Guest post by Bob Tisdale
My blog post October to December 2011 NODC Ocean Heat Content Anomalies (0-700Meters) Update and Comments was cross posted by at WattsUpWithThat here. (As always, thanks, Anthony.) Starting at the January 27, 2012 at 8:44 am comment by J Bowers, I was informed of a critique of my ARGO-era model-data comparison graph by the Tamino titled Fake Predictions for Fake Skeptics. Oddly, Tamino does not provide a link to my post or the cross post at WattsUpWithThat, nor does Tamino’s post refer to me by name. But I believe it would be safe to say that Tamino was once again commenting on my graph that compares ARGO-era NODC Ocean Heat Content data to the climate model projection from Hansen et al (2005), “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications”. If he wasn’t, then Tamino fooled three persons who provided the initial comments about Tamino’s post on the WUWT thread and the few more who referred to Tamino’s post afterwards. The ARGO-era graph in question is shown again here as Figure 1. Thanks for the opportunity to post it once again up front in this post, Tamino.
Figure 1
Take a few seconds to read Tamino’s post, it’s not very long, and look at the graphs he presented in it.
My graph in Figure 1 is clearly labeled “ARGO-Era Global Ocean Heat Content Model-Data Comparison”. The title block lists the two datasets as NODC/Levitus et al (2009) and Hansen et al (2005) Model Mean Trend. It states that the Model Mean Trend and Observations had been Zeroed At Jan 2003. Last, the title block lists the time period of the monthly data as January 2003 to December 2011.
In other words, my graph in Figure 1 pertains to the ARGO-based OHC data and the GISS model projection starting in 2003. It does not represent the OHC data or the GISS model hindcast for the periods of 1993-2011 or 1955-2011, which are the periods Tamino chose to discuss.
Do any of the graphs in Tamino’s post list the same information in their title blocks? No. Do any of Tamino’s graphs compare the climate model projection from Hansen et al (2005) to the NODC OHC observations? No. Does Tamino refer to Hansen et al (2005) in his post? No. Do any of Tamino’s graphs present the NODC OHC data or the Hansen et al model projection during the ARGO-era, starting in January 2003 and ending in December 2011? No.
In other words, Tamino redirected the discussion from the ARGO-era period of 2003-2011 to other periods starting in 1955 and 1993. ARGO floats were not in use in 1955 and they were still not in use in 1993. He also redirected the discussion from the projection of the GISS model mean to the linear trend of the data itself. Yet Tamino’s followers fail to grasp the obvious differences between his post and my ARGO-era graph.
In my post, I explained quite clearly why I presented the ARGO-era model-data comparison with the data zeroed at 2003. Refer to the discussion under the heading of STANDARD DISCUSSION ABOUT ARGO-ERA MODEL-DATA COMPARISON. Basically, Hansen et al (2005) apparently zeroed their model mean and the NODC OHC data in 1993 to show how well their model matched the OHC data from 1993 to 2003. Hansen et al explained why they excluded the almost 40 years of OHC and hindcast data. The primary reason was their model could not reproduce the hump in the older version of the Levitus et al OHC data. Refer to Figure 2, which is a graph from a 2008 presentation by Gavin Schmidt of GISS. (See page 8 of GISS ModelE: MAP Objectives and Results.) I presented that same graph graph by Gavin in my post GISS OHC Model Trends: One Question Answered, Another Uncovered, which was linked in my OHC update from a few days ago.
Figure 2
I zeroed the data for my graph in 2003, which is the end year of the Hansen et al (2005) graph, to show how poorly the model projection matched the data during the ARGO-era, from 2003 to present. In other words, to show that the ARGO-era OHC data was diverging from the model projection. Hansen et al (2005), as the authors of their paper, chose the year they apparently zeroed the data for one reason; I, as the author of my post, chose another year for another reason. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for Tamino to understand.
And then there’s Tamino’s post, which does not present the same comparison. He did, however, present data the way he wanted to present it. It’s pretty simple when you think about it. We all presented data the way we wanted to present it.
