By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
As Anthony and others have pointed out, even the New York Times has at last been constrained to admit what Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC was constrained to admit some months ago. There has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for getting on for two decades.
The NYT says the absence of warming arises because skeptics cherry-pick 1998, the year of the Great el Niño, as their starting point. However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.
Usefully, the latest version of the Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly series provides not only the anomalies themselves but also the 2 σ uncertainties.
Superimposing the temperature curve and its least-squares linear-regression trend on the statistical insignificance region bounded by the means of the trends on these published uncertainties since January 1996 demonstrates that there has been no statistically-significant warming in 17 years 4 months:
On Dr. Santer’s 17-year test, then, the models may have failed. A rethink is needed.
The fact that an apparent warming rate equivalent to almost 0.9 Cº is statistically insignificant may seem surprising at first sight, but there are two reasons for it. First, the published uncertainties are substantial: approximately 0.15 Cº either side of the central estimate.
Secondly, one weakness of linear regression is that it is unduly influenced by outliers. Visibly, the Great el Niño of 1998 is one such outlier.
If 1998 were the only outlier, and particularly if it were the largest, going back to 1996 would be much the same as cherry-picking 1998 itself as the start date.
However, the magnitude of the 1998 positive outlier is countervailed by that of the 1996/7 la Niña. Also, there is a still more substantial positive outlier in the shape of the 2007 el Niño, against which the la Niña of 2008 countervails.
In passing, note that the cooling from January 2007 to January 2008 is the fastest January-to-January cooling in the HadCRUT4 record going back to 1850.
Bearing these considerations in mind, going back to January 1996 is a fair test for statistical significance. And, as the graph shows, there has been no warming that we can statistically distinguish from zero throughout that period, for even the rightmost endpoint of the regression trend-line falls (albeit barely) within the region of statistical insignificance.
Be that as it may, one should beware of focusing the debate solely on how many years and months have passed without significant global warming. Another strong el Niño could – at least temporarily – bring the long period without warming to an end. If so, the cry-babies will screech that catastrophic global warming has resumed, the models were right all along, etc., etc.
It is better to focus on the ever-widening discrepancy between predicted and observed warming rates. The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:
The variance between prediction and observation over the 100 months from January 2005 to April 2013 is thus equivalent to 3.2 Cº/century.
The correlation coefficient is low, the period of record is short, and I have not yet obtained the monthly projected-anomaly data from the modelers to allow a proper p-value comparison.
Yet it is becoming difficult to suggest with a straight face that the models’ projections are healthily on track.
From now on, I propose to publish a monthly index of the variance between the IPCC’s predicted global warming and the thermometers’ measurements. That variance may well inexorably widen over time.
In any event, the index will limit the scope for false claims that the world continues to warm at an unprecedented and dangerous rate.
UPDATE: Lucia’s Blackboard has a detailed essay analyzing the recent trend, written by SteveF, using an improved index for accounting for ENSO, volcanic aerosols, and solar cycles. He concludes the best estimate rate of warming from 1997 to 2012 is less than 1/3 the rate of warming from 1979 to 1996. Also, the original version of this story incorrectly referred to the Washington Post, when it was actually the New York Times article by Justin Gillis. That reference has been corrected.- Anthony
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[snip – Greg House under a new fake name. Verified by network path. Mr. House has been shown the door but decided to come back as a fake persona preaching the Slayer/Principia meme. -Anthony]
jai mitchell says:
June 14, 2013 at 2:55 pm
“The sinusoidal solar cycle, held at a constant average incidence for 50 years will not produce a long-term.”
If that were the case, sure. But, we are interested in this particular solar system which we inhabit, where there are several quasi-cycles, and no stationary average.
Lil Fella from OZ says:
June 13, 2013 at 1:58 pm
Dr. Pachauri said that he would not take notice of these trends unless they continued for 40 years.
