This is just nuts, sorry, I just don’t have any other words for it.
Computer modeling and simulations are not hard data nor empirical proof, especially when trying to hindcast the upper atmosphere temperature back to 1860, well before radiosonde data exists. They can’t even calibrate the output against real-world upper air data for the majority of the time series. But, illogically, these authors claim that their method is sound. And, the timing is suspect. Look at the laundry list of names on the publication too. The fingerprint graphic seen on the second graph is downright corny, as if maybe the public just wouldn’t “get it” unless they put an actual human fingerprint on their graph. It’s like they threw this together as an insurance policy in case the IPCC AR5 report wasn’t convincing enough. -Anthony
(Phys.org) —A team of climatologists with members from the U.S., Australia, Canada and Norway is claiming in a paper they’ve had published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that they have found proof that global warming is being caused by human influences. They are basing their claims on computer simulations they’ve run and data obtained from three decades’ worth of satellite observations.
Most of the world’s scientists agree that our planet is experiencing global warming. Most also generally support the theory that the cause of global warming is due to an increase in greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide. And while many also support the notion that the increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is likely due to human emissions, few are willing to go on record claiming that global warming is due directly to human activities. The researchers in this new effort are one such group and they claim they have proof.
Satellites, as most everyone knows, have been hovering over or circling our planet for over half a century. Over that time period they have grown progressively more sophisticated, measuring virtually every conceivable aspect of the planet below—from gas levels in the atmosphere to temperature readings on an averaged global scale, to the impact of natural events such as volcanic eruptions. It’s this data the researchers used in their attempt to root out the true source of global warming.
The research team conducted a two stage study. The first involved creating computer models that simulated climate evolution over the past several decades under three different scenarios: a world without human influence, a world with only human influence and a world without human emissions or naturally occurring incidents such as volcanic eruptions. The second stage involved gathering data from satellites and comparing it with what the team had found in creating their simulations. They say patterns emerged that prove that human influence is the cause behind global warming. One example they cite is data that shows that the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere closest to us) has seen a steady rise in temperature over the past several decades, even as the layer just above it, the stratosphere, has cooled slightly.
But what has the team really convinced that humans are the true source behind global warming, is that they were unable to produce the type of warming we’ve seen with just natural events—it’s only when human emissions are added to models that such a trend can be realistically simulated. That, they say, proves that human practices over the past several decades are responsible for global warming.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-satellite-global-humans.html#jCp
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
The paper:
Human and natural influences on the changing thermal structure of the atmosphere, PNAS, Published online before print September 16, 2013, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1305332110
Benjamin D. Santer, Jeffrey F. Painter, Céline Bonfils, Carl A. Mears, Susan Solomon, Tom M. L. Wigley, Peter J. Gleckler, Gavin A. Schmidt, Charles Doutriaux, Nathan P. Gillett, Karl E. Taylor, Peter W. Thorne, and Frank J. Wentz
Significance
Observational satellite data and the model-predicted response to human influence have a common latitude/altitude pattern of atmospheric temperature change. The key features of this pattern are global-scale tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling over the 34-y satellite temperature record. We show that current climate models are highly unlikely to produce this distinctive signal pattern by internal variability alone, or in response to naturally forced changes in solar output and volcanic aerosol loadings. We detect a “human influence” signal in all cases, even if we test against natural variability estimates with much larger fluctuations in solar and volcanic influences than those observed since 1979. These results highlight the very unusual nature of observed changes in atmospheric temperature.
Abstract
Since the late 1970s, satellite-based instruments have monitored global changes in atmospheric temperature. These measurements reveal multidecadal tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling, punctuated by short-term volcanic signals of reverse sign. Similar long- and short-term temperature signals occur in model simulations driven by human-caused changes in atmospheric composition and natural variations in volcanic aerosols. Most previous comparisons of modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes have used results from individual models and individual observational records. In contrast, we rely on a large multimodel archive and multiple observational datasets. We show that a human-caused latitude/altitude pattern of atmospheric temperature change can be identified with high statistical confidence in satellite data. Results are robust to current uncertainties in models and observations. Virtually all previous research in this area has attempted to discriminate an anthropogenic signal from internal variability. Here, we present evidence that a human-caused signal can also be identified relative to the larger “total” natural variability arising from sources internal to the climate system, solar irradiance changes, and volcanic forcing. Consistent signal identification occurs because both internal and total natural variability (as simulated by state-of-the-art models) cannot produce sustained global-scale tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling. Our results provide clear evidence for a discernible human influence on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-satellite-global-humans.html#jCp
A little OT, I am trying to start a meme. Yesterday on Doc Spencer’s blog, we were discussing the supposed heating of the deep oceans, by which it is posited that warm waters somehow made their way to the depths without affecting the intervening upper layers. I have dubbed this action “The Immaculate Convection.”
I find it appropriate for describing a conjecture which is more religious than scientific in nature. And, the initials, TIC, aptly relate it to the neurological disorder which proponents suffer when they grasp for it to fend off the overwhelming cognitive dissonance with which they must cope when presented with the evidence that Nature is not paying ball with their desires.
