconstructs the cross-section. It isn’t difficult.
The same thing could be accomplished with equal ease from any satellite in an orbit at (say) 10R_e or more, ideally in an orbit at right angles to the ecliptic with a period that isn’t close to a low-lying rational fraction times a day, so that suitably coarse-grained sampling intervals systematically sample all the different angular windows onto the ocean and land uniformly, over time. Over twenty five years, in a 10R_e orbit, I’d expect to be able to get extremely accurate results for the total scattering cross section (and hence both albedo and night-side radiative loss) in all wavelengths — indeed, accurate enough to easily resolve systematic variations due to e.g. El Nino, cloud cover, and much more.
The point is that the time average and space average together will rapidly trigger the central limit theorem, at which point the mean albedo will be known arbitrarily accurately as sampling time increases. The short time scale noise, if anything, makes this work better! The long period variation, of course, is a potential problem, but any orbit with a period of > 2 days can a) see almost the whole disk of the planet at any instant; b) sample an average with contributions from (almost) every point on earth at least once a day; c) at different angles every two plus days.
Note well that I am NOT talking about sampling from windows onto the surface — the total integrated power from the entire illuminated earth already averages over precisely the irrelevant noise one wants to eliminate.
I’m not claiming that building a sufficiently precise detector is easy, but that’s the hard part, not the geometry or the need for lots of satellites. Given a precise and accurate integrating spectrometer, something capable of measuring the total electromagnetic radiation intensity from cone that includes the entire illuminated Earth from 18R_e or thereabouts, in a polar orbit, the building of a cross-section accurate to 0.1% is a simple matter of time, and not that long a time at that. A few years would almost certainly be enough to permit one to establish the mean within this accuracy, and would let one start to look for e.g. long period systematic variations, such as those one might expect to see associated with the various decadal oscillations and with any GCR-solar-mediated modulation of cloud cover.
rgb
‘a physicist’ says:
“…skeptics who regard climate change as any kind of recent conspiracy.”
As usual, ‘a physicist’ is off his rocker. It was Michael Mann who put forth the debunked conjecture that the climate never changed prior to the industrial revolution; no MWP, no LIA. Scientific skeptics have always known that regional climates and global temperatures constantly change. It is the alarmist crowd that denied those facts, and some still do, claiming that the MWP was a local “anomaly” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
And anyone who writes about “planned climatic changes” is also off his rocker.
here is the abstract of the flohn paper being flaunted by unemployed troll:
“Abstract:
An IIASA Executive Report based on and IIASA research report by H. Flohn, who has taken a paleoclimatic approach to gaining insights into the implications of global warming produced by he burning of fossil fuels. Using the most reliable radiation models for the relation between carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and temperature, Flohn selects thresholds of temperature increase, which he then speculates would produce climatic conditions similar to those of earlier periods in the earth’s history.
He establishes a four-part scenario. An increase in the global average surface temperature (GAST) of 1 degree C, which could occur around 2000-2010 at the projected rate of fossil fuel consumption, would correspond to the GAST 1,000 years ago during the early middle ages. Warming of 1.5 degrees C could occur around 2005-2030, mimicking conditions 6000 years ago at the peak of the Holocene period. Warming of 2.5 degrees C is considered possible around 2020-2050, corresponding to the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago. Finally, an increase of the GAST by 4 degrees C could be reached 2040-2080, producing conditions that occurred during the late Tertiary Period from 2.5 to 12 million years ago, a remarkable epoch when the North Pole became ice free while the South Pole remained glaciated. The Executive Report briefly describe what is known and generally assumed about the climate of the earth during each of the four periods.”
love that last paragraph – but no, one can’t say it broadly matches the hansen narrative.
4 scenarios do not a prediction make, much less a confirmed one.
i like to throw soap in the fountain of speciousness…
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:36 am
If Nick Stokes is correct and the adjustment makes sense to you, A Physicist, please provide information that backs up that claim. Because I don’t see how the adjustment makes any sense at all, but you and Nick seem to think it does.
Nor do I see how whether Hansen used or didn’t use the CERES data makes any difference. My point was that the adjustment, despite having the Nick Stokes seal of approval, was bogus. Why? Because it was not based on any physical principles. All they did was say “the data is wrong and the models are right, so we’ll adjust the data to match Hansen’s model.”
Hansen had no problem with considering using the data that had been adjusted to fit his model, although in the end he did not do so. You seem to have no problem with the adjusted data.
Me, I think adjusting data by that method is nonsense. I think that if you are really a physicist you are not thinking the situation through, or you would join me in condemning the practice of adjusting data to fit Hansens model, regardless of whether Hansen later used that data or not. How do Hansen’s actions make any difference?
Finally, a) I didn’t say Hansen used the CERES data, and b) the reason Hansen didn’t use the CERES data is not because of the bogus adjustment method. If Hansen had any problems with adjusting data to fit HIS MODEL he sure didn’t mention it …
Therefore, I respectfully suggest that (1) A Physicist read Eschenbach’s article carefully and in its entirety, and that (2) Eschenbach has no reason amend his WUWT post because he made no unfounded criticisms.
w.
MODERATOR- I have a copy of the Loeb paper. I have placed it on Megaupload here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XV3EJLKV
but that is probably a no-no so I do not want to post that publicly but if Willis or anyone else would like a copy of the Loeb paper, you could email them that link. I can also email it but the file is over 5 meg (PDF) and many mail systems will not accept attachments that large.
To use the Megaupload link, go to the link and wait for the “free download” counter to expire to 0 and then click “free download”.
Let’s imagine that Officer Green, having apprehended Hansen, proceeded to round up the rest of The Team. Maybe at the same time, renowned computer specialists from Norfolk Plod could gather up all The Team’s computers, software etc etc and the stuff the whole caboodle into a time machine. Then, with 95% confidence they were sent back 70 or so years, to the time when CO2 production ramped up to Warp 2 (ppm/year)
What would the team be saying once they’d re-established themselves in the new (old) time zone?
Presumably, something like they’re saying now – drier, hotter, wetter, colder, more disaster – we all know the story. But, hapless us are stuck in the here and now witnessing these dire predictions from 70 years ago.
How many have come true………………
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 6:19 am
It is pretty exciting, A Physicist, I will sleep better. Your cited article talks of problems with the satellite instruments measuring Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), and then says:
Gosh. You mean they are actually going to test the satellite instruments in a vacuum? With light levels comparable to the ones they will encounter in space? That’s absolute genius, why didn’t someone else think of it!
Boy, that is a forward thinking, cutting-edge kinda group there. It’s 2011, and they’ve finally built a facility to TEST THEIR SPACE-BOUND INSTRUMENTATION IN SPACE-LIKE CONDITIONS …
No telling what they might get up to next, folks, but stay tuned. I’m sure A Physicist will bring their next grand conceptual leap to our attention.
A Physicist, do you think that this kind of brilliant forethought might have something to do with the fact that the CERES measurements don’t add up, so that they have been adjusted to match Hansen’s model?
w.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 10:43 am
“More seriously, Flohn’s 1981 predictions have been well-confirmed by the warming seen to date, and are broadly consistent with Hansen’s more recent predictions. As anyone can check for themselves.”
You are yet another Warmist propagandist who is vastly ignorant of science and whose every statement about science reveals that fact. You do not know the scientific definition of ‘prediction’. To have a scientific prediction, you must have some set of reasonably well-confirmed hypotheses that can be combined with statements of initial conditions to imply observation statements that are found to be true.
Flohn’s work amounts to some vague hand-waving ideas, like all of climate science excepting Pielke, Sr., and a few others, that has no independent confirmation whatsoever and, for that matter, has never been rigorously formulated as physical hypotheses.
Sir, in your benighted understanding of ‘prediction’, you think that any given statement about the future is a prediction. You think that the statement “The Packers will win the superbowl this year” is a prediction. It is not, Sir, for the simple and obvious reason that there is no set of reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses which can be used to imply it. Your understanding of science is at kindergarten level.
crosspatch, you are mistaken about the Keeling CO2 data from Mauna Kea. They only take CO2 readings at night when the land has cooled and a strong downdraft condition is is place, bringing fresh, uncontaminated air down from the stratosphere. It is a tour de force of intelligent experiment design, unlike much else in the climate debate.
Robert Brown says:
December 21, 2011 at 10:47 am
“Well, or one could, perhaps, just average and integrate from the moon. The moon swings through its orbit. In the process it samples all angles from nearly oblique reflection to grazing. The intensity of sunlight incident on the earth is well known. The geometry of the reflected light is well known. By simply running such an observatory for a year one could get a very accurate estimate of the total scattering cross-section and hence the albedo.”
There you go again showing your instinct for the empirical and the experimental. What you suggest is the beginning of a serious science of albedo. The response you receive from the Warmists will be either total silence or sustained vituperation. (For those who might not understand my comment, I think Professor Brown’s suggestion is excellent and should have been undertaken thirty years ago.)
I’ve long had the same idea. We talked about it here and here this past summer in another thread. Just a rough idea for using the near side that always faces us with multiple sites for redundancy. Clearly, you have thought about this in more detail though.
Later on in the future, it would probably be a really good idea to place large telescopes and other equipment on the far side as a permanent Hubble-like installation for classical astronomy, and of course routine scanning for asteroids and other hazards. This would no doubt require several satellites to maintain line of sight real-time communication.
How sad is it that so much of this could already have been done were it not for the needless waste of billions on the climate farce. The entire team and all their silent enablers should be terminated, and then replaced by serious Scientists.