I could not work that out seeing Dr.Carter wrote that 30 year spans are climate as opposed to the general comment regarding weather. Does the money run out then!?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No Dr. Pachauri will be dead by then. He is now 72 and his chances of living another 40-16= 24 years is pretty slim. So he doesn’t have to worry about ‘take notice of these trends’ or about the pitchforks and torches….
taxed says:
June 13, 2013 at 2:32 pm
….. but l do think we can expect to see more heavy rain and the risk of floods across the NH during the rest of the year. As Arctic air dives deep to the south.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Tell me about it. It is 57F (13C) just south of RGB @ur momisugly Duke Univ. in NC. Summer? What Summer.
Lord Monckton: Whether there is warming or not, it has nothing to do with carbon dioxide which, if anything, has a net cooling effect of about 0.002 C degree as I can show. This calculation is based up the process of spontaneous evolution of thermodynamic equilibrium which the physics of the Second Law of Thermodynamics states “evolves spontaneously” thus producing a gravity effect which also “evolves spontaneously” as it established an autonomous temperature gradient – which is indeed the state of thermodynamic equilibrium with greatest accessible entropy, just as the Second Law says will evolve spontaneously. Thus there is no need to explain 33 degrees of warming with any greenhouse conjecture – it has already been “done” by gravity – on all planets – in their atmospheres, and also in their crusts and mantles if applicable.
The ineluctable retreat of the lying Mr. Stokes and the confused Mansion continues. First the liar. Mr. Stokes, like many of the paid and unpaid trolls who fill their aimless hours with hatred for those of us who question how much of the predicted global warming will happen, merely repeats his lie even after it has been thoroughly dismantled. His latest version of the lie is that Professor Brown explicitly criticized one of my graphs and did not criticize the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
Here is what Professor Brown actually said when Mr. Stokes first uttered his now-failed lie:
“Aw, c’mon Nick, you can do better than that. Clearly I was referring to the AR5 ensemble average over climate models, which is pulled from the actual publication IIRC. This is hardly the first time it has been presented on WUWT.”
Indeed it was not the first time the graph had been presented on WUWT. I had myself presented it only a few weeks previously, when explaining how I proposed to use it as the basis for contrast with what is actually happening to global temperatures.
Mr. Stokes says my graph does not look anything like the graph in AR5 and accuses me of having done “statistics” on it. My graph faithfully reproduces the upper and lower bounds of the range of predictions made by 34 computer models and displayed in the IPCC’s spaghetti graph, though for clarity I have not troubled to show the spaghetti in between. And the only thing I have added to the graph is the central projection – but that, even if Mr. Stokes wants to call it “statistics”, is, as I have already demonstrated, the IPCC’s piece of “statistics”, and not mine. So that was what Professor Brown was criticizing, and that was what Professor Brown explicitly stated he was criticizing.
Mr. Stokes now abjectly retreats from the field by saying that he does not consider Professor Brown’s criticism justified. In that event, why did he bother to utter his lie in the first place? Could it be that his sole aim in lying was to make up whatever nonsense he could for the sake of trying to discredit me personally rather than my graph, with which he now belatedly concedes he has little quarrel? One hopes he is being paid well to troll here and elsewhere, for he has made a spectacular ass of himself, and not for the first time.
So to the confused Mr. Mansion. He now realizes that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, and – to his dismay – that his attempt at a counter-example was a failure. He had said that if a room were warmed by a heater but someone opened and shut the window several times there would be no correlation between the warmth from the heater and the temperature variability in the room. He now realizes – again belatedly – that the heater’s continuous output could not have caused the variability and that, therefore, the absence of correlation between that continuous heat output and the variability of the temperature implies absence of causation between them.
However, like many trolls, he now shifts his ground rather than admit that his original assertion that absence of correlation does not necessarily imply absence of causation was incorrect in logic. Here is his priceless shift of ground:
“So, a) the heater heats the air, this is causation. Now, b) the temperature goes up and down or perhaps only down, thus no correlation. Does lack of correlation mean the heater does not heat the air? Get it now?”
