By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
It is time to be angry at the gruesome failure of peer review that allows publication of papers, such as the recent effusion of Professor Lovejoy of McGill University, which, in the gushing, widely-circulated press release that seems to accompany every mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness these days, billed it thus:
“Statistical analysis rules out natural-warming hypothesis with more than 99 percent certainty.”
One thing anyone who studies any kind of physics knows is that claiming results to three standard deviations, or 99% confidence, requires – at minimum – that the data underlying the claim are exceptionally precise and trustworthy and, in particular, that the measurement error is minuscule.
Here is the Lovejoy paper’s proposition:
“Let us … make the hypothesis that anthropogenic forcings are indeed dominant (skeptics may be assured that this hypothesis will be tested and indeed quantified in the following analysis). If this is true, then it is plausible that they do not significantly affect the type or amplitude of the natural variability, so that a simple model may suffice:
(1)
“ΔTglobe/Δt is the measured mean global temperature anomaly, ΔTanth/Δt is the deterministic anthropogenic contribution, ΔTnat/Δt is the (stochastic) natural variability (including the responses to the natural forcings), and Δε/Δt is the measurement error. The last can be estimated from the differences between the various observed global series and their means; it is nearly independent of time scale [Lovejoy et al., 2013a] and sufficiently small (≈ ±0.03 K) that we ignore it.”
Just how likely is it that we can measure global mean surface temperature over time either as an absolute value or as an anomaly to a precision of less than 1/30 Cº? It cannot be done. Yet it was essential to Lovejoy’s fiction that he should pretend it could be done, for otherwise his laughable attempt to claim 99% certainty for yet another me-too, can-I-have-another-grant-please result using speculative modeling would have visibly failed at the first fence.
Some of the tamperings that have depressed temperature anomalies in the 1920s and 1930s to make warming this century seem worse than it really was are a great deal larger than a thirtieth of a Celsius degree.
Fig. 1 shows a notorious instance from New Zealand, courtesy of Bryan Leyland:
Figure 1. Annual New Zealand national mean surface temperature anomalies, 1990-2008, from NIWA, showing a warming rate of 0.3 Cº/century before “adjustment” and 1 Cº/century afterward. This “adjustment” is 23 times the Lovejoy measurement error.
Figure 2: Tampering with the U.S. temperature record. The GISS record from 1990-2008 (right panel) shows 1934 0.1 Cº lower and 1998 0.3 Cº higher than the same record in its original 1999 version (left panel). This tampering, calculated to increase the apparent warming trend over the 20th century, is more than 13 times the tiny measurement error mentioned by Lovejoy. The startling changes to the dataset between the 1999 and 2008 versions, first noticed by Steven Goddard, are clearly seen if the two slides are repeatedly shown one after the other as a blink comparator.
Fig. 2 shows the effect of tampering with the temperature record at both ends of the 20th century to sex up the warming rate. The practice is surprisingly widespread. There are similar examples from many records in several countries.
But what is quantified, because Professor Jones’ HadCRUT4 temperature series explicitly states it, is the magnitude of the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties in the data.
Measurement uncertainty arises because measurements are taken in different places under various conditions by different methods. Anthony Watts’ exposure of the poor siting of hundreds of U.S. temperature stations showed up how severe the problem is, with thermometers on airport taxiways, in car parks, by air-conditioning vents, close to sewage works, and so on.
(corrected paragraph) His campaign was so successful that the US climate community were shamed into shutting down or repositioning several poorly-sited temperature monitoring stations. Nevertheless, a network of several hundred ideally-sited stations with standardized equipment and reporting procedures, the Climate Reference Network, tends to show less warming than the older US Historical Climate Network.
That record showed – not greatly to skeptics’ surprise – a rate of warming noticeably slower than the shambolic legacy record. The new record was quietly shunted into a siding, seldom to be heard of again. It pointed to an inconvenient truth: some unknown but significant fraction of 20th-century global warming arose from old-fashioned measurement uncertainty.
Coverage uncertainty arises from the fact that temperature stations are not evenly spaced either spatially or temporally. There has been a startling decline in the number of temperature stations reporting to the global network: there were 6000 a couple of decades ago, but now there are closer to 1500.
Bias uncertainty arises from the fact that, as the improved network demonstrated all too painfully, the old network tends to be closer to human habitation than is ideal.
Figure 3. The monthly HadCRUT4 global temperature anomalies (dark blue) and least-squares trend (thick bright blue line), with the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties shown. Positive anomalies are green; negative are red.