Some of the readers might wonder why Tamino failed to provide a similar ARGO-era comparison in his post. Could it be because he was steering clear of the fact that it doesn’t make any difference where the model projection intersects with the data when the trends are compared for the ARGO-era period of 2003 to 2011? See Figure 3. The trend of the model projection is still 3.5 times higher than the ARGO-era OHC trend. Note that I provided a similar graph to Figure 3 in my first response to his complaints about that ARGO-era OHC model-data comparison. See Figure 8 in my May 13, 2011 post On Tamino’s Post “Favorite Denier Tricks Or How To Hide The Incline”.
Figure 3
Figure 3 shows the ARGO-era OHC data diverging from the model projection. But the visual effect of that divergence is not a clear as it is in Figure 1. I presented the data in Figure 1 so that it provided the clearest picture of what I wanted to show, the divergence. That really should be obvious to anyone who looks at Figure 1.
Some might think Figure 1 is misleading. The reality is, those illustrating data present it so that it provides the best visual expression of the statement they are trying to make. The climate model-based paper Hansen et al (2005) deleted almost 40 years of data and appear to have zeroed their data at 1993 so that they could present their models in the best possible light. Base years are also chosen for other visual effects. The IPCC’s Figure 9.5 from AR4 (presented here as Figure 4) is a prime example. Refer to the IPCC’s discussion of it here.
Figure 4
The Hadley Centre presents their anomalies with the base years of 1961-1990. Why did the IPCC use 1901-1950? The answer is obvious. The earlier years were cooler and using 1901-1950 instead of 1961-1990 shifts the HADCRUT3 data up more than 0.2 deg C. In other words, the early base years make the HADCRUT anomaly data APPEAR warmer. It also brings the first HADCRUT3 data point close to a zero deg C anomaly, and that provides another visual effect: the normalcy of the early data.
Base years for anomalies are the choice of the person or organization presenting the data. Climate modelers choose to present their models in the best light; I do not.
Those familiar with the history of Tamino’s complaints about my posts understand they are simply attempts by him to mislead or misdirect his readers. And sometimes he makes blatantly obvious errors like using the wrong sea surface temperature dataset in a comparison with GISS LOTI data. His post Fake Predictions for Fake Skepticsis just another failed critique to add to the list.
ABOUT: Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations
SOURCE
The NODC OHC data used in this post is available through the KNMI Climate Explorer:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
2003 through 2011 (mid-year), waow, that is long term observation.
WUWT vets ideas. Tamino excludes them. Sound familiar?
I’ve never been impressed with Tamino’s mathematical abilities. I try to imagine the people who are.
Bob, nice destruction of Tamino’s religious nonsense. Your one graph says it all:
http://oi41.tinypic.com/117fx1c.jpg
There can be no legitimate complaints of the offset or the trend. And, Bill’s graphic makes it even worse:
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/340/argosplice.png
It is, however, entertaining to see the alarmists scramble and whine which only ends up making them look like they have no idea how to do real science (as if that would surprise anyone here).
This is precisely the same “nonsense offset depiction” issue you were criticized for few months ago. When you continue to present the misleading offset, expect the much deserved criticism.
Rogelio says: “I think Bob they are trying to wear you out., new tactic LOL”
I find this to be very relaxing.
Having now had a look at Tamino’s website, I’d say that Open Mind is more like open sore.
Jack Greer,
Bob has made clear what he is accomplishing. Nothing is being hidden, you either don’t understand, or you’re trying to make an issue out of a non-issue.
Just for the record, do you approve of this deception? That is a real issue, revealing Mann’s mendacity. You want to try and explain that deliberate omission of inconvenient data? Or would you rather keep harping on Bob Tisdale’s methodology?
Offset goshset.
Doesn’t make a hill of beans difference. The model is divergeing from the data.
This is the CENTRAL conclusion to draw. Anything else is noise.
Tisdale zeros the model mean trend but then zeros the observations, not the observation trend. There’s therefore an offset starting at 2003 is itself misleading since the actual model tend centrally bisects the timeline of focus.
Agree, noise is the central issue.
2003 is when the ARGOS float 3D ocean data became available. A far more reliable data source on OHC than anything before it.
So WHAT IS THE PROBLEM with looking at OHC with a 2003 start date? Its all about ARGOS, nothing else. Bob must be right that this jowl-flapping about statistics is a strenuous effort to put up a smoke screen to distract / misdirect attention from a painful and inconvenient fact.