Here, Mr. Mansion makes an error of logic that we must pray was not deliberate, though with trolls such errors usually are deliberate. He now says he was talking about a causative correlation between turning on the heater and the fact that once the heater is turned on it emits heat, making the air in the room warmer than it would otherwise have been. But if that was what he had meant from the outset, why introduce the complication of the opening and shutting window?
If one adds CO2 to an atmosphere such as ours, one would expect some warming to result. However, since warming is not at present resulting, there is at present no correlation between the steady increase in CO2 concentration and the variability of global temperatures: indeed, for up to 16 years 6 months (on the RSS dataset), there has been no global warming at all. Therefore, the CO2 concentration change cannot be causative of the current temperature fluctuations.
The implication one should draw from this is not that CO2 does not cause wom3 warming (it does: get over it) but that the warming signal from CO2 is so weak that several rather small natural cooling effects have been able to overwhelm it for getting on for two decades. The fact that there have been other periods of up to a dozen years without warming in the instrumental temperature record since 1850 tells us nothing: for during those periods our emissions of CO2 were not substantial enough to make a difference. They are now, but they are not making a difference, and that is interesting.
Mr. Mansion, for some spiteful reason determined to try to score a blow, says Dr. Santer’s argument that if there had been x years without global warming the models would be shown to be wrong, which I had explicitly addressed in the head posting, was really my argument. No, it wasn’t: the head posting had explicitly stated that such arguments could be imprudent and it was better to concentrate on the growing discrepancy between colorful prediction and unexciting reality.
Mr. Mansion says I had used the “no warming for x years” argument myself several months previously at the Doha climate conference. Yes, I did, for I had only a few seconds in which to make a point that would register with delegates (which is why, contrary to Mr. Mansion’s assertion that I had made it “repeatedly”, I had made it just once, as the video of my speech clearly shows). Indeed, the point I made is one that has rung around the world. But the head posting was what Mr. Mansion was addressing, and he only shifted his ground to Doha when he realized that his attempt to find fault with the head posting had failed.
Mr. Mansion – a glutton for punishment – goes on to say he did not consider himself under any obligation to state the period of the “overall trend” of global warming that he had previously mentioned, on the ground that the period was irrelevant to his point. If so, then his point was itself irrelevant. Since 10,000 years ago there has been global cooling. Since 150 years ago there has been global warming. The period of the “overall trend”, therefore, is crucial to any mention of an “overall trend”.
He then uses the usual troll technique of repeating a bad point that had already been demolished. He says that what he calls my “warming pause” argument (an argument I had explicitly stated I was not making, for it was Dr. Santer’s argument I was addressing) “does not contradict the alleged overall warming trend at all”. But I did not say it contradicted some other, unspecified period during which warming had occurred. Since warming and cooling may both occur and are observed, it ought to be self-evident even to the confused Mr. Mansion that the existence of a period of cooling does not contradict the existence of a previous period of warming.
Readers will by now have received the impression that Mr. Stokes and Mr. Mansion are somewhat out of their depth and out of their league. Both display an unbecoming intellectual dishonesty that is a discredit to them and to whatever causes they consider they are espousing. The monthly Global Warming Prediction Index will, for the first time, provide a straightforward benchmark to demonstrate whether and to what extent global temperature changes reflect what the models had predicted. At present, and conspicuously, they do not.
Instead of constantly quoting temperature anomaly, can we just report “model anomaly” or “model deviance”?
Monckton of Brenchley says: June 15, 2013 at 1:25 am
“His latest version of the lie is that Professor Brown explicitly criticized one of my graphs and did not criticize the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).”
It’s hardly my latest version. In my second comment I pointed out RGB’s explicit introduction:
“This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge.”
