I’m taking the rest of the weekend off – for two reasons:
1. With 100million views under my belt, I’ve earned it.
2. I’m rebuilding my home personal computer as it is becoming flakey, and such things take three times as long as you figure. Windows doesn’t take well to new mobos, and backup/prep must be done. So I’ll be down anyway.
Talk quietly amongst yourselves on any topic within site policy – don’t make me come back here until late Sunday night whenI start my regular work week. 😉 – Anthony
UPDATE: Sunday AM – My computer rebuild went well, and I learned some valuable things that I’ll share in an upcoming post. I went from an old AMDx2 64 dual core to a Intel I5 quad core CPU, doubled my memory speed, doubled my video card speed, and went from a SATA2 to SATA3 SSD. I can blog even faster now. Speaking of which, my email load this morning contained two stories (one quite dramatic) that I’ve put on auto-scheduled publishing that will appear soon. I’m still taking the rest of the day off though. – Anthony
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Since it’s a Hijack free thread…
Global Warming alarmists will run away and hide…when pigs fly!
http://youtu.be/F7Q-41Rd_Bc (mods can you imbed, I suck at it, or just publicly humiliate me so I will learn! you decide, lol)
Flying pigs courtesy of Roger Waters
“If you didn’t care what happened to me,
And I didn’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain,
Occasionally glancing up through the rain
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing.”
gee thanks!
Congratulations Anthony. I’m not sure rebuilding a flaky computer qualifies as “rest” in my lexicon, but it does verify Paul Simon’s great line:
“Everything put together, sooner or later falls apart.”
(…or runs down… and not just Honda Hybrid batteries)
Enjoy, Good luck, and thanks for the great blog!
Computer rebuild? I hope it hasn’t anything to do with solid state drives, Anthony, as I followed your lead and changed over to such a device. So far, so good.
All the best,
Ian
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am
“How do skeptics to AGW explain this?”
Your problem. Not mine. I don’t care other than your ‘Team’ is pi**ing away my tax dollars!
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am However, there does appear to be a great divergence in correlation in the later part of the 20th century (after about 1980) between solar activity ( as measured any number of ways) and global temperatures. How do skeptics to AGW explain this?
Here’s my explanation:
The AGW proponents say the Sun can’t be responsible for late C20th global warming because the amplitude of the solar cycles has been diminishing since the late 1950′s. There are several problems with this view. Firstly, although the peaks of the solar cycles have been getting lower, the cycles were shorter than average (around 10 years rather than the 11 year average) and the upramps and downramps were steep, and the minima between them brief. This means the average sunspot number over the period of about 70 was well above the long term average of around 40. What I have discovered, is that by making empirical comparisons between SST and the sunspot number (SSN), we find that there is a consistent relationship between the sunspot number and ocean surface temperature when the effects of the oceanic oscillations are accounted for. This means two things: Firstly, there is a relationship between solar activity levels and cloud cover, since small changes in cloud cover make a much bigger difference to the amount of sunlight hitting the ocean than solar variation does. Secondly, there must be a level of solar activity, as indicated by the sunspot number, at which the ocean neither cools nor warms. I have empirically determined this to be around the same value as the long term average sunspot number, about 40SSN. Another problem with the ‘solar cycles diminishing since the ’50′s argument is that Dr Leif Svalgaard has used solar magnetic records (derived from geomagnetic records) to determine that Waldmeier, who was in charge of counting the sunspots from 1945 until the mid ’80′s was overcounting by around 20%. Correcting this flattens the previously apparent drop in solar activity a lot.
You might find this thread helps
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
I second the congratulations.
My introduction to WUWT was the surface stations project. The first time I read about its inspiration, the Stevenson Screen Experiment, I thought “what a simple question, with a potentially profound answer.” I immediately saw Watts as being a “curious character” in the words of R.P. Feynman.
I think the answer to your implied question about why people bother with data of questionable quality is summed up by a professor of mine. He was known for quotable wacky statements. He once said “I known that this [seismic] data is crap…but there is so much of it!” If there is a lot of poor quality data people often think that statistics will lead to something useful just the same. Or, that even if the stations are badly sited, then the trend might still be significant… and so on. What I find amazing is that no one looked at this data very carefully before the surface stations project.
Paul Westhaver says:
January 7, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Found this..
Kevin Kilty said:
1) There is a well established reason why CO2 should impact climate. What else might too?
2) In the presence of feedback of many kinds, what is the ultimate impact of doubling CO2?
——end of technical questions——–
3)Will the impact be beneficial or not?
4)Is there any real alternative to just business as usual?
5)Will trying to change from business as usual lead to unacceptable social/political impacts?
6)Does Kyoto amount to more than a hill of beans?
7)Is it cheaper and more sensible to mitigate the impact of climate change rather than try to prevent it?
