by Walter Starck (in Quadrant Online)
The average temperature for the Earth, or any region or even any specific place is very difficult to determine with any accuracy. At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. Weather stations are relatively few and located very irregularly. Well maintained stations with good records going back a century or more can be counted on one’s fingers. Even then only maximum and minimum temperatures or ones at a few particular times of day are usually available. Maintenance, siting, and surrounding land use also all have influences on the temperatures recorded.
The purported 0.7°C of average global warming over the past century is highly uncertain. It is in fact less than the margin of error in our ability to determine the average temperature anywhere, much less globally. What portion of any such warming might be due to due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is even less certain. There are, however, numerous phenomena which are affected by temperature and which can provide good evidence of relative warming or cooling and, in some cases, even actual temperatures.
These include growth rings in trees, corals and stalactites, borehole temperature profiles and the isotopic and biologic signatures in core samples from sediments or glaciers. In addition, historical accounts of crops grown, harvest times, freezes, sea ice, river levels, glacial advances or retreats and other such records provide clear indication of warming and cooling.
Recent Warming Nothing Unusual
The temperature record everywhere shows evidence of warming and cooling in accord with cycles on many different time scales from daily to annual, decadal, centennial, millennial and even longer. Many of these seem to correlate with various cycles of solar activity and the Earth’s own orbital mechanics. The temperature record is also marked by seemingly random events which appear to follow no discernable pattern.
Over the past 3000 years there is evidence from hundreds of independent proxy studies, as well as historical records, for a Minoan Warm period around 1000 BC, a Roman Warm Period about 2000 years ago, a Medieval Warm Period (WMP) about 1000 years ago and a Modern Warm Period now developing. In between were markedly colder periods in the Dark Ages and another between the 16th and 19th centuries which is now known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The warmer periods were times of bountiful crops, increasing population and a general flourishing of human societies. The cold periods were times of droughts, famines, epidemics, wars and population declines. Clearly life has been much better in the times of warmer climate, and there is nothing to indicate that the apparent mild warming of the past century is anything other than a return of this millennial scale warming cycle.
Good News Unwelcome to Alarmists
This rather good news about a possibly warmer climate has not met with hopeful interest from those who purport to be so concerned about the possibly dangerous effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). On the contrary, their reaction has overwhelmingly been a strong rejection of any beneficial possibility. It is apparent that their deepest commitment is to the threat itself and not to any rational assessment of real world probabilities or the broader consequences of any of their proposed remedies.
Fabricating a Hockey Stick from Hot Air
This blanket rejection of any possibility other than the hypothetical threat of AGW has led to some strange behaviour for people who modestly proclaim themselves to be the world’s top climate scientists. Not only have they ignored and dismissed the hundreds of studies indicating the global existence of a Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, they have set out to fabricate an alternate reality in the form of a graph purporting to represent the global temperature for the past thousand years. It portrays a near straight line wiggling up and down only a fraction of a degree for centuries until it begins an exponential rise gradually starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then shooting steeply up in the latter part of that century. This hockey stick-shaped graph was then heavily promoted as the icon of AGW. It appeared on the cover of the third climate assessment report of the IPCC published in 2003 and was reproduced at various places in the report itself.
Among the emails between leading climate researchers released in the Climategate affair were a number which revealed a concerted effort to come up with some means to deny the existence of the MWP. The implement chosen to do this became known as the Hockey Stick Graph.
The methodology used to construct the graph involved the use of estimates of temperatures from a very small sample of tree growth rings from the Yamal Peninsula in far northern Siberia and ancient stunted pine trees from near the tree line in the High Sierras of California. This data was then subjected to a statistical treatment later shown by critics to produce a hockey stick form of graph even when random numbers were used as raw input data. To make matters even worse, the same tree ring data also indicated a significant decline in temperature for the 20th century, but this was hidden by burying it in a much larger number of data points from instrument measurements. The resulting study was published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature in 1998. Remarkably, this very small, highly selected and deceptively manipulated graph was proclaimed to be an accurate representation of global temperatures and the extensive body of contrary evidence was simply ignored.
full essay here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/11/speak-loudly-and-carry-a-busted-hockey-stick
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There appears no doubt that temperatures have levelled off over the past 16 years
A few of the main reasons for the leveling off are …….