And he goes on. There’s no doubt what he is criticising. It is “the graphs Monckton publishes above”. I have never contended that he did not criticise the AR5 elsewhere. he often does. But his remarks here were directed to graphs. He says which ones, and specifies no others.
“when Mr. Stokes first uttered his now-failed lie:”
I simply pointed out that your name was on the graph. True or not?
” and accuses me of having done “statistics” on it”
Well, somebody did. It says, for example, *3.20 C/century variance. This was one of the subjects of RGB criticism. Did you not calculate that? And r2=0.04? The variance that caused RGB to expostulate:
“using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error”
“which he now belatedly concedes he has little quarrel”
I said way back here
I don’t even think it’s that bad, but RGB says:
“One simply wishes to bitch-slap whoever it was that assembled the graph and ensure that they never work or publish in the field of science or statistics ever again.”
I pointed out early on that RGB had criticised the graph in severe terms, clearly thinking it was from the IPCC. I simply noted that it was yours, not theirs, which I think is a reasonable observation. I had no wish to take the matter further, but since you have insisted with increasing shrillness that these simple facts are lies, told by a habitual liar, I have no option but to patiently repeat the facts.
Clearly he thought he was referring to the IPCC, but the graph is labelled “Monckton”, and his diatribe matches the graph in this post. It does not match the AR5 graphs that he later linked to.
You mean, except for 11.33b, the graph following 11.33a that does precisely what Monckton claims. Perhaps the problem is the attribution. Perhaps he should have just referenced 11.33. Or 1.4.
Also, Nick, I’m puzzled. When Trenberth et. al. talk about the current neutral temperature trend not being rejected by “the models” at the “95% confidence level” — a phrase I seem to recall hearing fairly repeatedly as warmists seek to reassure the world, the media, and the U. S. Congress that warming continues without a rise in temperature. I might have heard it a time or two in the overall AR5 report, as well.
What, exactly, does this “confidence” refer to? Does it mean that it is still not the case that 95% of the spaghetti snarl of GCM results (where even 11.33a is probably not showing all that are out there, in particular the individual runs within a model that might give us some idea of what the variance of future predictions is within a model and hence how robust they are to trivial perturbations of initial state) have failed miserably? That seems to be what you are suggesting.
Look, there are two ways one can do things. Either you can use real statistics, following the rules (which are there for a reason!) and reject most of the GCMs because they are falsified by the evidence one at a time because the concept of “ensemble of model results” as an entity with predictive force quite literally has no meaning, in spite of the fact that (as figures 1.4, 11.33, and others in AR5 make perfect clear, the IPCC desperately wants to convince the lay public and policy makers that it does, implying with every single lying figure that a “consensus” of model results should be given weight in a multitrillion dollar decisioning process, or you can stop using terms like “confidence level” in climate science altogether. As it is, you seem to be suggesting that there is no criterion that you would consider falsification of the models, either individually or collectively.
Is this the case, or are you just picking nits over which figure or whether the figure captions (which generally do not explain precisely how their grey or light blue or whatever “ranges” supposedly representing error/variance are computed — personally I think somebody draws them in with a drawing program and the human eye because they are invariably smooth and appealing, unlike the snarl they usually hide from the public (for example, it is perfectly and laughably obvious that the “error bars” drawn onto the annual data in figure 1.4 were just made up and have no meaning whatsoever save to make it look like the figure is “science”)?
So let me extend the questions I raise to you personally. Do you think that the deviation of, say, the leftmost/highest models in 11.33a (the ones that are the farthest from reality over the last 15+ years) justifies their summary rejection as being unlikely to be correct? If not, why not?
If so, how far over and down do you think one should go rejecting models?
If you think it is reasonable to reject any of the models at all as being falsified, do you think it is “good science” to present them in the AR5 report in spite of the fact that nobody really takes them seriously any more (and believe me, even most climate scientists don’t seem to take Hansen’s ravings of 5+ C warming/century seriously any more, not after 1/7 of a century of neutral temperatures and a third of a century of ~0.1 C/decade temperature rise — e.g. UAH LTT)?
