I have to chuckle at the battle going on with stick graphs this weekend. Choose your weapon, flat or vertical blade, real data, or proxy data with an arbitrary extension added by the special effects department.
First, Christoper Booker’s flat bladed tool, made of real data from the UK Met office:
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/9919121/Look-at-the-graph-to-see-the-evidence-of-global-warming.html
Next we have Joe Romm’s vertical bladed tool, made from proxy data, with the “natural extension to the Marcott et al. graph” (according to Michael Tobis at planet 3.0) added, pulled out of some orifice and spliced on.
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/08/1691411/bombshell-recent-warming-is-amazing-and-atypical-and-poised-to-destroy-stable-climate-that-made-civilization-possible/
Which one would you rather have, young Jedi?
Shouldn’t all climate data come with a ‘health warning’ that ‘past performance is no guide to future performance’?
Really? I remember otherwise, for an entire decade.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
Maurice Strong, Baron Edmund de Rothschild and I. Michael Sweatman (4th WWC, Denver 1987) were quoting Dr. Mintzer of the World Resources Institute (DC)–BA in Literary Arts, MBA in Business Administration, and PhD in Energy Resource, all Berkelely–who used models only. For them, he was definitive.
Got a link for that?
stan stendera says:
March 10, 2013 at 6:59 pm
Anthony might want to get this sluyts chap to write a guest post. Impressivwe work!
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Heh! Stan, I think that’s “suyts”. Yes, it’s an adolescent acronym, but, it’s not quite “sluyts”. 🙂 But, thanks! Much of my knowledge of climate issues is derived from here. Anthony is always welcome to cross post my humble offerings.
If you’re referring to the Marcott critique, I can’t take credit. That was a guest post. Yes, it is impressive. Maybe another number cruncher can come by and independently validate? I’ll do it myself, but it doesn’t seem proper for me to say I’ve validated it when it’s a post on my blog.
Theyre both pretty bad arent they. How do you compare a 15 year graph and a 12000 year graph?
Booker’s graph shows 0.08C rise. Hardly the unprecedented dangerous rise in temperature that the UK Met Office still claim is happening. Perhaps they do not believe their own figures.
Steven Mosher 30 years has ‘picked ‘ not becasue its some magic number by which we reach statistical purity but becasue that number matches the data availability from satellites. And people could take this idea seriously if it were not for the frequent changes in it depended on what helps ‘the cause ‘ where 1 year is enough to claim proof but 16 years mean nothing when the data works against ‘the cause ‘
In reality we should use much longer time scales , if we are after perfection, but we don’t have the data for that to be practical and these time scales don’t help the ‘political’ angle at all either . The ‘scare’ has been all important to AGW right from the start so saying we need to wait hundreds for years of data is not going to work.
Gotta admit, Joe Romm’s schwartz is looking pretty healthy next to the flat line of reality.
James Sexton says:
March 10, 2013 at 11:05 pm
Now I know why your participation at this site has declined; I am very pleased to learn about your site, suyts, and I will visit regularly.
Re the article title:
http://xkcd.com/1022/
As a reminder Mr. Mosher is an English major with a background in sales and marketing not science, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/steven-mosher/1/b07/27b
Stephen Brown says:
March 10, 2013 at 1:14 pm
UK tropical?
You wish! The UK is at a “crossroads” between cycling air masses from the south AND the north as well as ocean currents warm and cool(er). If the anti-anti-alarmists are correct..if you do not like the weather wait an hour or so. If you didn’t like the season, fear not, next time will be different. Get yourself a sturdy umbrella and lots a lip balm.
Eventually you would get winter in Scotland and summer in southern England….at the same time.
oflo says:
March 11, 2013 at 1:51 am
Theyre both pretty bad arent they.
How do you compare a 15 year graph and a 12000 year graph?
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Any way you want 😉
Hey, i just came up with a new “talking point”…Carbon Terrorism is on DRUGS!
Time to cut myself off and drink a glass of H2O…
“30 years is the minimum acceptable period for which any assessment of temperature change can be made, aside from his use of the 1997 maximum as a starting point. This is not a quibble about his choice of period, it is a mathematical essential for any statistical interpretation.”
That 30 points assumes each year is an independent random variable. If yearly temperature is NOT a random variable- and it isn’t- with 22 year sunspot cycles, a possible 30 year oscillation in the PDO, etc, you’d need more like 30*30= 900 years to be able to deduce that such and such a fluctuation would happen by chance is under 5%.