Fig. 3 shows the HadCRUT4 anomalies since 1880, with the combined anomalies also shown. At present, the combined uncertainties are ±0.15 Cº, or almost a sixth of a Celsius degree up or down, over an interval of 0.3 Cº in total. This value, too, is an order of magnitude greater than the unrealistically tiny measurement error allowed for in Lovejoy’s equation (1).
The effect of the uncertainties is that for 18 years 2 months the HadCRUT4 global-temperature trend falls entirely within the zone of uncertainty (Fig. 4). Accordingly, we cannot tell even with 95% confidence whether any global warming at all has occurred since January 1996.
Figure 4. The HadCRUT4 monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies and trend, January 1996 to February 2014, with the zone of uncertainty (pale blue). Because the trend-line falls entirely within the zone of uncertainty, we cannot be even 95% confident that any global warming occurred over the entire 218-month period.
Now, if you and I know all this, do you suppose the peer reviewers did not know it? The measurement error was crucial to the thesis of the Lovejoy paper, yet the reviewers allowed him to get away with saying it was only 0.03 Cº when the oldest of the global datasets, and the one favored by the IPCC, actually publishes, every monthy, combined uncertainties that are ten times larger.
Let us be blunt. Not least because of those uncertainties, compounded by data tampering all over the world, it is impossible to determine climate sensitivity either to the claimed precision of 0.01 Cº or to 99% confidence from the temperature data.
For this reason alone, the headline conclusion in the fawning press release about the “99% certainty” that climate sensitivity is similar to the IPCC’s estimate is baseless. The order-of-magnitude error about the measurement uncertainties is enough on its own to doom the paper. There is a lot else wrong with it, but that is another story.
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dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 5:25 pm
I am sure you don’t back down very often so it’s very rewarding when you change the subject.
– High Priest –
Shaun Lovejoy says:
April 17, 2014 at 3:09 pm
Thank you for your support! Here’s a link to a Question and Answer sheet that I’ve made up to try to explain things as clearly as possible. Any comments/ suggestions are welcome!
This
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/esubmissions/Questions.Answers.17.4.14.pdf
Michael Whittemore, may I deconstruct? Thank you:
Your first graph is debunked by Planet Earth. Despite a 50 ppmv rise in CO2, there has been no rise in T.
Since the real world trumps all your models, charts, pal-reviewed papers, statistics, and assertions, you might as well give it up. Catastrophic AGW is complete nonsense.
Every scary prediction by the alarmist cult has failed. But religious True Believers will never accept what empirical evidence is telling us. Cognitive dissonance explains a large part of it. Then there is confirmation bias, and the refusal to undertand Occam’s Razor, and the Null Hypothesis, and even the Scientific Method.
Next time you post a chart, try to find one that reflects reality. Otherwise, you have no credibility.
========================
Michael Whittemore says:
I am sure you don’t back down very often so it’s very rewarding when you change the subject.
– High Priest –
First off, you’re just a lemming follower. The high priest is Algore.☺
I don’t back down unless I am wrong. If I’m proven wrong, I admit it. That is the central difference between skeptics and climate alarmists: skeptics just want scientific knowledge, wherever it leads. But mile thick glaciers could once again descend on Chicago in a new Ice Age, and the alarmist crowd would still be running around in circles, flapping their arms and clucking their nonsense about runaway global warming.
And of course, Mikey is wrong once again. I didn’t change the subject, I replied to Tucci — as any jamoke could see in the first 3 words.
So tell us, Mikey: are you ever right? About anything?
Michael Whittemore says:
April 20, 2014 at 11:24 am
But Temperature lagged behind CO2 rise as can be seen in this graph
===
Michael, that’s only because temp and CO2 were plotted at the same starting point…
move either one up or down from that point and you can make it show things it’s not meant to show
Tucci78 says:
April 20, 2014 at 12:42 pm
At 10:56 AM on 20 April, confronted with the ineluctability of Henry’s Law, Phil. weasels:
Indeed, but it works both ways, if sufficient CO2 is added to the atmosphere to maintain the concentration above the Henry’s Law value the flow is from atmosphere to ocean, unless the ocean temperature is increasing even faster.
The argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature doesn’t work very well with the idea of a ‘hiatus’ in global temperature over the last 15+ years since CO2 has increased about 50ppm during that time!
There is no “argument that atmospheric CO2 is going up because of increasing ocean temperature “ at the present time, you loon.
I take it you aren’t familiar with the arguments of dbstealey? For example he immediately followed your post with this
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 10:46 am
Tucci78 is correct, and he gives a very clear explanation of why CO2 follows temperature.
