People send me stuff.
The IPCC has announced (via a “leak” campaign only to selected media outlets, such as Reuters, NYT, WaPo) that they are now 95% certain. From Reuters:
Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.
I’m glad they pinned down “…since the 1950s”, that’s important.
According to this MotherJones report:
According to Jonathan Lynn, who is head of communications at the IPCC, the organization expects that leaks will occur because report drafts wind up in so many different hands. Lynn cautions that “there’s no question that the final report will not be the same as the drafts.”
I’ve been in touch with IPCC secretariat Mr. Jonathan Lynn, and while he’s glad to point out issues on WUWT, neither he nor any of the media outlets that have the “leaked” report are willing to provide WUWT with a copy. No matter, we’ll simply go with what we know.
Here is the statement again, emphasis mine:
Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.
OK, so here’s the 64 thousand dollar questions for IPCC cheerleaders:
- Which side is which time period?
- What caused the warming before CO2 became an issue to be essentially identical to the period when it is claimed to be the main driver?
- How is the IPCC 95% certain one side is caused by man and the other is not?
h/t to Burt Rutan, but I believe the original comparison concept was by Warren Meyer.
BTW, the answer should be obvious which is which due to the telltale 1997-1998 El Niño signature in one graph.
@Ian –
CNN also repeated the lies this morning (as I noted in an earlier post on another thread). No question about it, the MSM are political campaigners, not news reporters. Only Fox seems to have not taken this low road, but even they could do a lot more than occasionally having Marc Morano on Cavuto.
@dp, Richard M –
How easy it is to blow holes in AGW with the simplest of observations. Good work.
Steve in Seattle says:
August 20, 2013 at 7:43 pm
You’re welcome. I’ve kept it since the dawn of YouTube time, but felt that the hubris of 95% certainty of man-made Armageddon finally warranted sharing it, however marginally apropos.
Glad you enjoyed it. Carlin was more politically liberal than I, but that didn’t stop me from being a fan since Wonderful WINO & the voice from nowhere days. A sensible funny man.
95%… so there are at least AR6 96%, AR7 97%, AR8 98%, AR9 99% and AR10 100% for UN bureaucrats although they may not stop there… AR12 102%?
600,000 Carlin hits…..and I’ll bet that….wait for it….95% found it funny. Except that nobody would be sceptical about that, nor forced to toe the line about it.
TomRude says:
August 20, 2013 at 8:50 pm
In 2033, the UN will be sure that humans were responsible for warming the planet from 1977 to 1996, keeping it even until 2013, then cooling it for the next 20 years. No matter what happens, it’s 100% our fault & it’s 100% bad. No other option is possible, since it’s all unprecedented, worse than we thought & can only be fixed by expanding government, preferably the UN, but if need be, then the regimes of all those member, primitive nation-states.
Willis wrote an append a while back about oil on the water, that during WW2 there was an incredible amount of oil dumped on the ocean surface. He hypothesized that that caused the unusually cold winters during that time period. Coming from that artificial cold, as the oil was consumed by organisms, would look like an unusually fast rate of warming.
Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
August 20, 2013 at 8:55 pm
At least 95% of viewers found the clip 95% funny at the 95% confidence level, at least 95% of the time. Its incontrovertible humor is settled, by consensus.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
Rattus, obviously you support laws against plastic bags. Only those who fear the plastic could not find this funny.
dbstealey says:
August 20, 2013 at 3:53 pm
richardscourtney,
Was this the chart you asked about?
And here is another chart based on Phil Jones data.
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Using the Phil Jones data one could make a WUWT escalator. I’m sure it would be a nice addition on the right side of the site. 🙂
Human give themselves “way too much” credit for everything.
Day By Day says:
August 20, 2013 at 9:07 pm
The Earth…plus plastic.
Rob says:
August 20, 2013 at 9:15 pm
You want to talk organisms effecting climate change on Earth, how ’bout them microbes?
Our atmosphere went from practically no oxygen to a little bit to a few percent to 10% to 20% to 35% (dangerously combustible) back down to 21%, all without benefit of human activity.
Ditto from oceans of molten lava to oceans of water ice covering the planet, with little or no effect from organisms of any kind, but certainly not very complex.
Rob, Milodon,
To give ourselves too much credit is to claim we know more than we do. That is Comtism (of Auguste Comte). Comte pushed this thinking and called it “positivism”, inspiring Hegel and Marx. It’s an exaggerated sense of knowing without humility, a resisting, a suppression of the discomfort of our vast not-knowing. The not-knowing that is basic to science. This error that triggered the imbalance and arrogance of the European “Enlightenment” and led to mass deaths of the twentieth and soon the twenty-first century. Taken up by fascists and pro-agressives, today it fuels every idealistic world movement, continuing to be incredibly dangerous, still gaining in strength. Quack environmentalism is but one way to express of positivism’s motivation. If it was just pseudo-environmentalism we could probably knock it down, but it’s much more integrated into society than that.