To clarify, the telescopes and Keeling CO2 measurement facility are on the dormant Mauna Kea, while Mauna Loa to the southwest is still active. The Mauna Loa Observatory is a volcanology facility, not focused on astronomy and climate, and its CO2 readings are intended to detect the volcano emissions. For more information see http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/program_history/keeling_curve_lessons.html
It ain’t complicated, Willis.
(1) Hansen plainly states that the overall calibration of the CERES data, whether adjusted or not, is so uncertain as to be useless for energy balance purposes. And so, he doesn’t use it.
No problem here.
(2) Hansen refers to Loeb’s work, which applies an overall correction to the CERES data so that it becomes useful to “studies that infer meridional heat transports”. The point is that even if the CERES data has an uncertain overall calibration, Loeb and his colleagues show how the data can still be useful for studying (for example) differences in cloud coverage at high and low latitudes.
No problem here.
(3) Both Hansen and you urgently recommend work to improve satellite calibration. And Hansen explicit recognizes that such calibration is very difficult.
No problem here.
What’s hard to understand, Willis, is simply this: What’s the problem?
Oops, I got it backwards- the Keeling observations ARE made at Mauna Loa- but the important point is that the measurements are made only during downdraft conditions and are clearly NOT contaminated by volcanic emissions.
A says:
December 21, 2011 at 7:25 am
A, thanks for the note. I looked at the post I wrote, but I couldn’t find the broken link you referred to. Which one is it?
Regards,
w.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:36 am
“Hansen’s point (which is plain in the article) is that the calibration uncertainties in the CERES data are so large as to place no constraints upon aerosol forcing. For this reason, Hansen’s article takes care to ensure that precisely none of its conclusions and recommendations depend upon the CERES data correction that the WUWT post is complaining about.”
What Hansen’s conclusions depend on are the same tired, old “a priori” assumptions that he has been using throughout his career. The man simply cannot find a place for the genuinely empirical and experimental in his work, unless of course we are talking about the Divine Hunches that make up all of Warmist climate science that has some vaguely empirical character.
I read their adjustment procedure a while back, I was satisfied at the time that it worked but I recall being worried that if anything changed, they could get wildly different results. This is why actually the monthly number is missing many daily readings, because they often have to throw out the data for that day and they create a “fill” number that fits between the last good reading and the next good reading, if I recall correctly.
David Middleton says:
December 21, 2011 at 7:55 am
Not true at all. He was referring to trying to influence what particular instruments go on board a satellite, so that the needed key information can be gotten from space-based measurements. Totally legit in my book.
w.
Doug Jones says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:26 am
“crosspatch, you are mistaken about the Keeling CO2 data from Mauna Kea. They only take CO2 readings at night when the land has cooled and a strong downdraft condition is is place, bringing fresh, uncontaminated air down from the stratosphere. It is a tour de force of intelligent experiment design, unlike much else in the climate debate.”
And all this is based on the assumption that CO2 is “well mixed,” meaning distributed randomly throughout the atmosphere regardless of the location of its source, right? If I am mistaken, please state the well confirmed physical hypotheses that explain just how this instantaneous mixing occurs. Also, please state the history of experiments done in the atmosphere to show that the physical hypotheses are in fact well confirmed. Or admit that there is actually no empirical science of CO2 distribution in the atmosphere. Admit that you are extrapolating from laboratory work.
A physicist says: ” were largely anticipated 30 years ago, by Herman Flohn’s Life on a Warmer Earth” “This should ease the mind of skeptics who regard climate change as any kind of recent conspiracy.”
Okay, Flohn should be credited with originating the conspiracy of climate change. While Hansen, Mann, Gore, et.al. actually elaborated on Flohn’s conspiracy, turning it into a recent scam of Global profitable proportions.
A physicist says: “More seriously, Flohn’s 1981 predictions have been well-confirmed by the warming seen to date”.
And had Flohn’s 1981 predictions also predicted the recent cooling, he would have very-well-confirmed, but alas he did not. Missed it by ” ” that much…
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
A physicist, it’s pretty incredible that you have still not grasped what Hansen did. You claim he “carefully criticized” the satellite data.
But Hansen said nothing about adjusting satellite data to fit his own climate model. He actually thinks that procedure will reduce the errors. He was only unhappy because he didn’t think the procedure would reduce the errors enough, viz:
So he has problems with the final accuracy, but does he have problems with the method? No way. He goes on to say:
A physicist, you keep claiming or implying that I said Hansen used the CERES data. I said nothing of the sort. I was astounded by Loeb’s procedure, and even more astounded that Hansen would discuss using the procedure as one possible option … all without either Hansen or Loeb noting the elephant in the room.
That is the unmentioned fact that the Loeb procedure was to take observations and adjust them until they agreed with HANSEN’S OWN MODEL.
So no, A Physicist, Hansen didn’t criticize Loebs results for being a non-scientific hack, or for squeezing observations until they fit Hansen’s own model data. Hansen, unsurprisingly, seems to have had no problem with that part at all.
He criticized them because at the end of the non-scientific adjustment to fit Hansen’s model results, they still weren’t accurate enough. And you seem to think that’s sufficient criticism to make everything just peachy keen and totally fine.
Others of us still follow the scientific method …
w.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 10:43 am
Any time someone claims that something is “broadly consistent” with something else, I assume that it is in fact inconsistent, and the “broadly” is a crutch to cover that up. It’s good, because it tells me where to look for whatever they don’t want noticed.
Now, off to take a look at Flohn’s predictions.
w.
PS—A Physicist, since Hansens’ predictions have been uniformly pretty bad … how is “broadly consistent with Hansen …” any kind of help?
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 10:43 am
OK, here’s Flohn’s work from your citation:
Well, he thinks there was a Medieval Warm Period that was a full degree warmer than 1981. So far so good …
And he also thinks that we will see that 1° temperature rise from 1981 by 2000-2010 … BZZZT.
A Physicist, you tried to convince the uninformed that this Flohnish nonsense of a one degree rise by 2010 is “well-confirmed by the warming to date”??? That’s nonsense. HadCRUT3 puts the 1981-2010 warming at half a degree, all of which happened before 2000. So Flohn is wrong, and not only wrong, he’s wrong by 100%. And like other alamists, he totally missed the current 15-year hiatus in the warming.
You can see why I said above that when someone claims “broadly consistent with” it’s a huge red flag. Yes, Flohn’s predictions are broadly consistent with Hansen’s predictions—but only because they’re both off by about 100% …
w.
PS—You invited everyone to “check for themselves”, do I did. You were wrong. You really should think about that before inviting people to check for ourselves, because around here, we’ll take you up on the invitation …
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:40 am
“A physicist”, Loeb adjusted actual observations so that they would agree with Hansen’s climate model results.
I know you don’t think that’s a problem. And it is obvious that Hansen doesn’t think that’s a problem.
But out here in the real world, adjusting data to fit your model is not considered science.
What’s hard to understand is why you don’t think that adjusting observational data to agree with Hansen’s model is a problem. Nor have you told us why it’s not a problem. You could resolve this uncertainty simply, by starting off a sentence with
and then keeping going from there.
I await your explanation because to me, that kind of nonsense is a real problem in climate science. The mistaking of model results for data is one part of it.
But actually adjusting data to agree with Hansen’s model results? Sorry, that’s a real problem, whether Hansen ends up using those results or not.
w.
LOL … Willis, “check for themselves” is exactly what IMHO folks *should* do.
And it sure seems to me that Flohn called it pretty much right, for sure Flohn was more foresighted than anyone else in the 1970s and 1980s.
How did Flohn do it, do you think? Could it be that Flohn (and Hansen too) shared a pretty solid understanding of the basic physics of climate change?
So as my earlier post (11:40 am) asked, “What’s the problem?”
But Willis, if they just adjust the data to fit the models, there would be no error to talk about. Blahahahahaha.
Some serious PWNEAGE going on in this post. Keep talking A Physicist, you are really helping “the cause”.
Ps – I don’t know any physicists, chemists, engineers, or any other scientist, other than climate scientists, that have no problem changing observational data to match model output. In the professional world you get fired and loose your license for that kind of activity.
Willis Eschenbach says: December 21, 2011 at 11:09 am
” My point was that the adjustment, despite having the Nick Stokes seal of approval, was bogus.”
Where do you get that from? All I said was that it was Loeb’s adjustment, not Hansen’s, and Loeb’s paper is the one to read to find out what it is for. Leprechauns brought it overnight (thanks), so I shall do that.
What I was saying is that the adjustment clearly does not have Hansen’s seal of approval, in terms of producing an accurate result. So, like “a physicist”, I’m left wondering – what’s the problem.
Wiillis, like I said in my 11:40 am post, this stuff ain’t hard.
Suppose we have a satellite (CERES) whose overall calibration us uncertain, but whose space-time resolution us outstanding.
That satellite us of little use for assessing earth’s overall energy budget (Hansen’s “energy imbalance”).
Yet by normalizing the data, we *can* use that same satellite’s data to reliably infer relative heat balance, for example tropical-to-arctic heat flow (Loeb’s “meridional heat transports”).
Both of these strategies, Hansen and Loeb’s, are reasonable and clearly explained.
And of course, both strategies leave everyone wanting better-calibrated satellites. Which ain’t easy, but (hopefully) these satellites are coming! 🙂
So like I asked before: What’s the problem?
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 12:49 pm (Edit)
You are putting up Mann 2008 as your citation? Have you lost the plot totally? There were so many problems with that paper, it’s a joke in the trade.
Heck, it doesn’t even agree with Flohn. Remember that Flohn said that the Medieval Warm Period was 1°C warmer than today … and you seriously think Mann 2008 agrees with Flohn? Mann has spent his professional life trying to get rid of the MWP that Flohn takes as established fact … surely you know that?