1. they have run out of adjustments they can feasibly make
2. too many people are watching now
3. there are very few remote stations left for them to misplace.
4. Most of the airpoart and carpark station are already concreted.
You can bet they will still try though !!!
100 degrees C?
A bit of a nitpick, but I think the author has mixed up Celsius and Farenheit. The temperature range between the coldest and hottest places on earth are typically less than 100 degrees Celsius (180 deg Farenheit) and only occasionally due temperatures vary by as much as 54 deg F in a day at any given location.
“It is apparent that their deepest commitment is to the threat itself and not to any rational assessment of real world probabilities or the broader consequences of any of their proposed remedies.”
Bingo. I suspect that the primary reason most of the usual suspects got into climate science in the first place was their desire to save the planet. The science is secondary to “the cause.” So if the evidence contradicts preconceived ideas, it has to be fudged or ignored.
Kevin says
“… having a larger number in diverse positions would decrease measurement error. ”
Only if “global temperature” (whatever that is supposed to be) was homogeneous … which it isn’t.
The AGW thesis is a POLITICAL MOVEMENT, akin to communism or radical islam or Nazism. Just as these two latter groups invent(ed) enemies (kulaks, jews, christians, etc.) the frauds who promote the fraud of AGW seek either money and fame (Gore, Mann, etc., ) or are simply seeking a new route to rid the world of capitalism (which, to the communist/socialist is the root of all evil in the world).
It is no coincidence that the AGW movement gained traction soon after the fall of the USSR. Also, it is no coincidence that just about all AGW proponents are liberal progressives, socialists or communists. (Please recall that Hitler was a socialist too).
“REAL SCIENTISTS” can produce an infinite quantity of hard core, irrefutable facts and evidence to show that AGW is a fraud, but it WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL, because the AGW proponents are not interested in the science. Science has absolutely nothing at all to do with the AGW dogma. It is merely a tool, a vehicle , a ploy to impose a political order (a tyranny) upon the great unwashed masses.
Rest assured, if this ever comes to pass, the ruling elites – those that are screaming the loudest about AGW – will not for one minute cease flying about in private or chartered planes, nor will they give up their massive gas guzzling SUVs, nor their numerous LARGE vacation homes or yachts.
The AGW crowd is simply a self anointed extension of the ruling aristocracy – the Kings and Queens and Royalty – that ruled Europe for a thousand years. A group of people that believe they are superior, smarter, better, more sophisticated, more cultured than the average person (whom they hold in total contempt).
Frankly, if ever the AGW proponents are finally shown to be a fraud and generally accepted by all to be such, they should be executed, hanged; for promoting the biggest “scientific” fraud in the history of the world, and more so, for promoting an ideology whose goal is simply the establishment of a tyrannical form of govt that will enslave all of us.
The world has already experience Nazism and communism which produced MORE THAN 100,000,000 CORPSES. We do not need to experience all of this again.
It’s possible to have bad data, to have corruption of data, to misinterpret proxies but the thing that can’t be denied is the physical evidence in Greenland and written accounts of real people, drawings done. The historical record as revealed as the ice retreats in Greenland reveals trees that are 1000 years old, animals dated to be 1000 years old making it undeniable that this has happened before. If it happened before what are the chances it’s only happened twice in history? We have drawings of the Thames freezing over in winter for years.