____
All excellent questions, each worthy of a separate discussion in and of themselves.
A note to those who suggest that someone can hijack an “Open Thread”, wouldn’t that be like stealing a box marked “Free Books” that your neighbor left out at the curb?
Mr Gates.
Since there are no reliable global temperature records prior to the thermometer era, how do you know what the global temperatures were in times past, and to what precision?
>>and backup/prep must be done<<
With the price of hard disks being what it is and my time being worth what it's worth, I find it much more efficient to use new drives and restore stuff as it's required from the old drives.
That way you can't possibly miss anything.
“R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am Okay, I’m a well known warmist here on WUWT, but I’m open to learning.”
Now that Rog Tattersall has taught you something you must be feeling a bit cooler.
You might also like to acknowledge that because X is not Y it doesn’t follow that Z must be Y.
You might give Linux Mint a try. You typically do a new install to get the latest version. But it has an app that saves your apps, so after the new OS install, you just restore your apps.
Congratulations Anthony!
Tallbloke,
Thanks for the lenthy response. I would be interested in seeing more metrics like the one you pointed out that show that in fact, solar activity (and potential solar impacts on climate) have not been diverging as much as some might think from global temperatures since 1980.
In addition to atmospheric temps of course is the issue of ocean heat content, which, in my mind, because the tremendous difference in energy stored there versus the atmosphere, is an even better metric for looking at energy balances in Earth’s climate system. OHC continues to rise (though I realize that some skeptics doubt this). One would expect the OHC to show a very signficant drop over the long-term (not just the little fluctuations we see during ENSO cycles), to counter the rather signficant rise we’ve seen over the past 30+ years, if this rise is cyclical, and not due to longer-term energy imbalance caused by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases.
@ur momisugly R. Gates:
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Tallbloke,
“Thanks for the lenthy response. ”
Is it a safe assumption on my part to assume that you are open to a conversation about Climate Change?
The reason for my question is this posting. It is from a totally unrelated blog, but deals with open minded conversations. Everyone should read it.
http://www.lastbornchild.com/2011/12/is-it-still-called-conversation-when.html
Andrew
Thanks for the link TallBloke. I had already read Dr. Svalgaard’s potential corretion concerning sun spots.
Your analysis is very good.
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am
…….
The AMO old boy, or I should I say Mr. Gates
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GT-AMO.htm
Gates claims a divergence between solar acitivy and temperature after about 1980. Really? What divergence?
Solar-magnetic activity was at “grand maximum” levels until it fell off sharply towards the end of cycle 23. If high solar-magnetic activity causes warming, then warming so long as solar-magnetic activity as high is exactly what we would expect. By pretty much every measure, solar cycle 22 (from 1986-1996) was the strongest on record. Cycle 19, which peaked in the late 50’s, had more sunspots, but 22 had a stronger solar flux and was shorter.
The alarmists say that the sun cannot have been driving warming post cycle 19 because solar activity did not KEEP going up, but that is ludicrous. To heat a pot of water, it is not enough to turn the flame to maximum and leave it there? You have to KEEP turning the flame up? That is how unscientific the alarmists excuses for dismissing solar warming are, and this absurd excuse has gone completely unexamined. There is no argument for it. Dozens of these careless scientists have simply asserted that because solar activity did not KEEP going up, it couldn’t have caused warming.
I started a series of posts on this last year and have some more installments I have to get to soon. My exchange with Solanki and Schuessler on the subject here:
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2011/04/solar-warming-and-ocean-equilibrium.html
R. Gates:
Here is a simple explanation that explains the increase in temperatures since the LIA: It’s a normal part of the temperature fluctuations that occur on Planet Earth. In other words, the Null Hypotheses.
Here is another thought. The earth’s climate is complex, and can’t be modeled accurately with today’s technology. Maybe millions or trillions of orders base ten in compute power increase are required to model the earth, and maybe vastly more systems need to be included in the models. to model the future climate conditions. Who knows.
Here is another thought. Science ought to be inherently skeptical. Where’s the proof? It seems the proof is evaporating, and the world isn’t behaving as the models predict. Furthermore, the past results seem inconsistent in terms of the proxies. The one I trust the most, borehole data, shows warming well before humans started dumping C02 into the atmosphere, and seems like a continuation of an existing warming. And naturally there are the climategate emails surrounding the Mann hockey stick failures from a statistical perspective, as well as failures of the proxies to be reliable.
Here is another thought. Chicken Little arguments suck. It’s the same with the NASA asteroid thing that plagues on people’s fear of things they don’t understand. It’s manipulative.
Here is another thought. Global Warming Advocates, many of them, try to make disagreement with the science a moral, rather than scientific, issue. Why should people secure in the settled science have to do this?