At 7:45 PM on 20 April, warmist loon Phil. quoted nothing more than the first line from the first paragraph in my post of 12:42 PM (same date):
…obliterating:
…thereupon to blather:
Phil. (the religious zealot climate catastrophe putz) must have missed out on scientific investigations such as those of Pedro, Rasmussen, and van Ommen [Clim. Past, 8, 1213-1221, 2012], in which – despite those reporter’s climate quack alarmist bias, evident in the sucktard press release promulgated upon preliminary rather than final revised publication of their paper – it had been demonstrated (yet again) that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have always lagged increases in oceanic temperatures by centuries.
Pedro et al fined that lag down toperhaps 400 years (less than the eight hundred years estimated within the wriggle room (± 200) imposed by the analytical methods available a decade ago), but centuries nonetheless.
This study was assessed and considerably discussed in Watts Up With That? shortly after publication (New research in Antarctica shows CO2 follows temperature “by a few hundred years at most” posted on July 23, 2012). But doubtless Phil. missed that entry in Mr. Watts’ Web log.
Being familiar with Mr. stealey‘s prior posts on this thread and elsewhere, I was relatively certain that he’d been referring to works like Caillon et al (2003) and Pedro et al (2012) when he made that remark endorsing my appreciation of how Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.
Mr. stealey – unlike our Phil. – is literate in the science pertinent to paleoclimatological evidence of atmospheric CO2 variations.
dbstealey says:
April 20, 2014 at 10:46 am
The nonsense doesn’t stop there. Whittemore repeatedly calls the graph I posted “your graph”, and “that faked graph of yours”. Whenever I point out that it is R.B. Alley’s graph, and that the faked graph is the one Whittemore posted, it goes right over his head. Bias and dissonance.
As pointed out that graph was not produced by Alley, it is an example of a graph which uses his data misplotted with an incorrect time axis.
Next, the pseudonymous “Phil.” says:
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor…
Pure ad-hom; zero science. Prof Wegman is tarred and feathered by the pseudonymous Phil. for one reason: Wegman exposed Mann’s shenanigans. Wegman was Chairman of National Research Council’s Committee on Applied Statistics, but the pseudonymous Phil. falsely claims that Wegman does not understand statistics.
When folks like the pseudonymous Phil. must resort to that kind of underhanded ad hominem attack, it is obvious to the most casual observer that he has lost the science debate.
Not only do you not understand the meaning of ‘pseudonymous’ but you don’t know what an ‘ad hominem’ is. You brought up Wegman as an authority, I pointed out:
“Wegman! A serial plagiarist whose understanding of the statistics was so poor that he regurgitated what M&M gave him and even failed to understand it properly.”
It’s not that he doesn’t understand statistics but that he didn’t understand the particular statistics applied in that case, the mistakes he made in his report show that.
∆T causes ∆CO2. Try falsifying that, instead of name-calling and fabricated accusations.
No ‘fabricated accusations’ just facts.
Finally, the pseudonymous Phil. says:
I’m rather puzzled as to what relevance you think Whittemore’s referencing the wrong paper has to my critique of Monckton’s post?
It is because the pseudonymous Phil. wrote about Lord Monckton:
Rather sloppy work, presumably ’1990-2008′ should be 1880-2008…
I was merely pointing out to the pseudonymous Phil. that Whittemore had made the same kind of errors, but the pseudonymous Phil. never attacked him for being ‘sloppy’. But the pseudonymous Phil. is so easily “puzzled”. ☺
Like a child who’s learned a new word and misuses it all the time to the amusement of the grown-ups!
Whittemore didn’t write the blog post, Monckton did, at least Whittemore realized that he made a mistake.
The pseudonymous “Phil.” says:
Like a child who’s learned a new word and misuses it all the time to the amusement of the grown-ups!
Phil. me boi, you started using that word. So don’t snivel and cry when others make fun of you.
Me, I like the word! It fits you to a “T”. If you don’t like it, start using your name instead of an
anonymouspseudonymous screen identity……and I note that you still cannot falsify ∆T causes ∆CO2.
You mention my first graph but I only linked one in my last comment to you, either way I shall explain.. again..
You state my “first graph is debunked by Planet Earth. Despite a 50 ppmv rise in CO2, there has been no rise in T.” I take your comment is talking about the resent pause in atmospheric temperature after 1999. As you can see from this graph CO2 and temperature follow a good correlation during the last hundred years http://oi62.tinypic.com/2cey4w.jpg.