Positivism means that science and philosophy are literally a thing of the past, that there more important things at hand. It’s why there’s so little traction with proper science.
MattN says: August 20, 2013 at 4:26 pm
I’d recommend going back and using CRUT4 data. …
I agree. With Hadcrut 4 it’s even tougher to tell them apart because they kicked up the post 1998 temps, which makes the el nino much less prominent.
dbstealey’s chart from Phil Jones could be (ab)used thus:
The identical increases in temperature are natural BUT, they are on top of a steadily increasing man-made, catastrophic-if-it-continues, have to go back to the dark ages, man-made-CO2-induced global warming.
If the chart goes much higher perhaps it will prop up the sky and stop it falling.
should be assumed
In February of 2010 I posted a version of this comparison to various forums and news sites, based on the NOAA’s Climate.gov plot of the global average T:
http://s22.postimg.org/h73fr7elt/NOAA_Update_B.gif
I just fixed a typo too (“vertical” -> “horizontal”).
dbstealey:
Thankyou for the graphs you provide at August 20, 2013 at 3:53 pm.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/20/when-somebody-hits-you-with-that-new-ipcc-is-95-certain-talking-point-show-them-this/#comment-1395684
Yes, those are what I meant, And I suggest everybody needs to look at them.
Richard
From an article out today…
http://theweek.com/article/index/248472/4-shocking-findings-from-the-uns-latest-climate-change-report:
“The biggest headline from the report is that scientists are now more convinced than ever that humans are causing climate change. In a shot to climate change deniers, the report says that not only is the phenomenon real, but that there is a 95 percent certainty human activity is driving it.”
Now contrasted that with other findings in the IPCC report…
“While temperatures are still climbing, they have been doing so at a slower pace since about 1998, the report says. Previous research has suggested that this is the case, lending fuel to climate change skeptics who cite it as a proof that the crisis is overblown. The reasons behind the slowdown are unclear. The report cites several possibilities with “medium confidence,” such as an increase in volcanic ash lingering in the atmosphere, changes in the sun’s solar cycle, and a theory that oceans are now absorbing more energy in the past.”
How does medium understanding of the last 15 years translate to 95% confidence over the last 50 years? No reply required of course.
I have even read 95-100% confidence in some articles. The gloves are coming off.
If you swap the above graphs over and join them you get a rough idea how the temperature trend for the past ~120 years would look if James Hansen had stuck to astronomy and Phil Jones to hydrology.
William Astley says:
August 20, 2013 at 4:28 pm
The 95% percent confidence is a politically derived number. It has no scientific basis.
===============================================================
Of course it does. However, I am 97 percent certain they are wrong, which leaves them with only a -2 percent chance of being correct.
I’m not claiming to be the originator, but I posted the question a long time ago, with the graph of Hadcrut3 temperatures from 1858, 1978 resp.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~jonas1@westnet.com.au/Comparison_1858_1978.jpg
The graph is dated September 2009. Can’t find the link to where I posted it.
PS. Note the dates. We have three time periods matching, not two.
95% confidence is worthless. Once out of twenty times, you will ‘prove’ green jelly beans cause acne (xkcd). Can we get back to 5-sigma science, please?
Scientists in Australia say they have developed a new way of measuring CO2 in stalactites in this article, but does not actually report them. http://www.sciencewa.net.au/topics/technology-a-innovation/item/2342-stalagmites-unveil-past-environments-and-climate.html
The link to the paper is pay-walled, which is a bit above my ‘pay grade’ …
FThoma says:
August 20, 2013 at 8:58 pm
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I do not recall his article, but it sounds implausible to me.
During the war (just as in peace time) shipping is confined to narrow lanes. Ships do not cross even 1% of the oceans. So if there was spillage from ships (one presumes predominantly due to being attacked), on a global basis, not much of the ocean surface would be covered with oil.
Heck even the large spillages these last 40 or so years Torrey Canyon (about 120,000 tonnes) Exon Valdes (about 100,000 tonnes), Braer (about 85,000 tonnes), Sea Empress (about 75,000 tonnes) etc, had no impact on a global basis even if the spill covered hundreds of square miles. Those ships were carrying so much oil that they would have been the equivalent to a loss of hundreds of wartime convoys.
Since I did not read the article, I do not know whether he looked into the effect of those ships, and whilst I do not like joining isse with an article that I have not seen, my gut tells me it is rather implausible.