Mann himself wrote a good paper documenting some of the physical undeniable evidence of the mwp. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/medclimopt.pdf. In it he tries to discredit the global nature but subsequent studies in the last few years have laid that document to waste. It’s quite clear now that the mwp was global by numerous peer reviewed published studies. It would be funny to see Mann update that article now. Check out this site for supporting documents http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html#MWP
I also found it unbelievable like an earlier writer that Greenland somehow for hundreds of years could locally get so much hotter than the rest of the world. How would that be possible? If so, then how could the few dozen or so boreholes possibly be indicative or reliable of a global temperatures over this time period? We don’t need all the studies that have been done over the last 10 years to show that temperatures were as warm as today millennia ago all across the globe. The data was already there. They ignored it and left a huge logical conundrum that they refused to even speculate about. They just said its a mystery and went on building models that assumed something that seemed on the face of it to be indefensible.
That’s the thing that turned me. I saw they will answer certain questions that conform to their model and turn away data that doesn’t. That’s fine for a “theory in development” but it is not what we expect from “settled science”. String theorists can shake their head when they can’t explain something but at least the theory isn’t considered “settled”. It’s fine if someone has a model that says co2 is a primary force but if they can’t explain basic questions then the theory is not settled. That’s simply a fact. They can deny that their theory is just a conjecture but it is the truth. It can’t be proven or settled because they can’t explain basic things that contradict the theory.
The biggest problem I have is that the only really good data we have is recent data. Because of the massive problems with proxies not covering 1% of the land surface and water over this time period and the inaccuracies with these data it is hard to give much credence to models which are made to fit this suspect data regardless of mwp or how good they can be made to fit it… If the models are correct they have to be validated with current data because the other data is either suspect or was used in the construction of the models. Therefore it is preeminently important that the most recent data confirm the theory. Since it does not conform to current data either for land temps, ocean temps, moisture, tropospheric temps, this means it is likely purely contrivance or luck that the fit to older proxy data works. We have to assume that if the models either don’t conform to current temps or behavior of the system they must be wrong and it must be explained how this nonconformance exists and why they didn’t predict it or to show other corroborating data that show the validity otherwise any scientific person must put these theories in a holding bin. You don get in science to have your theory upheld even as it fails and wait for something to disprove it. That’s not how science works. Either your theory works or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t then you can keep working on it but you can’t say “hold on” it’s going to be okay. That’s not how science works. That’s how religion works. I don’t believe any scientist could disagree with a word I’ve written. Therefore it’s ridiculous to argue its settled. What’s settled?
In 2000 the ipcc said the models conform to the historical record to such a degree that we can eliminate the idea the warming from 1978-1998 was caused by anything other than co2. Their great logical fallacy was to think that they had conformance to proxies to such a high degree that the level of natural variability nature could provide was not sufficient to explain even a part of the warming from 1978-1998. Therefore they were able to estimate the probability they were wrong by assuming that this variability was within bounds they had observed. However, since 1998 it is clear that the variability is vastly more than they projected. They never saw the models differ from proxy data by more than a short period for small temperature differences however now we have 0.4C variation in just the last 16 years from the models. According to their mathematical basis for saying that it was 95% settled a 2% probability event to have this much variance. Even more statistically unlikely that it woudl happen immediately after they claimed success. whats the chances of that? a 2% chance occurance just happens to hit just after you claim success? In defense, they claim that there are periods in the record that ar long with flat temperature trends but in all those cases they had an explanation for that. Whether aerosols or volcano eruptions they thought they understood why these variances occurred and had modeled them to some extent to show that the models fit the historical record quite closely and where they didn’t fit they could explain why. Fine. I can see how a scientist even a reasonable scientist would be secuced by such logic. However immediately after having proclaimed victory and therefore being able to estimate the probability of their theory being settled the earth decides to have a totally unexplained completely out of scale massive natural variability that is well beyond any previous variability. Clearly their explanations for past temperature variance must be flawed or else something else completely new and never seen before is happening but however you look at it the mathematical basis, the scientific basis of their 95% claim, the idea that this is settled is totally unglued. Before they could explain why variances occurred. Now they simply say : trust trust but any scientific person must understand that the scientific basis of their confidence has become completely laid false by the last 15 years. Their working model used the conformance of the models as statistical basis for saying it was TRUE. Now that the natural variance is clearly not what they said back then the entire basis has fallen apart. It may still be true that co2 has an enormous effect on temperature but the statistical basis and the scientific argument for that has been devastated.