There’s been a host of posts listing huge problems of all types with Mann 2008. Here’s mine. Here’s one on proxy weighting. Here’s another. You’re way behind the curve here, A Physicist. Google is your friend. You may be up-to-date in your field of physics, but you are way behind in this field. You should take some time to read something other than RC and Michael Mann, or people will just continue to point and laugh whenever you post.
w.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:04 pm
And like I said before, more than twice, the problem is adjusting the observations so that they match Hansen’s model. I invited you to explain how that is no problem. I even gave you the start of your reply, viz:
Despite that, you keep refusing to discuss the problem, and persistently pretending that the issue is elsewhere. By now it’s clear that you are not missing the point, you are dancing around it.
Finish the sentence above, and I’ll believe you are serious. Otherwise, you’re just blowing wind.
w.
@Willis – I will give it a go:
“Adjusting satellite observational data to agree with James Hansen’s climate model is absolutely no problem because …we are saving the world”
Or
“Adjusting satellite observational data to agree with James Hansen’s climate model is absolutely no problem because …the ends justify the means”
or
“Adjusting satellite observational data to agree with James Hansen’s climate model is absolutely no problem because …we are the enlightened ones. We know what’s best for you”
or……
Wiillis, if you tried again to answer, more plainly, the question that Nick Stokes and I now are are both asking with regard to Hansen’s methods, namely What’s the problem?, then maybe folks will start appreciating better the nature of your criticism(s) of Flohn’s work and Mann’s work too.
In his EEI&I paper Hansen says in the first paragraph:
“Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing
more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar
minimum.
The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 ± 0.15 W/m2 during the 6-year period
2005-2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.”
Since he used the word “improving”, one can say that it hasn’t been very accurate in the past but is getting better. My question is: are the Argo floats a more accurate method of measuring this imbalance than the satellites which one can only assume are “improving” too?
If an observational value, a data point, is variable based on who is producing the data set, why waste the resources collecting the data? Just put out your fictional BS and call it good. That is pretty much the reality of climate science.
The only question is – are they really surprised that reality doesn’t match their computer generated scenarios, or did they just expect they could say and do whatever they wanted (adjust, I mean manipulate) the observations, and no one would have a problem with it?
Glacierman, as several other WUWT posters have noted, that is not what Loeb and his colleagues did. See for example crosspatch’ well-reasoned post
If Willis were to explain his considerations with similar clarity and thoroughness to crosspatch, perhaps we would all arrive at a shared understanding.
What I find really wierd, is that most of the naive people here, including the person who posted this, are assuming that. TOA net downward energy flux could ever really be 6.5 w/m^2.
That’s 6.5w/m^2 net downward flux, as in the Earth would be heating up a lot faster than it is currently.
And if your claim is that Earth is not heating up, then please explain where the net downward TOA energy flux of 6.5w/m^2 is going to in the first place.
One would think that you all would be in agreement that the net TOA energy flux would be as close to zero as possible, since you all would appear to agree that the temperature changes are all due to natural cycles internal to the system.
But if you want to believe that a CALCULATED number is the same as a direct empirical/observational point measurement, then do please keep on being naive people.
Note to all you naive people: The CALCULATED number of 6.5 w/m^2 is not a direct empirical/observational point measurement, see;
http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/atbd.php
Or this CERES data flow diagram;
http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/documents/ATBD/pdf/atbd_linked_dfd_06_11_2009.pdf
Do either of these links suggest that the CALCULATED number is a straight forward process with absolutely no room for error? Because even Loeb (2009) themselves don’t believe their own unadjusted CALCULATION of 6.5 w/m^2.
D’oh!
A physicist;
the question that Nick Stokes and I now are are both asking with regard to Hansen’s methods, namely What’s the problem?,>>>
The “problem” seems to be that you and Nick don’t understand the problem.
If this were a Joseph Heller novel, it would be hilarious. And this “sound scientific practice” does belong there, along with all the antics of Milo Minderbinder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder)… But seeing as this happens in the reality we live in, it is downright scary. This person is so far removed from science, one does hope NASA removed him just as far from their offices… which by my reckoning would place him just near the outer rings of Saturn.
People like this make a mockery of science, if what I was taught about the scientific process during my education is anything to go by.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Which is why there’s no dispute about it? … What planet are you on? If this stuff were easy, we wouldn’t still be arguing about it thirty years after Flohn’s work.
I see this argument made a lot. “Our model is off by a whole lot … in a whole lot of places. So it can’t give absolute answers. But despite that, by gosh it can give very accurate relative answers.”
It is POSSIBLE that either a climate model or a satellite dataset transformation could have those characteristics. Either one of those two, the climate models or the satellite results, could have the capability to be inaccurate but still be precise.
What I object to is the assumption that all models (or all satellite data transformations) are inaccurate but precise. Me, I see no reason to assume a priori that either one of them is precise. That is something that would have to be established, not simply assumed or asserted.
Indeed, it is quite possible to introduce further distortions by using some “objective constrainment algorithm”. Nor is there any easy way to check if you have done so. For example, the objective constrainment algorithm may adjust the tropics in a slightly different manner than the poles. And that would definitely interfere with the ability to “reliably infer relative heat balance, for example tropical-to-arctic heat flow.”
In short, it may be precise, but I’d have to be shown that, it cannot be assumed as the climate modelers do.
w.
The model energy imbalance is actually the same as the observed OHC energy imbalance… from Hansen 2005: “The observed annual mean rate of ocean heat gain between 1993 and mid-2003 was 0.86 plus/minus 0.12 W/m2 per year for the 93.4% of the ocean that was analyzed (20)”. So to say that the CERES measurements are adjusted to conform to a model is not true.
The CERES measurements are made with some known level of uncertainty and some known biases, so all the adjustment has done is to “calibrate” the TOA energy balance to the observed OHC energy imbalance by adjusting parameters within their uncertainty bounds and removing any known biases. Simple.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:40 am
“(2) Hansen refers to Loeb’s work, which applies an overall correction to the CERES data so that it becomes useful to “studies that infer meridional heat transports”. The point is that even if the CERES data has an uncertain overall calibration, Loeb and his colleagues show how the data can still be useful for studying (for example) differences in cloud coverage at high and low latitudes.”
We are here for debate. Your entire position rests on your claims about Loeb’s paper. If you do not explain those claims in your own words, including Loeb’s “adjustment procedure,” then you are refusing to participate in debate. Do not expect to be taken seriously if you cannot state your own position completely and in your own words.
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“What I object to is the assumption that all models (or all satellite data transformations) are inaccurate but precise. Me, I see no reason to assume a priori that either one of them is precise. That is something that would have to be established, not simply assumed or asserted.”
Exactly. What “A Physicist” needs to do is establish the precision in his own words. Then he will have a post worthy of attention.
[Moderator’s NOTE: Theo, site policy requires a valid e-mail address. I had something to send you and it bounced back. Please provide a valid e-mail address. -REP]
Trenberth bragged about extracting an apology from the editor of an academic journal for allowing a paper that used observational data that contradicted computer models to be published.
What’s the problem?
Briffa published a paper that claimed to be a 1000 year temperature reconstruction of the global temperature that was based 50% on a single tree.
What’s the problem?
Mann published the famous hockey stick graph based on a computer program that sifts through mountains of data and weights anything that fits a hockey stick shaped curve out of proportion to the rest of the data.
What’s the problem?
Jones and Mann contend that tree ring data is a good proxy for temperature measurements, despite nearly half the data from tree rings taken during the instrumental record doesn’t match at all.
What’s the problem?
Mann, Jones, Briffa, etc etc etc insist that their models that show a nearly non existant MWP and LIA are correct except for isolated regional data despite evidence from dozens of studies all over the world to the contrary, and the same for historical records.
What’s the problem?
@crosspatch
Data from Mauna Loa has very strict protocols to reject CO2 measurements that represent local contamination from volcanic sources and the effects of regional vegetation. It is interesting to note that despite these rules the raw average annual CO2 measurements (from 1975) vary only from -0.606 to +0.288 ppm from the values calculated by applying the strict rules, which raises the question whether they are successfully measuring the background CO2 concentration.
So, is it just a coincidence that when they adjusted the CERES data down to be more in line with the imbalance suggested by climate models, they settled on exactly Hansen’s number of 0.85? From 6.5 down to 0.85 – exactly as Hansen’s model said it should be, right?
Sure glad the science is settled.
[Thank you. Nice area. Check your e-mail. -REP]
Finder says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“The CERES measurements are made with some known level of uncertainty and some known biases, so all the adjustment has done is to “calibrate” the TOA energy balance to the observed OHC energy imbalance by adjusting parameters within their uncertainty bounds and removing any known biases. Simple.”
Really, I would think that that calibrating TOA energy balance to OHC energy imbalance is something about which there is no agreement among climate scientists. You may mean that reading two sets of numbers and “calibrating” them is easy but the topic here is the actual relationship between TOA and OHC energy imbalances. Can you explain that relationship?
Yes. Exactly. It is sort of like the “Briffa problem” where you throw out any samples that do not meet your expectations so that your result looks exactly like your expectation. And they throw out quite a large number of readings.
I wonder how much this reflects CO2 and how much it reflects confirmation bias. Which is why I would feel much better if the monitor were not sitting right on top of an active CO2 emitter.
Eric Huxter says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:06 pm
“It is interesting to note that despite these rules the raw average annual CO2 measurements (from 1975) vary only from -0.606 to +0.288 ppm from the values calculated by applying the strict rules, which raises the question whether they are successfully measuring the background CO2 concentration.”