A child in his dark bedroom thinks that the dim shadow of a big teddy is a scary monster.
Then the lights are turned on and … ITS GONE … no more scary monster.
Bob Tisdale.
From Hansen’s Figure 2 he shows a series of “runs” that model model the OHC increasing from 1993 to 2003 by 6 W yr/m^2 (approx).
Your graph (Figure 1 above) seems to convert that series of runs into a straight line, then you convert the y-axis and finally change the offset to 0.0 in 2003. Why not just take Hansen’s Figure 2 graph and extend it to 2011 adding a projection line of 0.6 W yr/m^2 (6 Wyr/M^2 over 10 years) and then comment on how Hansen has done since 2003?
Tamino is less like his namesake from “the Magic Flute” and more like the Pied Piper.
LazyTeenager says:
January 28, 2012 at 10:39 pm
I don’t know–you’re the teenager. You tell us.
Michael Jankowski says:
January 29, 2012 at 1:17 pm
No, he’s the broken reed.
Jack Greer says: “This is precisely the same ‘nonsense offset depiction’ issue you were criticized for few months ago. When you continue to present the misleading offset, expect the much deserved criticism.”
First, Jack, please advise who were quoting with “nonsense offset depiction”. Those three words in that order do not appear on this thread before your quote. Second, since the time Tamino first criticized me baselessly for that same graph, it has appeared in two other OHC updates here at WUWT without this foolish furor on the parts of so many–like yourself. So apparently, you’re wrong that I should expect criticism when I continue to use the graph. Third, the only thing nonsensical about this is your criticisms, and the criticisms of others. As I have illustrated before on this thread, if I:
1. replicate the GISS Model-ER ensemble mean from Figure 2 above, which is a graph of OHC hindcasts/projections from a 2008 presentation by Gavin Schmidt,
2. then replace the older NODC data with the current version, and
3. set the base years for the for full term of the data (1955-2010) so that no one can claim I’ve cherry-picked those,
look at where the GISS model mean intersects the OHC data:
http://oi41.tinypic.com/117fx1c.jpg
That sure looks like it intersects at 2003. Here’s a close-up starting in 2003, Jack, just in case you’re having trouble seeing it:
http://i41.tinypic.com/eklz6x.jpg
Look familiar?
Ciao.
Steve from Rockwood says: “Why not just take Hansen’s Figure 2 graph and extend it to 2011 adding a projection line of 0.6 W yr/m^2 (6 Wyr/M^2 over 10 years) and then comment on how Hansen has done since 2003?”
As I showed in Figures 1 and 3 in the post, it really makes no difference whether the model projection line intersects with the ARGO-era data in 2003 or later in time. The difference in the trends remains the same. That is, the model projection is still 3.5 times greater than the trend of the ARGO-era Ocean Heat Content data. Everyone, as far as I can tell, is complaining because Figure 1 makes the difference APPEAR worse than in Figure 3. So they’re squawking.
Basically, where the model projection intersects with the ARGO-era data depends on the what base years are used for anomalies. We don’t know what base years Hansen et al (2005) used, but it appears they zeroed the data at 1993, the start of their comparison graph. My logic has always been that if Hansen et al (2005) was able to zero the data in 1993 to make their models look good from 1993 to 2003, then I was able to zero the data in 2003 to show how poorly they projected the flattening during the past 8 years. I’ve also had something in my back pocket just in case the complaints started again about my short-term comparison. And I’ve shown this a couple of times on this thread. That is, if I:
1. replicate the GISS Model-ER ensemble mean from Figure 2 above, which is a graph of OHC hindcasts/projections from a 2008 presentation by Gavin Schmidt,
2. then replace the older NODC data with the current version, and,
3. set the base years for the for full term of the data (1955-2010) so that no one can claim I’ve cherry-picked those,
this is the resulting graph:
http://oi41.tinypic.com/117fx1c.jpg
That sure looks like the model mean intersects with the OHC data at 2003, which is what the complaints are all about. And here’s the same data but only showing the period of 2003 to 2010:
http://i41.tinypic.com/eklz6x.jpg
Look familiar?