If you find it appropriate, please pass it along. I would be interested in seeing how far it penetrates into common parlance.
Bart says:
September 18, 2013 at 10:03 am
A little OT, I am trying to start a meme. Yesterday on Doc Spencer’s blog, we were discussing the supposed heating of the deep oceans, by which it is posited that warm waters somehow made their way to the depths without affecting the intervening upper layers. I have dubbed this action “The Immaculate Convection.”
——–
Ha ha ha, yes, and no sentence where it is used should be without the name “Travesty Trenberth” in it.
This is not worth the paper it is written on. This is beyond ridiculous.
Obviously this is based upon a 3am bull session by some fraternity brothers after a long night of beer. Please tell me why these people are being paid. Climate science fiction.
Refresh my memory. Was it Sputnik or Telstar that was in orbit in 1870?
For a long time, their playbook has been:
“If you can’t dazzle them with brillance, baffle them with bulls?!t”
I’d say this this is spot on to that end!
Authors of this allegedly research paper who are authors for WG1 IPCC AR5
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Authors and Review Editors As of 23 July 2013
Working Group I
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models &
150 Gleckler, Peter Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, Chapter 9, Lead Author
Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change : from Global to Regional
164 Gillett, Nathan Environment Canada Canada, Chapter 10, Lead Author
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
215 Taylor, Karl Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, Chapter 12 Review Editor
Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
22 Thorne, Peter (NOAA), USA, Chapter 2, Lead Author
Papers referenced or attributed in above paper whose authors are also authors/editors to WG1 IPCC AR5
S1. “Mears C, Wentz FJ, Thorne P, Bernie D (2011) Assessing uncertainty in estimates
of atmospheric temperature changes from MSU and AMSU using a Monte-Carlo technique. J Geophys Res 116, D08112, doi:10.1029/2010JD014954″
S3. “Santer BD, et al. (2013) Identifying human influences on atmospheric temperature.
Proc Nat Acad Sci 110:26-33.”
S4. “Santer BD, et al. (2003) Contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcing to
recent tropopause height changes. Science 301:479-483.”
S5. “Tett SFB, et al. (2002) Estimation of natural and anthropogenic contributions to twentieth century temperature change. J Geophys Res 107, D16, doi:10.1029/2000JD000028.”
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and irreversibility
216 “Tett, Simon, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, Chapter 12, Review Editor”
S6. “Gillett NP, et al. (2011) Attribution of observed changes in stratospheric ozone
and temperature. Atmos Chem Phys 11:599-609.”
S8. “Eyring V, et al. (2013) Long-term changes in tropospheric and stratospheric
ozone and associated climate impacts in CMIP5 simulations. J Geophys Res
(in press)”
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
148 Eyring, Veronika Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Germany Chapter 9, Lead Author
Pal review? Incestual perhaps describes the relationships better. Nothing like determining what is needed and tailoring a paper to fulfill that role. Haste and desire are unlikely to bring any sort of quality to the paper and results.
While discussing results;
Other models contribute data to this series,
Observational data is spliced in,
Anomalies are determined, kinda , maybe, forced, yeah that’s the ticket,
Prognosticating past history from bad present day models with models that never worked, nor have their developers ever figured out why they don’t work,
Splice data to modeled data to observations to respliced data, splice it again and again! &
Then use the results to bafflegab the world.
How Gavin ever got roped in agreeing to be an identified author on this paper is sort of surprising. I had thought he was starting to stay with hard science; maybe he restricted his role…
Looks like I forgot to end my next line   with a semi-colon. My apologies!
If I model a dog’s tail as a leg, how many legs does it have?
philincalifornia says:
September 18, 2013 at 7:43 am
Conclusion-based conclusion drawing – the hallmark of sh!t scientists.
Why do they even bother putting the model results in the middle ?
I’m sure you know the answer to your question but let me spell it out for those unfamiliar with climatology – it’s to keep the modellers (ie Gavin et al) in plenty of grant (ie your) $$$$$$!
Uhoh!
Well, since CAGW is a faith and definitely not science,
I love it Bart!
I certainly wouldn’t call the authors for this paper disciples, but the extreme catholic faith movement called ‘Flagellantism’ comes to mind, “…Flagellants was to take this self-mortification into the cities and other public spaces as a demonstration of piety…”,
“…Flagellants was to take this self-mortification into the cities and other public spaces as a demonstration of piety. …”
“… Thousands of citizens gathered in great processions, singing and with crosses and banners, they marched throughout the city whipping themselves. …”
“… However, one chronicler noted that anyone who did not join in the flagellation was accused of being in league with the devil. They also killed Jews and priests who opposed them…” (from wikihell)
Remarkable similarity to the CAGW religion’s ‘man must pay’ meme along with their frequent calls for ‘inquisitions’.
Mods:
Should I resubmit my earlier post with the broken  (s) with corrected next line coding?
[Done. Mod]
If these people have so much confidence in their ability to model chaotic systems, why don’t they model the stock market and get rich? Oh, that’s right. They would have to risk their own money. They don’t have THAT much confidence in computer models.