Empiricism lives! Yes, because of things like Spring and Autumn the measurements should vary much more than that. They do not have an actual empirical science that can predict and explain CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. They haven’t even tried.
Uh, yeah thats just conservation of energy. The amount of energy coming in has to be equal to whats going out plus what is used to heat the ground, melt snow and ice and heat the ocean etc. If the value were actually 6.5W/m2 and only 0.85 of that was going into the ocean, which is by far the largest sink, then you have 5.7 W/m2 which has to be going somewhere.
If the data are foo, the adjusted data will be adjusted foo. And Hansen looks foolish.
*Ouch*
EFS_Junior says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:38 pm
“What I find really wierd, is that most of the naive people here, including the person who posted this, are assuming that. TOA net downward energy flux could ever really be 6.5 w/m^2.”
Uh, no. What we are pointing out is that there is no empirical data to support the values being assumed. What most of the naive dissenters seem not to grasp is that the inadequacy of one data set does not validate the adequacy of another. It isn’t an either/or proposition. They can both be completely wrong.
What we are seeing is a bait-and-switch in which empirical data is being used to lend credence to an hypothesis, but the data themselves do not, in fact, support it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/20/hansens-arrested-development/#comment-839402
It’s almost like you don’t even understand where CO2 mesurements have been made, how long these CO2 measurements have been made, how these CO2 measurements are made, and where these CO2 measurements have been made.
Please see “Trends in CO2”:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Get back to me when you have a firm handle on these CO2 data sets and accuracy thereof. Which means like never.
A physicist says: “And it sure seems to me that Flohn called it pretty much right,”
Not hard to do when you call it with four possible rather open predictions, the person doing the judging is biased, the person judges in favor of despite three of the four predictions having yet to occur, and the person judging ignores the one semi-predicted possibility missing the decline (granted it was a hidden decline).
By the way ‘A physicist’ what is it you do not get about “Flohn selects thresholds of temperature increase, which he then speculates would produce climatic conditions similar to those of earlier periods in the earth’s history” being all to conveniently possible (non earth shattering)?
Try it this way: Given a future temperature of X, the climate in the future will look “similar to those” climates in earth’s past history which had a temperature of X. Never mind that X temperature happened in the past without the burning of fossil fuels…
davidmhoffer says: December 21, 2011 at 1:49 pm
“The “problem” seems to be that you and Nick don’t understand the problem.”
Well, do you? Care to explain, carefully, and without getting excited? Let’s stick just to what Hansen said on this occasion, since Loeb’s paper is hard to access.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Willis said:
“Adjusting satellite observational data to agree with James Hansen’s climate model is absolutely no problem because …”
I’m guessing here, but it’s an educated (CG2.0) guess: because…. something about “THE CAUSE”?
I personally do not know what to believe about predicting climate, but I do know that no model should ever give rise to “scientific consensus” when it comes to a system like the climate. I understand that we need to take caution with problems predicted by science, but I feel like this “cause” is killing the debate on the tough question a lay person like myself would like to see answered… Too much “nothing to see here” for me to get the gist of why seemingly legitimate criticism is being called “denialism”. For instance: I am shocked by the amount of reasonable questions being “boreholed” at RC even though, of course, much of what ends up in the “borehole” is utter crap…
Will, on reviewing your twelve most recent post, it seemed (to me) that not a single point made in any of these twelve posts had any concrete bearing upon Hansen’s choice of data, analysis methods, results, or conclusions.
Everyone understands that you perceive lots of problems. It’s less clear that the problems you perceive have any concrete bearing upon Hansen’s article.
What’s impressive is that Flohn foresaw in detail, decades earlier than anyone else, that CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change, that these two mechanisms would compete, and that the latter would have a short atmospheric lifetime. All of which in later decades became main themes of James Hansen’s research (and many other climate change scientists too).
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:05 pm
“Let me leave you with Loeb’s description of how they handled the large errors in both longwave and shortwave fluxes. He says they used an
‘objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty in order to get their desired result …’
So you can believe that is all solid science if you wish. I think it is up there on a par with your citation of Mann 2008 as an exercise in futility. Neither one is solid science to me.”
If someone is serious about defending Loeb’s work then they must explain and defend the “objective constrainment algorithm.” Without such a defense, there is no argument at all.
A physicist writes “There’s good news, Willis … you’ll sleep even better as you learn more about how NASA actually calibrates its satellite data.”
And another important takehome from that exercise is the importance of empirical measurement vs theoretical calculation. This must apply to all aspects of science. And in my books models dont even rate as highly as theoretical calculations.
It is recommended reading at RC actually.
Nick Stokes says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:55 pm
davidmhoffer says: December 21, 2011 at 1:49 pm
“The “problem” seems to be that you and Nick don’t understand the problem.”
Well, do you? Care to explain, carefully, and without getting excited?>>>
Alas, I cannot. How it is that the two of you cannot understand the blatantly obvious is beyond me.
Nick Stokes;
Let’s stick just to what Hansen said on this occasion, since Loeb’s paper is hard to access.>>>
Since doing so doesn’t change the problem at all, I don’t see that it matters one way or the other. The problem remains the same, which is that you don’t see the problem.
A physicist;
What’s impressive is that Flohn foresaw in detail, decades earlier than anyone else, that CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change>>>
This is a different problem than the one I alluded to earlier, which is that you don’t understand the problem. Let’s call this one Problem2. To illustrate Problem2, we need to break it down into Problem2a and Problem2b.
Problem2a is that citing Flohn in this case is akin to magic. In magic, a member of the audience is asked to pick a card at random from the deck and pulls out the five of diamonds. The magician smiles, reaches within his cloak, and produces an envelope. Inside the envelope is a piece of paper upon which is written “five of diamonds”. As the audience applauds, the magician discards his cloak for another, lest someone in the audience spy inside it and notice that there are pockets with another 51 envelopes within them…. Predictions about what will be dominant and what not are of little value unless they are backed up by precise formulas that can be tested against. Einstein was well before Flohn, and his work is remarkable in that decades after he lived, the mathematical formulas he developed have been borne out by experimentation. Flohn’s “impressive” vision was no more than to pick two variables, which you now cite. Had the two variables you believe to be important been other than CO2 and aerosols, you would have been citing a completely different paper by a completely different author. There are enough to choose from that there would be one or more that were “magically” correct when all you require of them is vague predictions.
Problem2b is that you have presumed CO2 and aerosols to be the dominant drivers of climate change and that this has been proven, thus showing Flohn’s prescience. You’ve assumed facts not in evidence. If CO2 was one of the two main drivers of climate change, then we would see pronounced effects from CO2 increases, but instead we see an almost insignificant change in the opposite direction to that predicted from CO2. The notion that aerosols are “masking” the effects of CO2 is equally bankrupt. In the 70’s and 80’s jokes like “itz the smog…I swallowed a piece” and “I shot an arrow into the sky….and it stuck there” were common, as were frequent smog alerts in major cities around the world. No more do we have this problem, and the notion that China is producing more smog today than Europe and North America cleaned up since then just doesn’t add up. In brief, it is another version of the magic trick that you’ve pulled off. Instead of 52 envelopes within the magician’s cloak, there is only one. The deck on the other hand, contains 52 five of diamonds.
The surprise is not that the daisy chain of reasoning goes on and on. The surprise is that some defend the perverse practice.
A physicist;
Everyone understands that you perceive lots of problems. It’s less clear that the problems you perceive have any concrete bearing upon Hansen’s article>>>
There was only ever one problem (in Hansen’s article). There were many explanations of the problem, which, unfortunately, you cannot seem to understand. So, to summarize, we can refer to the problem in Hansen’s article as just “the problem”, your inability to see “the problem” as Problem1, and that you’ve picked the five of diamonds out of a deck of cards and matched it with a paper from 30 years ago mentioning the five of diamonds as Problem2.
If you wish to refute any of these, please be certain to specify which problem it is that you are addressing since there seem to be several (which is amazing unto itself given the simplicity of “the problem”)
davidmhoffer says:
December 21, 2011 at 4:30 pm
You are spot on. “A physicist” and others such as he are amazed by simple parlor tricks. The things they think are jaw-snapping coincidences which make for compelling arguments quite simply aren’t.
Theo Godwin says:
The Keelings (father and son) never claimed that their measurements were global, just the best possible for a single site… and more recent satellite measurements do show that there is some spacial variation around the globe, in the range of 20 ppm from min to max. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100629112030.htm for a typical distribution, about 375 to 395. Not perfectly mixed, but not wildly variable either.
Doug Jones, “The Keelings (father and son) never claimed that their measurements were global, just the best possible for a single site… and more recent satellite measurements do show that there is some spacial variation around the globe, in the range of 20 ppm from min to max. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100629112030.htm for a typical distribution, about 375 to 395. Not perfectly mixed, but not wildly variable either.” Click on my name and let me know what you think about my analysis of of CO2 data.
Doug Jones says:
December 21, 2011 at 5:06 pm
“The Keelings (father and son) never claimed that their measurements were global, just the best possible for a single site… and more recent satellite measurements do show that there is some spacial variation around the globe, in the range of 20 ppm from min to max. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100629112030.htm for a typical distribution, about 375 to 395. Not perfectly mixed, but not wildly variable either.”
Thanks for your helpful response. I do not mean to pick on you but I have to point out that, from the point of view of scientific theory and especially one that aspires to being global, saying that the measurements were “just the best for a single site” is tantamount to saying that “our measurement of the half-life of uranium in Dallas Texas is the best for a single site.” At some point, the climate science frauds have to face up to the standards of science and those standards have always been the same. If you claim that your science is global then you must be able to state the measurements for all sites on the globe.
