Burt Rutan: 'This says it all and says it clear'

Bart says:
January 25, 2013 at 10:03 am

You are preaching a storyline which has been assumed and taken on a patina of scientific respectability by repetition alone. But, it is discredited by the evidence before us. Stop regurgitating cant, and get those neurons firing.

The graphs you’ve shown suppress low-frequency, long-term information–that’s what a derivative does. In electronics, a differentiator circuit can be used as a high-pass filter; you could literally boost the treble and supress the bass in your stereo with it. So, once you’ve taken the derivative, your signal has little to say about long-term trends.
As you’ve noted, the information is still in there, but it’s been suppressed so much that you can’t hope to see anything about long-term trends on a noisy signal by eyeballing a couple of lines on a graph. In fact, taking a derivative is a pretty good recipe for preventing any information about long-term trends from being noiticed.
Bart says:
January 25, 2013 at 10:08 am

BTW, your WoodForTrees link is to my chart comparing the CO2 derivative with temperature. Nice correlation, eh? You cannot fail to see my point.
Now, try to correlate absolute CO2 levels with temperature – can’t be done.

And so it was. Thanks for letting me know. [Mod: Thanks for fixing the other formatting problem too; my apologies for that as well.] Here is the link that I meant to post:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:24/scale:0.0095/offset:-3.1/plot/gistemp/from:1959/mean:24
Absolute CO2 actually does correlate well with temperature in the long term. Of course, with that sort of short-term fluctuations in temperature, a graph, by itself, does not indicate which is cause and which effect, or whether both stem from a common cause, or whether it is mere coincidence. Those who believe that CO2 is driving temperature expect this due to greenhouse gas theory, and use graphs like the one linked above for confirmation.
Correlations between the rate of change of CO2 vs. temperature are interesting, not least because what you find is exactly what you would expect from some known mechanisms opperating on an annual timeframe (with variations lasting several years). But the whole idea of scary AGW is that it should operate over much longer timeframes, and your efforts will run into a brick wall whenever a believer brings up the short-term vs. long-term issue, and points out that you’re looking only at short-term changes when it’s long-term changes that they fear. Especially because the known mechanisms for short-term changes won’t work for the long-term ones.

“So, once you’ve taken the derivative, your signal has little to say about long-term trends.”
As can be plainly seen, there is still a trend in the derivative of CO2. That trend integrates into the curvature of the absolute CO2. And, that curvature is what falsifies significant contribution from human sources. I’ve written extensively about all of this above. Please familiarize yourself with the argument before going any further.
“Absolute CO2 actually does correlate well with temperature in the long term.”
No, it doesn’t. This is the flip side of your argument above: integrating suppresses higher frequency information. So, all you’ve got is a similarity in very low frequency, which is very easy to match on a superficial level when you are allowing yourself to pick and choose the offset and linear terms.
“…your efforts will run into a brick wall whenever a believer brings up the short-term vs. long-term issue…”
There is no issue. The dCO2/dt relationship with temperature integrates precisely into the observed CO2 and matches all the variation as well as the longer term trend and curvature. Occam’s Razor then kicks in.
To do what you are proposing, there would have to be implausibly complicated mechanisms in place which high pass filter the temperature contribution, and low pass filter the human contributions, and match the two outcomes precisely in phase so that it looks like temperature only is all that is needed. Which is more likely? Such fantastic processing of the signals to make it look just like it would when it is only temperature driving it, or in fact that it is only temperature which is driving it?

Well, Gail, I have to disagree. I think the CO2 measurements offer corroboration of the adjustments, as the correlation between the adjusted temperatures and the CO2 derivative is readily apparent.
That temperatures and CO2 should be so correlated I explain here. I think the keepers of the records are not fraudsters, merely not up to the job of drawing the correct inferences from the data.