Here is another thought. AGW is too tempting to politicians, and even to scientists, since it solves a huge social problem. How to unite mankind towards some external enemy. In this case, the enemy is AGW caused by our actions, which require concerted actions.
Here is my theory: AGW the theory is popular not because of its scientific merits, but because of its political merits:
1) It has strong tie ins to religion, with its apocalyptic outcome, manufactured or not, making it a useful tool. It also lends itself to a continuation of government as God takeover by leftists.
2) It has a ready made advocacy group in existing environmentalists, who have long been looking for a way to make their cause accepted, but they are willing to simply force.
3) It’s a wonderful way for socialists to blame individualists that they can’t be individuals, and have some kind of shared responsibility for all of mankind.
4) The one worlders love it.
5) Democrats love it as a way to get in the middle of your utility bill and charge you more self righteously.
6) Democrats love it as a way to redistribute money (remember Obama wanting to redistribute utility bills even more than they are)
7) Democrats love it as a way to tax more regarding manufacturers, etc.
8) Crony capitalists/Big government types love it as a way to pay off their friends and contributors.
9) Big government types love it as a way to bash workers of all kinds into shame and compliance.
The political popularity, of course, yields all kinds of funding to “prove” it, when it is one of those really hard to prove things.
markus says:
January 7, 2012 at 1:22 pm
“R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am Okay, I’m a well known warmist here on WUWT, but I’m open to learning.”
Now that Rog Tattersall has taught you something you must be feeling a bit cooler.
You might also like to acknowledge that because X is not Y it doesn’t follow that Z must be Y.
———————-
Rog Tattersall (Tallbloke) has shown a correlation based on a dubious statistical trick, nothing more than that, IMHO. On the other hand, I could be wrong. Maybe rog Tattersall has something. So, here is my question to skeptics:
If any of these blogospheric studies like Tallbloke’s have any merit, why don’t their authors work them up into real papers and submit them to reputable journals? Surely there must be some open-minded editors who would publish them, as long as the science makes sense.
[Reply] I reach more people via my blog than I would via a paywall. TB – mod
As Anthony takes a well deserved weekend off I’m reminded of another great over-achiever:
Climate Change Happens! 🙂
Congrats again, Anthony.
2) In the presence of feedback of many kinds, what is the ultimate impact of doubling CO2?
Average Global Temperature Data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, below, indicates no change in the last 13 years, while Carbon Dioxide has risen by about 25%.
Year Deviation from the base period 1961-90, degrees C
1998 0.529
1999 0.304
2000 0.278
2001 0.407
2002 0.455
2003 0.467
2004 0.444
2005 0.474
2006 0.425
2007 0.397
2008 0.329
2009 0.436
2010 0.470
2011 0.356
Source: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt
Carbon Dioxide goes up and the Temperature remains the same
Re: 2) In the presence of feedback of many kinds, what is the ultimate impact of doubling CO2?
Answer: More food. No change in temperature.
After checking Wikipedia to see how long this blog has been running (2006), I loved one description attributed to Matt Ridley of the Spectator:
“metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians”.
May the metamorphosis continue and WUWT grow bigger, more beautiful and more highly regarded.
News from China being leapt on by the Gillard Government is that China is planning to introduce a carbon tax of about $1.5 per tonne targeting coal, oil and gas but at this price seems more like a token gesture much the same as India’s symbolic one dollar tax on coal.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/china-to-tax-carbon-by-2015/story-fn59niix-1226238633181
The Chinese move is at odds with another report that it will refuse to pay the EU green tax on flights into Europe. Strange – the Gillard Government has not leapt on this one:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/07/uk-airlines-carbon-tax-asia-idUSLNE80600Y20120107
We are waiting Hillary.
Adam Gallon says:
January 7, 2012 at 1:14 pm
“Mr Gates.
Since there are no reliable global temperature records prior to the thermometer era, how do you know what the global temperatures were in times past, and to what precision?”
Or in other words: comparing current satellite measurements with the land thermometer era is problematic; and comparing the the land thermometer era with the proxy era is also problematic.
Just like the Hockey stick splice.
Another thought: 2000 year ago there was the Roman Optimum; 1,000 years ago the MWP; now it’s another peak. Looks regular enough.
After the Roman Optimum, there were the Dark Ages and the destruction of the Roman Empire by the Völkerwanderung or Migration Period; Germanic tribes taking a vacation in Italy; seeking warmth, after the MWP, there was Black Death, the 30 year war and the Inquisition – both cold periods full of misery and death.
And the CAGW folks want us to complain.
Mr. R Gates
How does one degree of warming from 1900 to 1950 in ‘low’ CO2 emissions qualify as “natural” and one degree of warming from 1950 to 2010 magically become “” catastrophic AGW”?
Since 1998 all warming seems to have ceased despite desperate fiddling by Climate Scientists”.