If it isn’t good science to present them on an equal footing with more successful (or not as glaringly failed) model predictions then why are they there — could it be because of political reasons — because without them the centroid of GCM climate results stops looking so, um “catastrophic”?
Do you think that the phrase “confidence” and the terminology of hypothesis testing has any purpose whatsoever in climate science (since as far as I can tell, nobody ever rejects a hypothesis such as “this particular GCM can be trusted when it predicts global warming even though it fails to predict rainfall, temperature, the coupling between surface temperatures and LTTs, or the variations in the major decadal oscillations better than a pair of broadly constrained dice”)?
For example, do you think that the AR4 “Summary for policy makers” should have included the phrases: “strengthening the confidence in near term projections”, or “Advances in climate change modelling now enable best estimates and likely assessed uncertainty ranges to be given for projected warming for different emission scenarios. Results for different emission scenarios are provided explicitly in this report to avoid loss of this policy-relevant information. Projected global average surface warmings for the end of the 21st century (2090–2099) relative to 1980–1999 are shown in Table SPM.3. These illustrate the differences between lower and higher SRES emission scenarios, and the projected warming uncertainty associated with these scenarios. {10.5}”?
When it presents figure SPM5 — as Multi-model global averages of surface warming with shading denotes the +/-1 standard deviation of individual model annual averages and uses phrases such as “likely range” (emphasis theirs, not mine) is this utterly misleading? Do the authors of these documents need to be bitch-slapped?
Does the fact that graphics, commentary, and the abuse of statistical language used backwards — to suggest that the models have a 95% chance of being correct instead of not quite having made some arbitrary rejection threshold as they continue to deviate from reality — of almost identical nature are in the AR5 draft deserve any comment whatsoever?
In your opinion, of course. I’m just curious. Do you really think that this is all OK? I occasionally have the temerity to comment on /. on climate reposts, and there is a religious army that will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you assert that global warming or sea level rise will be less than 3 to 5 C or meters respectively, because there are many people who uncritically accept this crap about “95% confidence” completely backwards (who understands statistical hypothesis testing? Not even all statisticians…)
Do you think the end justifies the means?
Just curious.
rgb
I bet the oddds of Nick responding to all of RGB questions are 100 to 1 against. Any takers?
Mr. Stokes continues to lie and lie and lie again. How childish.
He has been corrected by Professor Brown but persists in his lie, which he now embellishes with further nonsense. For instance, the variance on my graph is that between the IPCC’s own prediction and reality, not, as he has assumed between the upper and lower bounds of the IPC’s predictions.
The correlation coefficient, too, is calculated not on the IPCC’s projections but on the real-world data. And, whether he likes it or not, it is correctly calculated: I invited a Professor of Statistics to verify the correlation coefficient independently by reference to the source data to ensure that I had not made a mistake.
If only Mr. Stokes were less desperate to find fault, he would not have been led deeper and deeper into his futile lie.
The position, then, is this. The derivation of the orange prediction region on my graph is explained clearly in an earlier posting by me, to which I have already referred Mr. Stokes. The derivation of the IPCC’s central projection was explained earlier by me. There is, therefore, nothing wrong with my portrayal of the range of projections or of the central projection in AR5.
On the same graph I have superimposed the HadCRUt4 temperature anomalies since 2005; I have calculated the least-squares trend-line; I have compared the slopes of the IPCC’s central projection and the trend-line on the observed data to establish the variance between prediction and reality; and I have calculated the correlation coefficient on the observed data. And that is that. The entire process is innocent and reasonable, and has been adequately explained to Mr. Stokes many times.