@Juan Slayton
Depends whether you’re trying to predict a specific instance of an outcome or formulate a new general law of nature. Compare predicting the instance of sunrise tomorrow having observed the consistent generality of past sunrises with predicting an unfailing and unending generality of future sunrises on the basis of the experience of a mere trillion of past instances.
And despite your apparent optimism to the contrary, analogies invariably mislead, usually deliberately.
clue = finding a gas can at the scene of a house fire in no way rules out that lightning could have started the fire…….and then the heat from that fire igniting the gas can making it appear that the big fire started at the gas can.
BobN says: November 27, 2012 at 11:56 am
………
In Siberia, the winter temperature can drop to -60C while in the temperature in Death Valley, California occasionally exceeds + 50C.
Juan Slayton says:
November 27, 2012 at 11:31 am
simon abingdon: Induction (arguing from the general to the particular….
Er, I think it’s actually the other way around. But I would not dismiss analogy so lightly. An analogy may be purely illustrative. Or it may point to instantiations of general propositions. In either case it can be used or misused.
Quite. Analogies can be used to explain unfamiliar concepts – like Voyage charters – to a non-maritime background.
As noted – misuse is possible. Same as with cars and computers and Coca-Cola and – you get the picture.
BobN says:
“A bit of a nitpick, but I think the author has mixed up Celsius and Farenheit. The temperature range between the coldest and hottest places on earth are typically less than 100 degrees Celsius (180 deg Farenheit) and only occasionally due temperatures vary by as much as 54 deg F in a day at any given location.”
A typical tropical high would be about 35 C and a typical Antarctic low would be about -60 C, a range of 95 C.
The lack of an effective greenhouse effect in deserts (little H2O/clouds) causes huge range of temperatures between day and night, sometimes from upper 90’s during the day to lower 30’s at night (in F).
So, 100 C and 30 C are pretty good numbers.
The madness inflicted with the Hokey Stick continues. GM, the great example of screwing over capitalist investors for the pleasure of unions, has released another unwanted all-electric car unto the market:
The US is BROKE, we cannot afford a $7500 tax credit so people can pretend they are Green by paying twice as much out of pocket for a tiny car inefficiently powered by electricity from fossil fuels generated elsewhere. We have a plethora of cars getting 40mpg or better, that aren’t even hybrids.
If they really must propagate their eco-insanity, why not make the tax credits for super-efficient vehicles, which will be bought by people who can’t afford vehicles that are larger and/or will cost them more at the pump? Perhaps an additional credit for vehicles certified for 100% biofuels, like ethanol or biodiesel?
Oh wait, that actually makes some sense, therefore it cannot be allowed. They’ll stick with prices of two and a half times more for limited near-worthless vehicles, powered by fossil fuels elsewhere, incorporating exotic materials extracted elsewhere yielding toxic wastes that are poisoning someone else. Because that’s the Green way of saving the planet.
vukcevic says:
In Siberia, the winter temperature can drop to -60C while in the temperature in Death Valley, California occasionally exceeds + 50C.
one of those is summer, the other is winter, that’s not an “at any given time” as the author put it..
logiclogiclogic asks:
“What’s settled?”
That sounds like a worthwhile list to create, I’ll start:
1) The Sun radiates energy in mostly UV & Visible, some IR.
2) The Earth absorbs energy from the Sun.
3) The Earth has an atmosphere.
4) The Earth’s atmosphere absorbs energy and radiates IR.
5) Mann is an @ur momisugly$$, a charlatan, and a Fake Nobel Laureate.
6) Data had to be severely manipulated (tortured) to produce the hockey stick.