But of cause you can’t just look at CO2 and temperature without considering all the other aspects of the climate system. Volcanic eruptions, solar forcing and other greenhouse gasses all need to be considered. This graph shows the forcing that has taken place over the last century http://oi62.tinypic.com/2d98wv4.jpg.
As can be seen when other facings are considered the decreases in global temperatures correlated well. This is how science works! Even Lovejoys recent paper shows how CO2 forcing matches temperature rise over the last century http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8
This means that as you stated before, that only the resent CO2 correlation debunks all the other science I have referenced is not true. This includes the correlation between CO2 and temperature over the last 500 million years and the temperature lag of CO2 rise during the last deglaciation http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/lovejoys-99-confidence-vs-measurement-uncertainty/#comment-1617438
– High Priest –
Tucci78 says:
April 21, 2014 at 3:44 am
You mention “Being familiar with Mr. stealey‘s prior posts on this thread and elsewhere, I was relatively certain that he’d been referring to works like Caillon et al (2003) and Pedro et al (2012) when he made that remark endorsing my appreciation of how Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.”
Mr Straley does tend to post this fallacy. As you seem to do as well. The papers you refer to look at a regional proxy temperature, not a global one. During the deglaciation refereed to in the papers you cite, globally only 10% of the warming happened before CO2 rise. That means globally over 90% of the warming happened after CO2 rise.
In response to my earlier post today, in which I’d observed that
….at 7:19 AM the pernicious Michael Whittemore crapped himself in public with:
First and foremost, you stupid schmuck, your use of a graph bereft of legend doesn’t even demonstrate what the various plotted points and lines represent, much less the source of the information tracked in the visual element. You got anything like a friggin’ reference URL to fill in those blanks, and perhaps to attribute the graph to its source on this Web site? For all we know – IN CONTEXT – that graph might have been presented in Watts Up With That? only to demonstrate that your cultist fantastical contention against Henry’s Law is as bereft of factual congruity with the physical universe as has been every other goddam spatter of spew with which you’ve been polluting the ‘Net in your fraudulent effort to “keep the skeer on” the potential victims of your fascist faction’s antiscientific bamboozlement.
Just what the hell so you claim to have in support of your blithering batpuckey about how “globally over 90% of the warming happened after CO2 rise,” anyway? When the EVIDENCE gathered and reported thus far demonstrates the above mentioned lag, your extraordinary – indeed, outrageous – contravention thereof requires a whole helluva lot more back-up than merely yanking a naked assertion, steaming and stinking, from out’n your cloaca and waving it around while you squeal like a stuck stoat.
Tucci78 says:
and here is a link to the paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html
April 21, 2014 at 9:40 am
I can understand your frustration, its not easy having it handed to you. I have already explained it to Mr. stealey so a simple cut and paste will suffice.
“The CH4 increase at 2810 m [would] thus signal a first warming in the North […] CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation […] This sequence of events is till in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing.” http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf
This information led to a study that looked at global temperature proxys of both the northern and southern hemispheres during the last deglaciation. What they found was that when you get a global temperature, temperature rise lags CO2 rise. They found that over 90% of the warming that happened on Earth all took place after CO2 rise. Here is the graph from the paper with the yellow dots being CO2 and the blue line being the global temperature
For some reason you seem to say I have a “fantastical contention against Henry’s Law”, I assure you I do not, I merely want to correct your opinion that “Henry’s Law serves well to explain why ∆CO2 in the atmosphere lags global ∆T and must always do so.”
If you actually look at the graph, it explains everything that most people would need to understand it. Its colour coded..
At 10:15 AM on 21 April, the execrable Michael Whittemore fails yet again to source the post on Watts Up With That? from which he stupidly drew the legend-less graph to which he keeps referring, but he did make reference to Shakun, Marcott et al [Nature 484, 49–54 (05 April 2012)], which preposterous spouting of warmist crap had been muchly ripped asunder on Mr. Watts’ Web log immediately after those friggin’ idiots infesting Nature haplessly puked it up, notably in:
(a) A new paper in Nature suggests CO2 leads temperature, but has some serious problems (4 April 2012)
(b) A reply to Shakun et al – Dr. Munchausen Explains Science By Proxy (6 April 2012) – a detailed dissection of the data from which Shakun and his co-religionists confabulated their craptacular bilge, providing the following final conclusion:
(c) Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy! (8 April 2012) – where we read:
(d) Did Shakun et al. really prove that CO2 preceded late glacial warming? [Part 1] (9 April 2012) – whence Whittemore sucked out that graphic image file to fling it nakedly before honest men in this forum in order to peddle his stinking tripe.