Further on the bias and quality of peer review at Proceedings of National Academy of Science (PNAS):
A Black Day For Science – PNAS publishes a paper based on a skeptic blacklist
WUWT June 22, 2010 on
Lindzen-Choi ‘Special Treatment’: Is Peer Review Biased Against Nonalarmist Climate Science? about a paper rejected by PNAS (a rare event) but accepted by Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences
by Chip Knappenberger, June 9, 2011
Follow-up WUWT post June 9, 2011. (136 Responses) Posted in: Peer Review
While they were busy modeling the past, why didn’t they model the future, too? Were they afraid to expose their methods to a testable prediction? We shouldn’t have any more confidence in their methods than they do.
Claim: simulated satellite data back to 1860 proves global warming caused by humans
Posted on September 18, 2013 by Anthony Watts
Right which one of you bastards hacked my time settings, it says 18th Sep but its blatantly April 1…..
Honestly I can’t figure out what to do, smear a couple of them with peanut butter, I suppose, and chuck them in the pound to be buggered to death by Great Danes and wolfhounds. See it it improves the work output of the rest….
daviditron is right, the John Daly link is only one page, but it destroys Santer’s underhanded shenanigans.
That is a classic case of lying with statistics: truncating post and prior data, in order to cherry-pick a graph that supports their dishonest conclusion. Typical of the pseudo-science games being played by the climate alarmist clique, who cannot make a credible case without resorting to lying.
Just one page. You don’t even need to read it, just overlay the partial and the full graph. They lie for money. They should be prosecuted for scientific misconduct.
It is fourth down and long. The game is nearing a tipping point. The TEAM huddles at mid-field and needs a quick touchdown. The game has gone all wrong in the last couple of quarters as the world got colder, and snow was up to the center’s rear.
In the huddle, Quarterback Gavin directs the next play.
Gav: Ok, guys, we gotta do a hail Mary on this one. Susan, you’re the tight end so I want you to fake a run-block on the left side while I sprint-out, hide-the-decline, and throw it to Mann for the touch.
Susan: That stumble-bum Mann is on the bench where he belongs. Besides, I am not a tight-end. I am a wide receiver, and I want to run a post route to the end zone, and we don’t need to hide-the-decline. You can run the play-action thing the way we practiced it.
Gav: No, Susan. That was not the play-action pass we practiced. I tossed a real pass to you, but you did not want to play.
Ben: Hey, guys. Don’t I get to do anything? I’m going to tell my boss that you have been reading Watts Up With That, and you will all have to do twenty… uhh, push-ups not years.
Tom: Since I am the center, I have something to contribute to this huddle. Singer is playing nose guard, and I need some help. With the stats he brings to the game, we are all in trouble.
Gav: No, Tom. I am the center of things since Hansen took the last coal train to the coast. All you have to do is block Singer and make sure Spencer doesn’t get through to our backfield. I have to worry about Christy. The Force is strong in that one. Ben, it is your job to take on Christy.
Ben: Block Christy? He doesn’t play fair with all his facts and satellite stuff. You work for NASA, too. Why aren’t you using satellites instead of Hansen’s jury-rigged series? It would make more sense, and we would have a chance.
Gav: Look folks, the way we modeled this thing is that we don’t have to have proof. All we gotta do is stonewall a few FOIA’s, fake some data, and boot-leg the peer review. It can’t work any other way according to the models. OK, Team. Remember, deception is our game!
Bill Illis says: “I love the part where they have NO long-term impact on the stratosphere from volcanoes (and ascribe all of the stratosphere cooling to CO2 rather than the Ozone depletion caused by large volcanic eruptions).”
Why would there be a long term impact from volcanic aerosols? They are not permanently up there.
And they DO attribute the lowering in the stratosphere from ozone depletion:
“The decrease in TLS (their abbr. for lower stratosphere) is primarily a response to
human-caused stratospheric ozone depletion, with a smaller
contribution from anthropogenic changes in other greenhouse
gases (GHGs) (19, 22, 23).”
Here’s Robert Anton Wilson’s take:
I would like to thank tha authors of this paper for finally showing the world that when a climate science paper is deemed to be “peer reviewed” it in no way means that it or its finding are correct and validated.
Anyone can see that this is nonsense. So the next time you hear the “but it’s peer reviewed” just quote this paper. Imagine if the accountants at CERN realised that according to this groups’ logic, you didn’t need to build a supercolider to find the Higgs Boson – you just needed to build a model!!!
rogerknights says:
September 18, 2013 at 12:49 pm (replying to)
Rather:
If A is less than B, and B is less than C, then A is less than C, except where desired by lawyers. And climate scientists.
If this was a Star Trek episode and Mr. Spock did the simulation. I might be somewhat less skeptical — if I were also a fictional character in a make-believe universe.
PNAS? Well that’s embarrassing. If you have a pal in the national academy your paper will get in with essential no peer review, I know, I have done it myself.
mickyhcorbett75 says:
September 18, 2013 at 12:59 pm
“Imagine if the accountants at CERN realised that according to this groups’ logic, you didn’t need to build a supercolider to find the Higgs Boson – you just needed to build a model!!!”
HEAR! HEAR!