Finally, you did not address my complaint about the assumption that CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere. When the Keelings made their measurements they assumed that CO2 is well mixed. That is my half of my complaint. The other half is that the scientific fraud that goes by the name climate science has never undertaken actual experiments in the atmosphere to confirm that assumption. There is no empirical science of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The work simply has not been done.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:30 pm
“What’s impressive is that Flohn foresaw in detail, decades earlier than anyone else, that CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change…”
Sir, you undermine yourself. The claim that “CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change” has no detail in it and cannot be used for prediction at all. Yet you say that Flohn foresaw it in detail. In science, “in detail” means rigorously formulated hypotheses that produce predictions that can be tested against unique empirical observations.
What you might be thinking is that Flohn foresaw that climate scientists, so-called, would claim that CO2 and aerosols are the two main agents of climate change. That is not a scientific claim. But that is the level of detail at which you are working.
davidmhoffer says:
December 21, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Excellent analogy! Bravo!
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:22 pm
“Will, on reviewing your twelve most recent post, it seemed (to me) that not a single point made in any of these twelve posts had any concrete bearing upon Hansen’s choice of data, analysis methods, results, or conclusions.”
That is because it is you who are off topic, “A Physicist.” Willis’ article is about the following quotation from Hansen’s article:
“The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).”
You have steadfastly refused to address this quotation. The quotation says in the most straightforward language that they did not like the satellite data so they introduced some instrumentation calibration factors to bring the satellite data in line with their models. In simple and plain language, that says that instrument data that disagreed with the models was changed to agree with the models. Now, will you deal with that quotation or will you once again change the subject?
“A Physicist,”
Given what everyone knows about the models, anyone who would change satellite data or data of any sort to bring it in line with the models is either a fool or a crook. The models have zero credibility and they have earned every bit of it.
davidmhoffer says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:41 am
crosspatch;
At first glance at the Loeb paper, it seems to me that the adjustments are reasonable. They are due to instrumentation and optical issues though I am not an expert with optics.>>>
“Reading through the excerpts you’ve posted, it seems to me that the reason that adjustments are needed is sound. But are the adjustments themselves sound? My impression remains that they applied adjustments based on matching model results.”
Oh My God! Crosspatch, all of the adjustments described are “could bees.” That is, this “could be” the case, that “could be” the case, and so on. Nothing in the paper establishes or gives any reason to believe that some adjustments must be made. If adjustments are necessary, they are to be made not on the basis of the need to reach a particular conclusion in a particular article, Hansen’s, but on the basis of a systematic review by the instrumentation people themselves.
Seriously, what is that problem?
Is it the way Loeb calibrated his satellite data?
No, that can’t be it. Hansen criticizes Loeb’s calibration severely:
And of course, Loeb’s article itself never claims that these calibration methods are adequate for energy balance analysis. Rather, Loeb adjusts (essentially) one parameter: the product of the instrument gain and the solar constant. All of the spatial and temporal variation in the satellite data is left unaltered (variation that for many research purposes, but not for Hansen’s, is what mainly matters).
To me, one plausible explanation is that Willis Eschenbach simply misunderstood Hansen’s article, and then never read Loeb’s article at all, and that’s why Willis’ reasoning is hard to understand.
Hopefully, everyone is happier now that these matters are clearing up!
To my mind it does. For example, the part about having the aperture ahead of the view limiter or behind it makes sense for me. But the point is that Hansen rejects those adjustments, according to the way I read things. So the Loeb adjustments are moot. Hansen basically says “I can’t trust the raw data because so many adjustments have to be made to it and because it is so wildly different from all other measurements that have been made before, I’m just can’t use it”
So whose confirmation bias is correct, yours or his? I would tend to go Hansen’s way if it were me. I would look at this data, say that there must be something really out of whack with it because it varies so wildly from everything before and from what the calculations say it *should* be, I can’t trust it. If his model numbers are in fairly close agreement (or closer agreement) to what had been measured in the past, that would tend to give me confidence in using my model numbers.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think Hansen is generally discredited in a lot of what he said in the past and I don’t mean to say I am marching in lock-step with everything he says but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
A physicist says:
What’s impressive is that Flohn foresaw in detail, decades earlier than anyone else, that CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change, that these two mechanisms would compete, and that the latter would have a short atmospheric lifetime. All of which in later decades became main themes of James Hansen’s research (and many other climate change scientists too).
decades?? really decades?? centurys from now we may well say “your name is Physicist”…as in your name is MUDD (the doctor who fixed up John Wilkes Booth) cause we aint talking decades…gonna change your name to A WEATHER MAN NAMED PHYSICIST we talking CLIMATE CHANGE OVER CENTURYS AND MILLINIUM…sorry for yelling your short sighted ness just pisses me off…1970s they said ICE AGE A COMMIN… now shittakke mushrooms if it aint Global Warming, cripes aint noone lives long enough to see the trends, you thing all the virgins killed in southAmerica stopped climate change in the 1200 to 1500s?????
Call me whenn humans live a couple a hundred years.
A physicist;
To me, one plausible explanation is that Willis Eschenbach simply misunderstood Hansen’s article, and then never read Loeb’s article at all, and that’s why Willis’ reasoning is hard to understand.>>>
Nope. The more plausible explanation is Problem1, which is that you don’t understand “the problem”.
Another more plausible explanation is that you are being deliberately obtuse, which I suppose we could now refer to as Problem1 V2.
Theo
“The quotation says in the most straightforward language that they did not like the satellite data so they introduced some instrumentation calibration factors to bring the satellite data in line with their models.”
You muddle things with pronouns. Hansen said that Loeb introduced calibration factors. So what has Hansen done?
What he said, that you’re not dealing with, is, immediately following:
“There can be no credible expectation that this tuning/calibration procedure can reduce the error by two orders of magnitude as required to measure changes of Earth’s energy balance to an accuracy of 0.1 W/m2.”
So whatever Loeb was doing, Hansen is very explicitly saying that such an adjustment is not to be used here. So what’s the problem again?
Look, climate always changes. We know with absolute certainty that we can survive a 2 degree rise because we survived one for nearly 4,000 years earlier in the Holocene and we know we can survive a 5 degree rise because the last interglacial was about 5 degrees warmer than now.
So “catastrophic” environmental impact is right off the bat irrational hysteria that is disproved by events clearly in the historical record, that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the subject of this thread.
“Grey lensman says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:38 pm
As i understand it, energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. Thus in energy, terms the earth energy budget, must be in balance all the time.”
No, earth does not have to sustain an energy balance because of the First Law. This widely used fairy tale is convenient for the warmista to proclaim the existence of a simple one on one energy in-out rule. Why call it a balance then?
As far as the First Law is concerned, energy can accumulate on Earth until it is as hot as the Sun. Energy will still be conserved right? The First Law is just a bookkeeper in case of energy conversion, but because all we have here is radiation it’s obsolete here.
It is the Second Law that determines what energy fluxes will do depending on temperature gradients. It does not act over some in-out radiation balance, the Second Law does not care about that. This law just wants to reduce temperature (as effect from increasing entropy, T = dQ/dS).
The key difference is that the Second Law works step by step from within Earth system and not over some TOA balance outside. When energy from the Sun enters we get a cascade of interacting processes ruled by the Second Law, all with different speeds (lag time in energy distribution). SW photons interacting with the solid surface leave quickly as LW photons, but this is just a little part of the energy. Most of the energy has to find a way out through and participate in all the (thermodynamic) processes and cycles in the ocean and the atmosphere, mostly ruled by the Second Law resulting in different energy holding times.
And then you don’t even know which part of the energy over a time frame has gone out to space or is still at work somewhere, and you don’t know what part of this energy is sensible heat, and you will certainly never find out measuring radiation going out.
A physicist;
Proceeding on the assumption that your lack of understanding of “the problem” is genuine, allow me one more crack at it.
If you were actually a physicist (I’m not, but I play one on WUWT) you would recoil in disgust at the mere thought of measured data being subordinate to computer models in any way shape or form. Following is the money quote from one of your comments above:
“There can be no credible expectation that [Loeb’s] tuning/calibration procedure can reduce the error by two orders of magnitude as required to measure changes of Earth’s energy balance.”
This statement presumes that the error is entirely in regard to the measured data. It leaves no room for the possibility that the models are wrong and the measurements correct, nor does it allow for the possibility that both the models AND the measurements are wrong. However, that is the lesser of the two sins committed by Hansen in that statement.
The greater sin is in suggesting that the tuning is invalid because no tuning procedure could reduce the error by two orders of magnitude. Even putting aside the presumption that the error is 100% in the data, and 0% in the model, it makes little difference if the adjustment in question is two orders of magnitude, one order of magnitude, or 1%. There can be no justification for making ANY “calibration” or “tuning” of the data without the physics theory to suggest what the adjustment should be combined with experimentation to verify the physics. No adjustment of any amount would be acceptable science when justified by matching to models alone.
Hansen’s sin is not that he was critical of Loeb’s methodology, but that his criticism went no where near far enough. Loeb should have been excoriated, not for proposing a two order of magnitude adjustment based on model results, but for proposing ANY adjustment based on model results. By failing to do so, Hansen promotes the myth that models are a valid way of verifying actual measurements.
They are not.
And that sir, is “the problem”.
Yes, that is the litany of the “climate change scientists,” isn’t it? (Is that a new speciality—not just ‘climatologists’—heaven forbid!—nor ‘climate scientists’, but ‘climate change scientists’?) But where has it been empirically demonstrated that “CO2 and aerosols” are “the two main agents of climate change”? Only in the modeling exercises and speculations of the Warmists, who are promoting a political agenda, not science. Never mind the sun, the clouds, the oceans, the vast biosphere—not to mention real climate change on geological time scales, where continental drift, and the Earth’s orbital changes come into play. Just “CO2 and aerosols”? Not bloody likely!