(e) Shakun, Not Stirred, and Definitely Not Area-Weighted (9 April 2012)
(f) Shakun The Last, I Hope (11 April 2012)
(g) More fatal flaws in the Shakun et al. Nature paper claiming that CO2 preceded late glacial warming [Part 2] (18 April 2012)
So two friggin’ years after Shakun et al (2012) went down the goddam tubes, this Whittemore specimen is trying to peddle this busted bicycle as if there were anything of validity – y’know, like science – to support his contrafactual antiscientific warmist bovine excrement.
Egad. And the banhammer hasn’t been dropped on this putz yet?
It’s fun observing how totally deluded some of the alarmist crowd can get. They cherry-pick only those things that they believe will support their “carbon” scare, and reject the mountains of evidence contrary to their belief system. Michael Whittemore is a prime example of that cognitive dissonance.
So if I may, I will destroy Whittemore’s claims — not that it will make the slightest difference to Whittemore’s True Belief, because as the great Leo Tolstoy wrote about folks like MW:
That describes Michael Whittemore to a “T”.
Whittemore says to Tucci [commenting on the ∆T/CO2 relationship]:
Mr Straley does tend to post this fallacy. As you seem to do as well.
To call hundreds of thousands of years of empirical observations a “fallacy” sounds exactly like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers [waiting for their flying saucer] in his seminal work on cognitive dissonance. Dozens of ice core records in both hemispheres show conclusively the cause-and-effect relationship between T/CO2: ∆T causes ∆CO2, not vice-versa. But since that scientific fact does not fit Whittemore’s wacky world view, he simply rejectes it as a “fallacy”. See what we’re dealing with? Major cognitive dissonance.
Whittemore continues:
But of cause [sic; you constantly make this error. It is: ‘of course’] you can’t just look at CO2 and temperature without considering all the other aspects of the climate system.
But Mikey, the alarmist crowd does exactly that all the time. Without “carbon” to demonize, they are dumbfounded.
Next:
Even Lovejoys recent paper shows how CO2 forcing matches temperature rise…
Wrong as always. It shows no such thing. That graph, like the one you posted, is a simple overlay. They do not show cause and effect. They only show a coincidental rise. The graphs I regularly post explicitly show causation, which is always: ∆T causes ∆CO2. I have also posted numerous graphs showing that CO2 remains completely flat, while T rises — over hundreds of years.
MW also repeats the word “pause”, which as the rest of us know, is not accurate. Global warming has stopped. Not just for a few months, but for more than seventeen years. Even NASA/GISS admits to that fact. To call it a pause would require global warming to begin again. Unless and until it does, there is no “pause”. Global warming stopped. That is a fact.
Next:
You mention my first graph but I only linked one in my last comment to you, either way I shall explain.. again..
Mikey sounds exactly like Mrs Keech, ‘explaining’ to the Seekers why the flying saucer didn’t arrive as predicted. His graphs explain nothing about causation. They bamboozle the credulous, who have already made up their minds and as a result, do not need much in the way of evidence. But for skeptics, here is a Wood For Trees chart that does show causation. Anyone can see that CO2 lags T. There are no charts showing that T is caused by CO2. I know; I have looked everywhere. The best anyone has done is to overlay T and CO2. But that does not show which changed first. The charts I post do, and I have a lot of them, from months to hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, the claim that “carbon” causes global warming is evidence-free. It is a baseless conjecture, nothing more. A Belief.
dbstealey says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:32 am
“That graph, like the one you posted, is a simple overlay.” I thought you had read Lovejoys paper? You have a lot of worthless stuff to say about something you have not even read! Of “course” (thanks for the correction) it is CO2 forcing, it says it on the graph too. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2
The alarmist crowd believes the following conjectures:
1. The globe warmed over the course of the 20th century
2. The planet is warming right now
3. Global warming will continue in the future
4. This warming is unusual, unnatural, and unprecedented
5. Global warming is a bad thing
6. Global warming is caused mostly by human-emitted CO2
7. Humans can reduce their global CO2 emissions
8. A large amount of warming could be reversed if CO2 was lowered
9. The amount of CO2 emissions that would be reduced by passing a ‘carbon tax’ will lower global warming by enough to be worth the economic pain of such a tax
I agree with the first. But as JoNova says [that’s where I got these]: “Convert me!”