7) Results produced from torturing data are properly characterized as fiction.
8) Basing policy on fiction is usually not wise.
9) Advocacy, Noble Cause Corruption, and Conflicts of Interest have subverted climate science.
10) Al Gore is a charlatan and a real Nobel Laureate.
No problem getting a 100 degree C range across the world for part of the year at least. Typical winter temperatures in Vostok – the Russian base in Antactica – are around minus 70 C (close to minus 100 F), while the northern hemishere has plenty of places above 40 C every day. So the typical daily worldwide range in the northern summer is above 110 degrees C, or 200-odd degrees F.
In the northern winter, tempertures below minus 50 C are common in Siberia, while the hottest parts of Australia and Southern Africa will usually exceed 40 C on a daily basis – not too often above 50 C, though.
John West says:
November 27, 2012 at 12:46 pm
“The lack of an effective greenhouse effect in deserts (little H2O/clouds) causes huge range of temperatures between day and night, sometimes from upper 90′s during the day to lower 30′s at night (in F).”
In these conditions it shows just how small the effects of co2 are, and the daily average temperature change (~18F follow the link in my user name, there’s 4 pages with analysis of NCDC data) hasn’t changed as co2 has increased.
1) This proves almost all of the greenhouse effect is from water vapor.
2) If there’s no appreciable difference in daily temperatures from co2 only, it can’t force any water vapor differences.
I hit send too soon….
3) None of the temperature changes over the last 100 years could be from co2 (because it doesn’t show up in the daily change data).
It has to be from something else!
Kev-in-Uk says:
November 27, 2012 at 10:49 am
Using Mosh’s analogy of the gas can – sure it may well be present – but did it ever have any gas in it? THAT is the true skeptical question, is it not?
==============================================================
And the fact that there is a consensus of Fire Marshals that say fires can only start with gasoline. (the fire marshals that get g’ment grants to prove that fire only start with gasoline)
Threadjack: Why do I feel we are always playing Whack-A-Mole: Global Warming Threat: Permafrost Thawing Across Siberia And Alaska Poses New Concern, UNEP Reports – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/global-warming-permafrost-thaw-siberia_n_2196876.html
People who believe magic math that makes hockey sticks
is needed to look into magical boreholes where that “space for the roots/canopy, light/canopy, water/canopy/roots, 15 individual elements in proportion/roots, pollutants/toxic substances contacting canopy/roots, temperature canopy/roots” thing
vanishes, and suddenly, a tree, is a treemomotur
because we don’t have enough equipment
to look into the atmosphere around us and determine whether a certain spectra of infrared light has been growing in the atmosphere. We can’t check the atmosphere for infrared light because the task is too difficult,
but we can use magic hockey stick making math to interpret readings from magical boreholes that become readouts from magically,
treemomiturs.
And since we can’t make head nor tails of any of the above, everybody had better just lay down their old useless energy purchases
and buy energy from Al Gore’s Occidental Oil ‘Alternative Energy’ systems,
ignoring the election where we decided not to put his policies into effect,
because if we don’t,
we could all die.
Yeah that’s leadership. No, that’s Libtardship
‘What’s the average temperature of the planet?’ Silly to believe you could know the answer.
‘What should it be?’ Sillier still.
StanleySteamer:
At November 27, 2012 at 10:57 am you ask and say
Some time ago a group of us attempted to publish an analysis of these issues which addressed your questions, but the paper was blocked from publication by nefarious method.
The entire subject was covered in my submission to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry (i.e. whitewash) into climategate, and a draft of the paper is its Appendix B. Your post suggests you may want to read it. It is at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
Richard
JA:
At November 27, 2012 at 12:04 pm you say;
Please be aware that only an ignorant idiot would make such a claim.
H1tler was a fascist who attempted to exterminate socialists: he rounded up socialists and put them in extermination camps (along with Jews, communists, romanies and radical Christians).
Richard