/Mr Lynn
crosspatch says:
December 21, 2011 at 6:54 pm
“So whose confirmation bias is correct, yours or his?”
I do not see bias on my side. Scientists should not be adjusting the satellite numbers for the purposes of particular articles. We do not want 100 scientists applying 100 different adjustments to the same satellite data. Hansen’s argument is with the people who manage the satellites and no one else.
“If his model numbers are in fairly close agreement (or closer agreement) to what had been measured in the past, that would tend to give me confidence in using my model numbers.”
In the NH, this is the longest night of the year. Strange things can happen on such a night. I believe that the thought that anyone could trust Hansen’s models numbers qualifies as such a strange occurrence. You will feel much better tomorrow.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:30 pm
So you say that’s what’s been causing this “climate change” that’s been in continual operation on earth since the first primordial materials started collecting more than 4.6 billion years ago?
Just one big question–what gives you warmistas the right to commandeer the term “climate change” when it’s been an ongoing process for practically all of earth’s history–way way before mankind even arrived?
What give you warmistas the right to define “climate change” to your own liking (particularly to your own political ends), when it has been responsible for a far larger range of temperatures and climatic conditions than manking could ever be responsible for?
So please, don’t pirate the term–as a geologist I’m taken aback with the extreme sense of self righteousness you warmistas use to steal the term, distort the meaning, and try to make it your own territority, with the exclusion of everybody else. (Or is your argument about the climate so weak you have to jump onto some natural phenomena just to have something to ride? Shame on you!)
“Climate chage” Is simply NOT your term. Stick with “global warming”, or “weather wierding”, or “climate scientists for hire to the lowest government influence you can imagine and willing to commit fraud and evasion of the law”. But “climate change”? No, you cannot claim the term and you are a fool for trying. You apparently set yourselves as climate gods, endowed with the ability to predict or control the climate, but I’ve got news for ya: climate change gods ye are not! Quit blaspheming the term!
Nobody ever does.
Lets say I measure the brightness of the sun for 10 years with a particular instrument. That instrument dies. Now I am given access to a different instrument. This instrument reports the sun is much brighter than the last instrument did. Not only that, the seasonal variation due to orbital eccentricity is different. I need to make adjustments in order for the data from the new instrument to compare with the data from the old instruments. In order to do that I need to identify the sources of difference and quantify them.
Adjustments are often necessary in all sorts of things. You may know that your oven runs a little cool of the thermostat setting and adjust cooking times. But someone else’s oven might run a little warm.
We do stuff like that all the time. Same in science.
Crosspatch, you seem like a pretty savvy person, but in the interest of balance, you ought to have mentioned that plenty of species did not survive those climate changes. Seem any mammoths, ground sloths, dire wolves, cave bears, or teratornis lately?
‘a physicist’ does not have the slightest bit of testable evidence that any species died out as a result of warmer temperatures. His belief is akin to religion, because it is based on blind faith and nothing else. Science based on the scientific method is entirely beyond the religious belief system of ‘a physicist’.
A physicist;
Crosspatch, you seem like a pretty savvy person, but in the interest of balance, you ought to have mentioned that plenty of species did not survive those climate changes. Seem any mammoths, ground sloths, dire wolves, cave bears, or teratornis lately?>>>
Well no, but they died out because of a COOLING period. They were just fine with with +5.
You may as well argue that water is bad because look what happened when the deserts dried out.
Those extinctions happened well AFTER the end of the ice age and those species had survived the ice age before and the ones before that. It is likely that humans killed off most of those species.
Well, wolly mammoth, wooly rhino, auroch, etc were all likely killed by humans, went extinct well after the end of the ice age (when climate was stable but still COOLER than the interglacial before, which they survived). It depends on exactly when they went extinct, exactly as to the cause. Could have been disease in many cases, too.
Nick Stokes says:
December 21, 2011 at 7:20 pm
“You muddle things with pronouns. Hansen said that Loeb introduced calibration factors. So what has Hansen done?”
Here is the quotation:
“The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).”
The first sentence states very simply and plainly that the satellite “finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2.” It does not say anything more. Agreed? Hansen does not say that Loeb made this claim. He owns the claim. The reference to Loeb is irrelevant to the content of Hansen’s sentence. If Hansen had wanted to say that Loeb but not Hansen made this claim then he could have. But he did not.
The second sentence says that the result (from the first sentence) is implausible. I take that to mean that Hansen affirms that the result is implausible. He has made it his claim. The fact that he references Loeb is irrelevant to the fact of his ownership of the claim.
The next clause states plainly that the result (from the first and, now, second sentences) was reduced to the imbalance suggested by the climate models. Hansen has made this claim his claim. The reference to Loeb is irrelevant to Hansen’s ownership of the claim.
The remaining clause states plainly and simply that instrumentation calibration factors were the means used to reduce the result to that suggested by the climate models. Hansen owns this claim.
Putting it all together, Hansen has written, in remarkably poor English, that he affirms that the satellite results are implausible and he affirms their reduction to agreement with climate models and he affirms the means used to achieve the reduction, namely, instrumentation calibration factors.
You want to read Loeb into Hansen’s statement but you have no justification for doing so as I have shown. Hansen affirmed all this and he owns all this. If he had wanted to say that Loeb was responsible for something that he, Hansen, does not affirm then he failed to do so.
Maybe the problem is that Hansen has poor command of the English language. But the English language is no less important in communication than are statistics or difference equations. If the English language is Hansen’s problem then he is fully responsible for the mistaken sentences that he has written and no less subject to criticism than if he had shown incompetence in statistics.
I am writing about what is on the written page. I believe that you are reading into Hansen’s words a lot of material that is not written there. In debate about what Hansen said, you are permitted to create your own position but you are not permitted to create your own words and use them to replace Hansen’s words.
Remember that this is a debate. Eschenbach wrote an article that began with this quotation from Hansen and I have been responding to your criticisms of Eschenbach by referring to this quotation. But this quotation is not your topic at all. You are all over the place introducing material from Loeb and other material from Hansen. Yet this debate is not about your other concerns and should never have been about your other concerns. Eschenbach’s thesis is about the quotation from Hansen that we have been discussing. Focus on that quotation. If you cannot make your case from that quotation, then please realize that you are not addressing the article that Eschenbach wrote.
“Well no, but they died out because of a COOLING period.”
Quite likely so. The 8.2ky event would have been nasty, indeed. So was the Younger Dryas. Lure species North with warm temperatures and suddenly slam them with glacial conditions and they can not migrate fast enough to get out of the way.
The Interglacial was full of those periods, too. We could have interstadials were temperatures would suddenly go to near modern day temperatures for maybe 100-500 years and suddenly back to glacial temperatures. We had a really warm period about 40,000 years ago, almost came out of the glacial, but didn’t quite make it out and went back into glacial conditions.
I am liking the recent galactic dust talk, that explains a lot.
“‘a physicist’ does not have the slightest bit of testable evidence that any species died out as a result of warmer temperatures.”
Of course not. If you look at the natural variation of climate over the past 600,000 years, “global warming” is positively not even noticed. It is such a tiny variation on the overall scale that it wouldn’t even be noticed even of the worst IPCC scenario came to pass which is becoming less likely every day as the observations continue to diverge from the models.
The models have proven to be complete and utter bull. They are completely discredited at this point.
Smokey says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:32 pm
‘a physicist’ does not have the slightest bit of testable evidence that any species died out as a result of warmer temperatures.>>>
I notice also that when his arguments get crushed by logic…. he changes the subject.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:17 pm
“Crosspatch, you seem like a pretty savvy person, but in the interest of balance, you ought to have mentioned that plenty of species did not survive those climate changes. Seem any mammoths, ground sloths, dire wolves, cave bears, or teratornis lately?”
The creatures that have not survived the temperature rise since 1850 are the climate scientists who understand and practice scientific method.
crosspatch says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Instrumentation adjustments should not be made by people who are writing articles that use data from the instruments. Instrumentation adjustments should be made by the people who manage the instruments. Hansen should take up his case with the instrument managers, follow the case to its conclusion, and report the results of that inquiry in his article.
Except for the existence of PAL review, Hansen’s article would never have seen the light of day. Reviewers would have said to him that he has no justification for using his model numbers rather than satellite data. They would have told him to resubmit his paper after that matter is settled.
davidmhoffer says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:39 pm
And that climate change was accompanied by an ‘alien species’ invading the range of these extinct megafauna, human hunters armed with big spears, strategic group hunting methods, and fire if needed. But since climate change allowed them to reach southern North America I guess we can blame it all on climate change, if we were totally simplistic and wanted to.
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:30 pm
. . . What’s impressive is that Flohn foresaw in detail, decades earlier than anyone else, that CO2 and aerosols would be the two main agents of climate change, that these two mechanisms would compete, and that the latter would have a short atmospheric lifetime. All of which in later decades became main themes of James Hansen’s research (and many other climate change scientists too).
————————————————————-
In debate I never allow anyone to use the term climate change, and no sceptic should. The acronym is CAGW, with C for catestrophic being the operative word on which all CAGW proponets fail. The ever predicted never realized disasters make the debate for CAGW proponets a hopeless proposition. The benefits of CO2 which increase as CO2 increases, are known. The negative effects are what if modeled maybes which exponentially decrease, and have failed to materialize.