Because I disagree with the second one. The third is unknowable. The 4th is flat wrong, as is #5. The 6th has no scientific evidence to support it, but there is plenty of evidence to falsify it. #7 is possible, but it will never happen. Again, there is no good evidence that #8 is a fact; it is only a conjecture. And #9 is ridiculous.
JoNova challenges the alarmist contingent to do the following:
• Stop making predictions that don’t come true.
• When you make a prediction, don’t just say something “might” happen.
• Don’t live your life like you don’t believe a word you’re saying.
• Stop the hate.
• Stop avoiding debate.
• Answer questions.
• Stop enjoying catastrophes.
• Don’t use invalid arguments.
• When you are wrong, admit it and apologise.
• Stop claiming that 97% of scientists agree that humans are warming the globe significantly.
• Stop lying. If you think it is okay to lie if it’s for a good cause, you are wrong.
• Rebuke your fellow Warmists if they act in an unscientific way.
• Stop blaming everything on Global Warming.
• Explain why the only solutions are always big-government “progressive” policies.
Michael Whittemore is guilty of all except the ‘lying’ part, IMHO. He is not deliberately lying, because he actually believes the runaway global warming nonsense. That aside, I would appreciate it if he and his side would follow those guidelines. It would be a first.
Skeptics are not perfect, but we are far better and more honest/ethical than the other side. Really, there is no comparison. The only honest scientist is a skeptic. The rest are self-serving, and they lead acolytes like Whittemore astray.
M. Whittemore says:
You have a lot of worthless stuff to say…
Who elected you to deem what is “worthless”? Your comments have devolved into baseless and wrong assertions. No wonder your arguments are getting thrashed.
It’s like Whack-A-Mole, and it’s just as fun. Every Whittemore conjecture is destroyed as soon as it pops up.
For example, MW is still fixated on his mistaken Belief that a simple overlay shows causation. It doesn’t. MW cannot understand that. Graphs like his and Lovejoy’s show coincidental rises, and nothing more. I am still waiting for MW or anyone else to post an actual graph, with provenance, showing long term causation where CO2 changes temperature. i have repeatedly shown the reverse is true: T causes CO2 changes.
But neither MW nor any other deluded alarmist has ever been able to produce any evidence showing that over a long time frame, that ∆CO2 causes ∆T. The reason is simple: because it doesn’t. ∆T causes ∆CO2, not vice-versa. Thus, the entire “carbon” scare crashes and burns.
It’s tough on folks when their entire Belief system is falsified. But that happens in science.
Why have you not posted my comment?
[Reply: there is nothing in the spam folder. Sometimes WordPress drops the ball. Just re-post your comment. ~mod.]
dbstealey says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:32 am
But for skeptics, here is a Wood For Trees chart that does show causation. Anyone can see that CO2 lags T.
No they can’t, since you have removed most of the change in CO2 from the plot, you show that a minor fluctuation in the CO2 correlates with surface temperature fluctuations, most of the change in CO2 is independent of surface temperature.
Phil. has his confirmation bias in high gear. The only folks who can’t see that changes in CO2 follow changes in T are the ones who know that if they admitted that one scientific fact, their entire Belief system would come crashing down around their ears.
That’s OK. The rest of us can see that on scales from months, to years, to hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 follows T. Tucci explained the mechanism very well. It’s also interesting that despite Phil.’s scientifically baseless nitpicking, there are no long term charts showing that changes in CO2 cause changes in global temperature.
This is thoroughly amusing to me. We are watching people desperately trying to evade a basic scientific truth. If they admitted that fact, they would be saying that falsifying the “carbon” scare is entirely good news for humans, and for the entire biosphere. It was all just a false alarm.
But they would also be admitting they were wrong all along. So they would rather have a climate catastrophe and be right, than say: “Whew! Good thing we were wrong about CO2! It was all just a false alarm, and now we can stop wasting piles of money on it.”
Human nature is fascinating, isn’t it? Instead of being happy that runaway global warming, climate catastrophe, and the CO2 scare were all wrong, and that humanity lucked out, instead they still fervently wish for monstrous climate disasters — just so they could claim their predictions were right!
I suppose folks like that don’t have mirrors in their homes. Because how could they look at themselves without feeling disgust?
Y’know, before the initial Climategate information dump hit the ‘Net in November 2009, I had only seen the expression “noble cause corruption” used in reference to a type of police misconduct:
In other words, it was a dereliction of duty among police officers (who violated procedural mechanisms designed to prevent them from violating the civil rights of us “civilians”) and prosecuting attorneys (whose objectives were to attain high conviction rates [“Just win, baby”] rather than to see cases adjudicated according to the intent and the letter of the law).