Therefore, let him stop lying, stop picking nits, and try – just for once – to do something constructive with his time. If this is the best the trolls can do to derail the Global Warming Prediction Index, then it is an effort as feeble as it is mendacious. Mr. Stokes should be ashamed of himself.
nevket240 says:
June 14, 2013 at 9:36 pm
Thanks for that link. I know it’s somewhat old news, but it bears repeating since it shows how monumentally wrong the WarmBelievers are. The brief warming period of the 80s and 90s will be looked upon as the halcyon days of modern climate. All of the “carbon” we could possibly pump out won’t stop the cooling, since it never had much warming effect to begin with. Although, it should help with the continued greening of the planet.
rgbatduke says: June 15, 2013 at 3:59 am
“You mean, except for 11.33b, the graph following 11.33a that does precisely what Monckton claims.”
What does it do that Monckton claims? It shows only a median and quantiles. It does not have means, variances, r2 etc about which you were so indignant. You said the person who assembled those should be drummed out of science. Who do you think it was?
Lord M assembled his graph from something. He says (over and over) it was 11.33a, and describes it as a spaghetti plot. It’s written on the graph. I’d assume it is what he used.
On model matching, as I said above, the models generate artificial weather, which they do not claim as weather predictions. That is one reason why they don’t align. They generate all kinds of realistic patterns, but the phase is uncertain. In real weather, we also have predictable patterns (ENSO etc) with unpredictable timing.
What Trenberth and others are saying is that from weather observed long enough, you can deduce a climate. That is true for both models and the Earth. Climate modellers are making predictions about the climate, not the weather – even decadal weather.
So the Earth has quite long hot and cold spells, superimposed now on the radiant forcing effect. Models have them too, but there’s no expectation that they will align in phase. You have to weight for a proper climate average from both before you can decide whether models have succeeded or not.
So no, I don’t think individual deviant models should be considered wrong after fifteen years. Of course, models produce hugely detailed pictures of the Earth’s weather, and there are many consistency tests that can be applied. Global mean surface temperature is only a small part of the story.
As to what SPM5 will say, we’ll have to wait and see. Fig 11.33 only shows median and quantiles, and box plots. The latter seem to reflect the varying estimation methods of the individual authors. Your bitchslap diatribe was based on Lord Monckton’s statistics, not AR5.
“Monckton of Brenchley says:
June 15, 2013 at 4:38 am”
Add to that list Jai Mitchell.
Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 4:53 am
So the Earth has quite long hot and cold spells, superimposed now on the radiant forcing effect. Models have them too, but there’s no expectation that they will align in phase. You have to weight for a proper climate average from both before you can decide whether models have succeeded or not.
Well then, I would suppose you would support that we all wait until the models show that they have succeeded (or not) before you would perform any action on the projection/predictions of the models?
So far, with them being so out of phase, the prudent thing would be to do nothing based on them, would it not?
Monckton of Brenchley says: June 15, 2013 at 4:38 am
“If only Mr. Stokes were less desperate to find fault, he would not have been led deeper and deeper into his futile lie.”
I think you’ve forgotten what the alleged lie is. But I’ve actually did little faultfindingt. I haven’t disputed the correctness of your calculations. I’m agnostic on the appropriateness, but I think some summary method should be found, and yours is in that direction.
The big fault-finder here is RGB. You’ve just confirmed, in your last post, that you are the author of the statistical methods that he so trenchantly condemned, in the graph he clearly pointed to.
Now it’s not a big issue for me what RGB thinks of Lord M’s statistics. I just object to him trying to pin it on the AR5. They didn’t do it.
JohnWho says: June 15, 2013 at 5:11 am
“So far, with them being so out of phase, the prudent thing would be to do nothing based on them, would it not?”
No. The fact is that we have dug up and burned nearly 400 Gtons of carbon. This has increased CO2 in the air by about 40%. There are thousands more Gt that we are likely to burn, unless we can figure out how to avoid it.
CO2 is a GHG, and its accumulation will make the world hotter. We have a real interest in knowing how much. GCM’s represent our best chance of finding out. We need to get as much information from them as we can. Doing nothing is not a riskfree policy.