@ Hans:
December 21, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Hans, excellent explanation. All energy within the earth system transferring multi-faceted at it’s own proper rate (current velocity, conductivity, diffusivity, wind speed, etc, etc) as it degrades and is eventually (sometimes fast, sometimes not) radiated into space as IR waves. That is the way I have always viewed it.
A bit off topic but I got into a discussion about mankind changing the in and out of earth’s radiation transfers. I said sure, I know that, but probably not at the same level or aspect as you others see it. If you dig a few meter deep hole in the ground then you (mankind) has altered earth’s daily radiation rates, no doubt about it. Yes, terribly small and immeasurable but you have changed it none the less. On the scale of cities maybe not.
They didn’t understand. I explained that since the emissivity of soil is clearly not one and that deep hole to incoming radiation is just next to one, a black body, that hole is going to absorb more energy into the wall of the hole during the daytime that the same area of soil would have absorbed. But being a near black body now that hole would also radiate energy at a greater rate than the same soil. But soil inside the hole is also absorbing by conduction. One thing is for sure since the top one centimeter of soil has thermal mass, the soil inside the hole would hold more energy than before, to be released during the night part of the cycle thereby altering radiation at lease over time if not absolutely.
This all had to do with UHI and vertical structures we tend to build being mankind and at all scales, tall buildings and lower homes. And we like conveniently placed thermometers almost always in the proximities of these vertical structures, for a conglomerate of vertical structures appear from above as being closer to a black body than the original flat earth soil and fields.
But Hans, I got to one question I could not answer and your knowledge in physics might help me. Would the net energy absorbed during the first complete day-night cycle be greater than without the hole, and, what would the temperatures of the one) air and two) the top centimeter of soil compare in the two cases. I got stumped there. Seemed to me greater over the complete cycle but Kirchhoff haunts my thoughts there. (but Kirchhoff also is not taking into account the increase in soil area inside the hole either, same as brick venires on most structures)
Any help?
Willis, I usually love your articles, but here I have to partially agree with Nick Stokes and “the physicist”: your article is quite misleading because Hansen doesn’t really use the satellite data. Instead, the bulk of his estimates comes from OHC measurements, and the bulk of those come from quite reliable ARGO data. I think the interesting questions to ask about Hansen’s paper are:
* Are the estimates of Schuckmann and Le Troan good enough? (also see my comment above, their final paper gives lower numbers than Hansen used)
* and how about the southern and abyssal ocean warming estimates?
* If yes to those – how can the lower ocean layers warm in a period where the upper 700 m stay more or less constant?
I think you should applaud that Hansen is actually moving in the right scientific direction when he turns his interest to OHC data. That’s where the bulk if the heat goes (if it goes anywhere)!
As I am from the wonderful world of Oz (which has fantastically ignored reality and imposed a new ‘economic extinction’ tax laced with green kool-aid called the ‘Carbon Pollution Tax’ based on the rubbish perpetuated by this pseudo-science. Isn’t there some sort of RICO law in the USA to do with racketeering and conspiracy that allows the FBI to target conspirators who defraud the public purse? Having read Donna Laframboise “Delinquent Teenager” Mosher “Crutape”, Plimer “Heaven & Earth”, etc there has to be a case for these people to answer.
If not, I have a secret formula for turning Pillars of Salt into Gold, all I need is a $100M government grant.
Graeme says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:52 pm
I can’t stop laughing! Very good words to the wise, otherwise, Anthony.
Graeme says:
December 20, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Maybe we can get an audit of Hansen’s taxes done to see if he’s doing something like that, and then finally we can get the guy fired! Lol!
crosspatch says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:22 pm
I’ve always wondered about the Mauna Loa CO2 data myself. I asked Roy Spencer one time about the fact that the Mauna Loa station was as close to the volcanoes of Hawaii as it was, doesn’t this create some uncertainty about the trends in the data, and he gave me an answer, if I remember correctly, to the effect that they only take data at certain times and places around the site and that they somehow compensate or allow for the fact of the volcanoes. I think it is time to reassess those methods, maybe. And by the way, as an attorney (and perhaps a cynic about statistics), I understand the value of calibrating your instruments and making “corrections” when necessary to account for what you are actually looking to measure. But making high-falutin’ corrections (my Texan coming out in me) to adjust back to – wow – what your model predicts? Such a coincidence! It’s all a little too convenient to me. The poster “a physicist” is also acting strangely obtuse for a physicist – if in fact he is one.
I note that Dr. Hansen appears, in these events, to be dressing himself in a fashion similar to that of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer at the time of the first experimental atomic explosion in 1945.
Agreed.
And it’s clear that a great many WUWT readers were misled.
That’s why the article should be amended to clarify the point that Espen is raising. It would not be complicated to do this.
Theo Goodwin said:
“You want to read Loeb into Hansen’s statement but you have no justification for doing so as I have shown. Hansen affirmed all this and he owns all this”
Thank you Theo. It can be challenging to keep a thread on point with all the distracters that show up to defend but you have done a good job.
Regarding CO2, is there a global monitoring system in place that determines a “global average” or is everything predicated on the Mauna Loa data? If the latter, how can any scientist, in good conscience, make claims about a rise in global temperature caused by a rise in CO2, if there is no measurement of a global rise in CO2?
Mike Lewis,
The sources I use are http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2.html and http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/cgi-bin/wdcgg/map_search.cgi. I copy and paste into spreadsheets. The reported monthly averages do not include spikes in measured flask data which could be anthropogenic or natural. These data represent global atmospheric background which varies very little with longitude and has a seasonal variation with latitude. Click on my name for a more detailed analysis.
There are two answers, Mike. One is scientific:
The alternative answer is, the claimed CO2 rise is fraudulent because the claims of science cannot be trusted.
The second answer is, of course, by far the simplest and most comforting.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:26 am
Espen says: Willis, I usually love your articles, but here I have to partially agree with Nick Stokes and “the physicist”: your article is quite misleading because Hansen doesn’t really use the satellite data.
Agreed.
And it’s clear that a great many WUWT readers were misled.>>>
I see. You asked for an explanation of “the problem”, you were given an explanation of “the problem”, you responded by wandering off onto entirely unrelated topics and ignoring the answers, but when someone else jumps into the thread who shares your misunderstanding of “the problem”…. suddenly you are in agreement despite having your original position on the matter torn to pieces with narry a word from you to dispute them.
I’m starting lean toward the explanation being Problem1 V2.
EFS_Junior December 21, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Said: “What I find really weird, is that most of the naive people here, including the person who posted this, are assuming that. TOA net downward energy flux could ever really be 6.5 w/m^2….”
EFS, this is one of the more incredible statements on the whole issue I have seen here. Your mind apparently works a little differently than most, or you are very practiced at the method of arguing a completely unrelated point.
It is blindingly obvious that what is in question is if an instrumental measure can be so obviously in error, how can we have the slightest bit of faith in a calculated, theorized result which is smaller by a factor of more than 7?
Exactly the same discussion would ensue if the difference in the two ‘measures’ was reversed.
I feel we are perhaps clouding the issue with discussion on what Hansen and/or Loeb meant or said or did or meant to say.
The point is that AGW proponents in debate claim temperature rises are confirmed by satellite TOA radiation measurements.
Quite obviously, with this degree of error (or accuracy) these measurements are somewhat less than convincing.
markx says:
The point is that AGW proponents in debate claim temperature rises are confirmed by satellite TOA radiation measurements.
I wholeheartedly agree. But as you can see, at least Hansen has now turned to OHC data to confirm his models, but he has to use the more sparse measurements below 700 meters to be able to measure a positive energy imbalance for the last few years. It would be interesting to scrutinize those few scientific papers to see how good their data really are, and also, it would be interesting to see if anyone could come up with a plausible explanation for how the abyssal waters can be warmed without any warming of the waters between.
(I hope Bob Tisdale or Roy Spencer takes a look at the Schuckmann and Le Traon paper!)
A physicist;
And IMHO, it’s very good to see that science and skepticism are evolving toward this natural mutual accommodation! :)>>>>
That’s probably the biggest load of total bunk you’ve posted in this thread so far.
Your assumption that skepticism isn’t even part of science in the first place, that it is some sort of other discipline or process, and that skepticism is moving toward an “accomodation” with science is ignorant and arrogant beyond belief. But what else should we expect of someone who calls themselves a physicist, but clearly doesn’t know SFA about physics or science? What else should we expect from someone who takes ridiculous positions, and rather than respond to the criticisms with facts and logic, simply changes the subject, or comes up with that most devastating or remarks, “what’s the problem?”
You sir are a charlatan attempting to present yourself as some sort of middle ground proponent, but your conduct reveals what you are. A spin doctor advocate for magic dressed up as science who understands neither the magic nor the science.
A helpful blogger sent me a copy of Loeb’s excellent paper, which I have now read. And no, I’m not about to “excoriate” it; it’s a major paper, and the techniques it uses are pretty fundamental. A key para is:
So they have stable instruments, which can meanure the relative amounts with high accuracy, but there are known error sources in the total. However, there is a fixed point to calibrate against, which is nett flux zero. And it isn’t quite zero, so they should use the best estimate, which is the model estimate.
This is a familiar situation in science. For example, you can easily make a liquid-in-glass thermometer which stably and linearly responds to temperature. But knowledge of the expansion coefficient is poor. So the scale is “adjusted” so that it’s right for the freezing point and boiling point of water (or fancier options like triple point). And to complete the analogy, for bp you don’t use 100C, but a value adjusted theoretically to account for atmospheric pressure.
That’s fine for temperature generally, but you can’t use it to determine the freezing point of water. And what Hansen is saying is that you can’t use the adjusted fluxes to determine TOA imbalance. You either have to be able to measure absolute flux accurately, or (as he does) look to ARGO.