Then the Climategate information – including not only the email communications of the Climatic Research Unit correspondents but also the deliberately corrupted temperature datasets and the “hockey stick”-outputting climate modeling software – confirmed the long-held suspicion that the preposterously overblown anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarm wasn’t just the result of blithering incompetence on the part of a few half-educated hacks masquerading as scientists but rather a concerted connivance perpetrated by credentialed charlatans willfully lying their asses off to feed politicians and similar professional crooks an excuse to pillage and impoverish honest human beings all over the planet.
Not too long thereafter, the chittering root weevils of the lamestream leftard statist establishment media began burbling the words “noble cause corruption” when it came necessary to acknowledge the vile, arrogant mendacity of the “climate consensus” perpetrators.
Y’know. “They did it (and they’re still doing it) for a good cause!”
Uh-huh. Nothing wrong with lying your ass off – knowing that what you’re doing is going to cost innocent people big chunks of their lives, their liberties, and their property – as long as you’re supposedly doing it “for a good cause.”
A kind of inverted noblesse oblige (damnably ignoble conduct for an allegedly noble purpose). Best of intentions, right?
Sic transit Mr. “Whittemore”. aka “major9985″
And Sic semper tyrannis, too. .
At 6:09 AM on 23 April, climatereason writes:
Ah, if only “Big Oil” would grease my palm a little….
dbstealey says:
April 22, 2014 at 11:42 am
As much as you want to debate this subject, you need to reference science, we cant argue with someone that just makes stuff up. I said to you before that you have to consider all the forcings not just CO2 and I showed you lovejoys forcing graph http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8. Of course you deny the graph is real (even though I referenced the paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2) and you say “But Mikey, the alarmist crowd does exactly that all the time.” Yet here you are doing it, hypocrite! I dont mind what you are doing, it really does not matter, I just care about governments not doing anything. So I think I will just have to focus my attention there.
I have made myself extremely clear and shown all the science. I know the immaturity that I am dealing with here and also the fact you are paid by the Heartland Institute. I hope you have mirrors in your house db and I hope you have kids who can look back at what you have done.
Dont expect a reply.
– High Priest –
M. Whittemore says:
I have made myself extremely clear and shown all the science.
If you really believe that, you are completely deluded. Your “science” is nothing but scientifically unsupportable assertions and conjectures. You avoid scientific evidence, because you have no real evidence.
Also, you should read Roger Sowell’s recent post on torts. You state flatly:
I know the immaturity that I am dealing with here and also the fact you are paid by the Heartland Institute.
You are a liar, Mr. Whittemore. A liar. Either post verifiable evidence that I am “paid by the Heartland Institute”, or apologize for your lie. I will not tolerate someone like you publicly lying about me. I have recourse.
Darn, Stealey. I was hoping that if you were getting paid by Heartland you could set me up…
How come nobody solicits me with those dirty Big Oil dollars?!?
:p
/ silly
Fine smokey, I mean dbstealey. I will rephrase my comment in that I don’t know if you get paid to be a moderator or get some sort of benefits from it but you work for an entente that is funded by the Heartland Institute.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate
REPLY: For the record Mr. “Whittemore”. aka “major9985”
1. Mr. Stealey volunteers his time here. He’s retired and mostly homebound taking care of his wife who has an illness. He does this to help keep the blog in order for me and to give himself something to do to feel useful. If you have a problem with that, I don’t care.
2. Heartland doesn’t pay WUWT to blog anything, as we’ve stated many times but you are just too stubborn to read about. See the WUWT FAQs.
3. This is what came of the money that Heartland helped me line up with a private donor: http://www.climatereferencenetwork.org Go ahead tell everybody how evil that site is, showing NOAA data. Meanwhile millions are pissed away every day in grants for global warming and people like yourself are still hung up on that $44,000 used to buy equipment and computers and programming to make that happen. I never got the part 2 of the funding to complete it because angry squawking idiots like yourself chased the donor away after Gleick committed his crime of wire fraud.
4. You’re no longer welcome here, so beat it, chump. I don’t have time for denigrating fools that just want to hurl the vitriol they parrot without actually checking what they are squawking about. All your future comments will automatically go into the bit bucket.
5. Feel free to be as upset as you wish.
– Anthony
This comment won’t be read by a lot of readers, since the thread is old. But my thoughts are as follows.
First, my sincere thanks to Anthony, who is the most honest, ethical man I know. He endures constant slings and arrows from a despicable crowd of reprobates who are not fit to shine his shoes.