Unfortunately, I’ve replicated that model mean data and it’s on an annual basis so I can’t use it for the update posts, which present the data on a monthly basis. So the squawking will continue, until I can get my hands on the actual output data from the GISS Model-ER hindcast and projection on a monthly basis from 1955 to now and a couple of years into the future.
I would encourage folks to see what Hansens actual paper stated, as in http://www.mest.ntnu.edu.tw/seminar/981/981_1006Kueh/ref.2.pdf – particularly Fig. 2. This is a physics based model, not a linear trend, and hence actually responds to ENSO, solar cycle, and other influences.
And you will also note from that Figure 2 that 2003 represents a swing above the Hansen model predictions (perhaps short term variance?), meaning that Tisdale did indeed offset the Hansen model for his graph. Hansen gave an offset as well as a trend, and not a linear projection either. In fact, the word “linear” does not appear in Hansen’s paper.
Bob Tisdale – You keep insisting that you are correct, despite the evidence. But offsetting Hansen’s prediction from what he gave in his paper means you are talking about something other than Hansen’s prediction, and is thus a strawman argument. Again.
Francois says: “2003 through 2011 (mid-year), waow, that is long term observation.”
It’s actually 2003 to 2011 (full year). But what’s a couple of months? And, unfortunately, 2003 to 2011 is the only period when there has been reasonable spatial coverage of the measurements used to calculate the Ocean Heat Content of the global oceans.
KR:
The offset is meaningless except for visual presentation. It’s only the trends that matter.
I think you should look up the word ‘strawman’ so you quit using it incorrectly.
Strawman – “To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.”
Yes – it fits. I’m using it correctly.
Actually no, you’ve simply used the word wrong, and the definition you chose to quote demonstrates that:
Tisdale has analyzed what Hansen did differently than Hansen did, as is saying as much (as <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/28/tamino-once-again-misleads-his-followers/#comment-878957"?your own comments reflect as this same understanding). Since Tisdale’s not saying that he’s refuting an analysis that Hansen actually did, then nope, it’s not a straw man. What he’s done completely unrelated to a straw man in fact.
You could criticize him (and you have done so and incorrectly as I pointed out) for using a different baseline, but the mere use of a different baseline, while it could be wrong or misrepresentative of Hansen’s results when comparing them on a graph (which just makes the graph wrong or misrepresentative, but not a straw man), is not germane to the issue of whether the predicted trend from Hansen agrees with the measured trend from the data.
I’ll also point out that Tisdale hasn’t addressed that latter issue in his post, but this isn’t an error per sé, it just makes his analysis incomplete.
Bob: you might be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
People go to great lengths to show Hansen’s predictions as accurate.
A little adjustment here, a little adjustment there, redoing a base period here and completely mistating the record there, and Hansen is pretty close.
Like his 1988 predictions. Some believe they were right on target. Michael Mann is even touting around a chart lately showing Scenario B following the temperature record to a T. Skeptical Science’s dana1981 is doing the same just a few days ago (again).
Hansen himself, however, knows he was wrong. As he shows in his own chart published on his own personal website just a few days ago (which seems to be accurate to me and is exactly the same as other sceptics have presented recently but is very unlike anything Tamino or Skeptical Science has presented).
Temps lower than Scenario C since 1999. Scenario C had stabilization of GHGs between 1997 and 2000 while they did nothing of the sort. Scenario B (which is almost exactly the actual forcing which has occurred) is 0.5C too high in 2011.
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/PNAS_GTCh_Fig2.gif
Bill,
From my observation’s Hansen’s famous 1988 prediction was vigorously defended up until the end of 2010 at the height of the last El Nino, which was the last time I recall Realclimate posting on the topic. (A rather bold cherry pick if there ever was one.) I also posted elsewhere that unless global temperatures rose sharply after that, that would be the last analysis on that topic that we would see from them. Since then, the 1988 prediction is now so far behind that *most* warmists seem to have acknowledged this as a failure or have otherwise become silent on the issue.
See:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
This failure was characterised as:
“As before, it seems that the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection is likely running a little warm compared to the real world.”
Indeed.
The OHC debate here will run a similar course until the diverge grows beyond all possible credulity, except for a few lone voices… Cranks don’t disappear, eventually everyone just stops listening to them. Of course, it’s always possible that OHC may rapidly increase again as it did 20 years ago. Only more data will ultimately decide the debate.