Nick Stokes;
And it isn’t quite zero, so they should use the best estimate, which is the model estimate.>>>
That is total and utter bullsh*t.
Nick Stokes;
This is a familiar situation in science.>>>
To adjust data from instruments based on completely artifical calculations from computer models than cannot be verified except through comparison to the very instruments we’re trying to calibrate?
That is total and utter bullsh*t.
Nick Stokes;
For example, you can easily make a liquid-in-glass thermometer which stably and linearly responds to temperature. But knowledge of the expansion coefficient is poor. So the scale is “adjusted” so that it’s right for the freezing point and boiling point of water (or fancier options like triple point). >>>
Except that the freezing and boiling points of water are actual physical processes that the thermometer can be calibrated against. Your example would only be valid if you had a computer model that predicted where the boiling point and freezing point would be based on calculations that had not been verified through experimentation and were based on fudge factors to estimate the full effect of 90% of the variables involved and completely guess at how they might interact with each other. Do you know what a high quality thermometer that would produce? I’ll tell you. It would produce a thermometer with readings….
That are total and utter bullsh*t.
crosspatch says:
“Well, wooly mammoth, wooly rhino, auroch, etc were all likely killed by humans…”
That’s what I always thought, too. But someone posted this a few weeks ago, and now I wonder [I love a good mystery!]
davidmhoffer says: December 22, 2011 at 1:05 pm
“That is total and utter bullsh*t.”
Well, David, I guess it has come down to time to ask you what are your qualifications for declaring that what these eminent scientists (who aren’t climate scientists) are doing is as you characterise it.
Nick Stokes,
Well, Nick, I guess it’s time to ask my question again, since you’re apparently hiding out from answering:
Where can I buy some DDT if it isn’t banned?
Since you stated that DDT isn’t banned.
And your response to davidmhoffer is another instance of avoiding answering questions.
@Smokey and Nick Stokes re DDT
Ebay is a place where you can find most anything, even dangerous things.
For example – radioactive Uranium
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_npmv=3&_trksid=m570.l2736&_nkw=uranium
Dangerous vintage Radium kits
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l2736&_nkw=radium
Radioactive Thorium Nitrate
http://www.ebay.com/itm/THORIUM-NITRATE-USP-Crystals-sealed-vial-/380389963837?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item589102383d
Tools for making Cyanide
http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-Kontes-Scrubber-Flask-Cyanide-Reactor-652267-0000-/390115969055?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5ad4b9481f
===============================
Surely you can buy DDT on Ebay if it isn’t banned?
DDT (the pesticide) – not found
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=DDT&_sacat=See-All-Categories
In fact finding it available for purchase anywhere on the net seems a lost cause.
http://www.google.com/search?q=purchase+ddt+pesticide&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
But if Nick Stokes wants to believe his usual head up his butt things, I say let him. He’s good comic relief. – Anthony
It took me less than 30 seconds to establish that Nick Stokes is entirely correct.
And yes, they’re happy to supply a quote over the internet.
Evidently there’s no obstruction to anyone’s purchasing industrial quantities of DDT from HIL and shipping it anywhere in the world (although US customs might have something to say).
Now Anthony, isn’t there something you’d like to say to Nick?
Lesson: it’s best to be polite, even when you’re sure the other fellow’s wrong! 🙂
Happy to help, Smokey!
DDT sold here in 24oz packages packed in drums.
How many drums? Heck as many drums as you want.
Wherever do folks get these fixed notions that DDT is unavailable?
There is simply no truth to them.
A physicist says: December 22, 2011 at 3:51 pm
Dr. Sidles, pardon me, please, but you are one of the slimier, more dishonest trolls to have turned up here. Your rebuttals and “happy to helps” are dishonest half truths and nothing more than an exercise in “gotcha”. The truth is that smokey could not purchase as many barrels as he wanted because DDT has been banned in the United States since 1972. Countries that did not outright ban DDT were coerced to avoid usage through the terms of aid grants. The de facto ban on DDT has resulted in millions of avoidable deaths. Don’t even attempt to tell me about how mosquitos were becoming resistant…. you have no clue. I am done with you.
‘a physicist’,
Thanx for the link, but I don’t feel like traveling to HINDUSTAN to buy DDT. Willis was right, you don’t even read what you post.
Private citizens can’t buy [harmless] DDT anyway. As your link says: The Stockholm convention allows DDT use for Public Heath purpose only (Disease Vector Control).
Sheesh.
My main observation on the ban status was
“I believe some US anti-malaria programs stopped using DDT following the Nixon admin ban. But there was no international ban, and UN agencies kept using it. And I know of no tying of general aid to cessation of DDT use for insect control.”
And my advice to Smokey was
I’m not sure whether the 1972 US ban had that exemption – it may be that if you can convince the authorities you have a malaria problem, you can get some.
So yes, there is a ban in the US.
I’m not sure why discussion of the Paaijmans, Thomas et al paper has wandered to here, but it is an opportunity to ask Anthony if he still thinks that paper means that “Mann’s 1.8 million Malaria grant” should be given back?
Nick Stokes says:
“So yes, there is a ban in the US.”
Finally, a climbdown. But getting it is like pulling teeth.
when a troll puts out as much energy and effort as the combined total harvest of attention, it’s not successful trollery. it’s a job.
Smokey says: December 22, 2011 at 5:21 pm
“Finally, a climbdown. But getting it is like pulling teeth.”
Smokey, you live in an alternate universe. I never said, as you asserted, that there was no US ban. My advice to you, on the other thread, linked above, clearly said there was. As did my earlier statement, also linked, on DDT status in general.
A physicist December 22, 2011 at 11:10 am
said: “… … in fact it’s the climate change skeptics who repose faith in satellite measurements …”
What on earth are you talking about?
Pointing out that a measurement is imprecise and that it does not prove one argument, is hardly relying on it for the opposing argument.
It’s simply a case of one piece of ‘evidence’ being discounted, and henceforth ignored (in that particular discussion).
We seem to have a pile of spin artists in here trying to deflect, obscure and railroad discussion.
Nick Stokes;
Well, David, I guess it has come down to time to ask you what are your qualifications for declaring that what these eminent scientists (who aren’t climate scientists) are doing is as you characterise it.>>>
Ah, the last refuge of he who can summon no argument of his own. Show me your credentials that I may dismiss your opinion for the simple reason that mine is based on the opinions of others who have longer lists of letters behind their names than do you. Such was the argument of those who could cure disease by letting the blood out of people. Such was the argument of those who could diagnose all manner of conditions by feeling the bumps on your head. Such was the argument of those who maintained that the sun circled the earth, that the earth was flat, that volcanic eruptions could be supressed by throwing virgins into the volcanoes, and that North America did not exist because it wasn’t on any maps (a map being nothing more than a primitive model of the earth surface, and with no more bearing on where or if NA exists than does a computer model have bearing on what values instrumentation should produce)
Hi Willis,
Thanks for your answer. The link I referred is in the bottom of your post:
“…I have posted the data I used, along with the R file that I wrote to analyze the data, as a zip file here. Enjoy!…”
I am interested to learn and know others ways of working for this reason i want to know how you have analized the dataset.
Good posts!!!!!
Regards!
A.
David, thank you for that crystal clear and concise summary of this nonsense. It is something most of us know instinctively and intuitively, but I don’t think anyone distilled it that purely.
This fits tongue in groove with another bad practice, allowing those in charge of collecting the data to also be interpreting the data. There is such a large conflict of interest here that anyone should be able to see it.
A says:
December 23, 2011 at 12:36 am
Thanks, A. The addressing for the .mac accounts all changed and left that an orphan. I’ve fixed it on the page, it’s available here.
All the best,
w.
Espen says:
December 22, 2011 at 12:02 am
You are correct, I’ve added an update clarifying that Hansen used OHC measurements.
I agree with all of those points, particularly the last.
The main problem I have with the OHC work is that the ARGO floats have adequate coverage only down to about 1500 metres depth. This means that we are only seriously sampling at best about a third of the ocean volume.
At that point, the term “oceanic heat content” seems like an over-reach to me. The ARGO measurements are fascinating, and I’ve discussed them elsewhere. But they only cover a third of the ocean. That makes the ± 0.15 W/m2 accuracy claimed by Hansen seem extremely doubtful.
w.
Thanks a lot for your answer.
But, I would like to know how you convert all the dataset to one column dataset. In your post, you transform all the columns to just one column dataset, then you can draw the “black line”….that you have csaid in your post.
All the best and Thanks a lot for your answers!!!!!!!
A.
Larry in Texas says:
December 22, 2011 at 1:57 am
crosspatch says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:22 pm
I’ve always wondered about the Mauna Loa CO2 data myself. I asked Roy Spencer one time about the fact that the Mauna Loa station was as close to the volcanoes of Hawaii as it was, doesn’t this create some uncertainty about the trends in the data, and he gave me an answer, if I remember correctly, to the effect that they only take data at certain times and places around the site and that they somehow compensate or allow for the fact of the volcanoes. I think it is time to reassess those methods, maybe. And by the way, as an attorney (and perhaps a cynic about statistics), I understand the value of calibrating your instruments and making “corrections” when necessary to account for what you are actually looking to measure. But making high-falutin’ corrections (my Texan coming out in me) to adjust back to – wow – what your model predicts? Such a coincidence! It’s all a little too convenient to me.
============
Exactly what they do. They decide what they will have as a cut-off point between volcanic activity produced CO2 and their mythical “background well-mixed” that’s supposed to be arriving over the pristine ocean and only decends into their little measuring cups when there’s no more ‘volcanic’…
It’s a bad joke. And the laughs on us.