Looks like NH ice has stopped melting again
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Or is it just that the team has told DMI to put a stop to that graph? LOL
There really is a diversion problem occurring
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ compare with DMI sea ice area same date. So who do you trust?
nick
In the real world-rather than the one of composite temperatures optimistically labelled ‘global’-temperatures are not rising and haven’t been for a decade
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
it would be more helpful to look at regional/koppen zone temperatures to see what is happening but Mosh doesn’t seem to like that idea.
In the meantime we have a global averaged temperature which is as useful as an average global telephone number or the global average economic growth rate in as much neither none of these matrix bears any relation to individual circumstances
tonyb
Nick Stokes says:
June 15, 2013 at 5:43 am
CO2 is a GHG, and its accumulation will make the world hotter. We have a real interest in knowing how much.
That’s the Belief of you Climahysterics. Since there is no evidence so far that the additional C02 (wherever it’s from) has, in fact warmed the planet. Your Belief system, and that of all Warmists won’t allow you to see that though. As far as your “real interest in knowing how much”, that’s hilarious.
No.
Setting aside any discussion about the actual AMOUNT of coal and oil we’ve dug up and burned, CO2 doesn’t just hang around, as much as that would move the narrative forward. CO2 is actively removed at varying and, if required, fantastically rapid rates.
Again, the continual repeating of this mantra does not make it so. The fact is that we do NOT have continuous and credible records of just what the CO2 level has been for most of this interglacial. There is still compelling evidence that the levels have been in the range they are now during the last few hundred years. And there’s still that little question about which increases first: the CO2 levels or the temperature…
Myself, I’m actively committed to burning each and every gram I can get my hands on, just to nullify the efforts of the luddites that think they’re saving the planet by avoiding burning any. And after seeing the CROWDS that turned out to protest Alberta Oil Sands Development while our PM was visiting parliament in London this week, I’m even more determined to make sure each and every one of them is disappointed.
@Nick Stokes
Nick as many have noticed you seem to be AC/DC on the whether chaos is important or not then you try and compare it all to turbulent flow in fluid mechanics. The problem is it is nothing like turbulent flow as we have two chaotic systems in the sun and earth/atmosphere linked together.
Remember the completely normal equilibrium situation of a body at earth distance from sun without greenhouse gases is the sun facing side of the planet to be several hundred degrees above zero the dark side to be several hundred degrees below zero …. we see that exact behavior on the ISS.
I dislike the chaos argument not for anything you discussed but for the above effect the chaotic behavior has defined limits and the chaos is synchronized to the drive force which is another slightly chaotic system being the sun.
Climate therefore has a definitive type of physics it belongs to => synchronized chaotic systems
When you synchronize chaos there are some pretty standard problems and most of them come back to haunt climate science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_of_chaos)
There are robust ways to pick signals out of synchronized chaos it is done a lot in the field of speech recognition and communications especially.
Put “robust signal detection in synchronized chaotic systems” into google and you will get the theory and a multitude of areas we use it which will be most disciplines. What you will find very few references for is climate change.
So the question for all you climate astrology types Nick is the mathematics and theory exists there is even prolific details on how to build models for these systems and the problems they encounter.
So the question to you Nick is why is so little of this used in climate change there is simply massive amounts of real and proper science available in this area thanks largely to speech and image recognition?
@rgbatduke thank you for your posts excelent stuff.
There are two scientists who I trust implicitly for some common sense and expertise when reading about the climate. @rgbatduke is one and Judith Curry over at her site is another. They have superlative credentials and conduct themselves with the kind of dignity and integrity that I always assumed all scientists did. Little did I know that others who are supposed to be scientists never evolved beyond adolescence, Agnostic initially, it didnt take long for me to see that defensive behavior and ad hominem attacks replaced robust scientific debate. Long live science.