If it were not for Anthony Watts, the lies and propaganda of the anti-science clique would rule. Anthony provides a forum for logic-based pushback with WUWT.
I am proud to assist in my minuscule way. I have put in about ten hours a day since this site began. Anthony has graciously allowed me to moderate comments, and I bend over backward to be fair. I recieve no compensation of any kind. In fact, I contribute monthly.
When in doubt, I always approve comments, because I believe that the strength and popularity of WUWT is due largely to its censorship-free policy. Readers decide what is true, and what is nonsense; WUWT does not have to tell them what to think. Common sense emerges from the comments.
The tide is turning, and it is due in large part to Anthony Watts’ incredible dedication to the truth. He has made more of a difference than anyone. When people look back at this great debate many years from now, the name Anthony Watts will stand out as the one who brought truth and transparency to the climate debates. That is a hella accomplishment, and of course it could not be done without all the commenters who support honest science.
As for M. Whittemore, he blew it. Now he is relegated to a few thinly-trafficked blogs where his fellow head-nodders will all agree that WUWT shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Whittemore has lost the privelege to speak to many thousands of WUWT readers. That does not happen very often here. But Whittemore deserves it.
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
As A Briton I find the Guardian to be an embarrassment at times to scientific reporting and to free speech. I suggest that any warmists posting here should also post on the Guardian comments site when there is a climate related story and express mild sceptical views. They will soon find it deleted.
The readership of the Guardian is dwindling rapidlyand it is losing a great deal of money, yet it still holds sway in the British Establishment. It is a shadow of the great campaigning newspaper it used to be and frankly it is laughable that obviously intelligent people like Michael should continue to believe in the claptrap they (often) push out under the guise of environmental reporting.
This idea that people like Michael has that sceptics such as myself are funded by some mysterious entity called ‘Big Oil’ is also simply laughable.
tonyb
dbstealey says:
April 22, 2014 at 11:42 am
Phil. has his confirmation bias in high gear. The only folks who can’t see that changes in CO2 follow changes in T are the ones who know that if they admitted that one scientific fact, their entire Belief system would come crashing down around their ears.
You are the one who has the confirmation bias, you continue to believe that your graph shows something that it does not. Modern CO2 changes follow fossil fuel emissions with a small modulation due to ocean temperature changes. Your removal of the data trend and rescaling of the residual (inadequately documented) obscures what it really happening, particularly to those who don’t understand what the WFT functions do exactly.
climatereason says:
April 23, 2014 at 6:09 am
dbstealey
Thanks for the time you put in here and your equitable moderating.
Abusing one’s moderating privileges by going back and editing your own posts after they have been replied to, without indicating that you have done so is inappropriate.
Trimming the whineage, at 7:32 AM on 23 April, Phil. had written:
Er, yeah. What part about the Keeling Curve is it you figure Mr. stealey doesn’t get yet?
The trace anthropogenic contribution to a trace component of the atmosphere (increasing as it must, with the continuing and accelerating purposeful combustion of fossil petrochemical fuels) isn’t disputed, you [snip]. What’s at issue is whether or not that trace increase has had – or could ever have – any adverse impact upon the climate by way of the greenhouse gas effect.
Has it slid past your [snip] head that nobody pushing the alarmist “climate catastrophe” garbage has yet been able to provide EVIDENCE in support of the crippled conjecture that pushes this nominal greenhouse effect as the only begetter of (much less a significant factor in) deleterious world-wide climatic conditions?
When your [snip] supposition was first brought to my attention in 1981, I recall having responded to the correspondent who’d mailed me that clipping as a curiosity (asking what I thought of this [snip] fatuity): “It looks as if they’re overstating the greenhouse gas effect of total atmospheric CO2 by at least three orders of magnitude.”
My correspondent was Dr. Petr Beckmann, one of America’s most acerbically outspoken advocates for nuclear power, and we had a good time contemplating how this “carbon condemnation” [snip] would actually oblige the leftie ‘viro idiots to confront the fact that nuclear fission is actually better for the environment than is the coal cycle.
No release of CO2, but also less radiation release by way of the uranium fuel cycle by a long chalk. (All that radioactive thorium in coal ash, y’know. Chemically carcinogenic, too.)
But, no. Back in 1981, both Dr. Beckmann and I figured that nobody could be stupid enough to base any kind of public policy decisions on that fantabulous fuggheadedness.
“Man-made global warming” because of carbon dioxide? Yeah, right….