SkepticalScience Needs to Update their Escalator

Some people like the article author never ever learn basic Theories of Science. First of all:
Fallacie nr 1 above: Argumentum ab auctoritate
Fallacie nr 2 above: Appeal to fear
Fallacie nr 3 above: Fallacies of Assumtion
not to mention: Fallacy from usage of insound premisses and Ad Hoc
How is it possible for anyone passing beyond Groundlevel at University anywhere not to have learn what it takes to present valid arguments that can lead up to a sound conclussion?
Please read Fallacies in argumentation (English text)

Anthony, here’s something really curious. Kevin Trenberth’s media page at the NCAR website includes links to WUWT posts, under a special heading no less:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/media.html
Actually, this is a sign (one among many) that Trenberth is a pretty reasonable guy. He actually reads what “the opposition” has to say (at least about him and his work) and is obviously willing to consider entirely new paradigms. At the very least he is unafraid of bucking the prevailing worldview of the mainstream CAGW/CACC group, and as chairman of GEWEX he has some serious influence. Finding the “missing heat” in the ocean is like asserting that it has all simply gone away never to trouble us again.
On another thread yesterday, a thoughtful reader posted this link:
http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/yearly_mt/T-dC-w0-2000m.dat
It is apparently the annual ocean heat content delta for the NH, SH and the globe for my lifetime (1955-present). It is enormously interesting. Two features I pointed out and will point out again:
a) The error bars are impossible. They are basically unchanged from 1955 to the present at ~0.003-ish (on the scale of the chart, which isn’t given). The assertion that we knew these numbers in 1955 at the same resolution that we know them today is laughable — somewhere in there ARGO came online, and back in the 1950’s we had only the most cursory and enormously, unbelievably sparsely sampled knowledge of the temperature across the depth of the entire water column. Today, with ARGO this is still true, but there is no way that the addition of literally thousands of sampling stations would not reduce the error bars. In fact, reduce them by a factor of (wait for it) order if the gods of statistics have not lost their power and charm. Since there are “thousands” of buoys (the number keeps increasing) error estimates in the present ought to be at least one, more likely two orders of magnitude smaller in the present, assuming that they might have had 50 stations sampling the entire planet back in 1955 and through much of the reported interval. Indeed, there should have been a rapid (nearly discrete) jump in precision when ARGO came online. It’s not there, so I doubt it.
b) OK, so error reporting sucks, but that is the rule, not the exception, in climate science. At least we can hope that the data themselves are accurate within some precision, or reflect some observed trend. And how very interesting a pattern it is!
From 1955 to 1974, ocean heat content rockets up — I eyeball an “average” annual increase of order 0.15-0.2 (in whatever the units are, again, not given in the 0-2000m data panel itself). In 1975, it is like a switch is thrown, and the rate of increase plummets to be nearly indistinguishable from noise (same order as the error bar) except for 1982/1983 (remember this for a moment). In 1994/1995 the switch flips again, and the ocean’s heat rockets up at the former rate until 2002 when it more than doubles and is still on a slow increasing trend.
Compare that to:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1955/to:2015
and it is almost scary. The intervals of flat atmospheric temperatures correspond to periods when the ocean was absorbing heat (which almost invisibly increases its temperature). The intervals of rising atmospheric temperatures almost perfectly correspond to periods when the ocean’s heat content was nearly flat. The recent weak cooling trend in the atmosphere corresponds to a time when oceanic heat absorption is gradually increasing. Even the “bobble” in ocean heat content delta in 1982-1983 corresponds almost exactly with a similar “antibobble” in global average temperature in HADCRUT4 (offset by around a year).
It would be very, very interesting to look at the correlation of the two data sets (with atmospheric temperature presented as an annual delta to correspond to the delta in oceanic heat) in a scatter plot. I predict that they will produce two distinct regimes — one where the ocean is warming and the atmosphere is neutral to cooling, and one where the ocean is neutral to cooling and the atmosphere is warming with almost nothing in between. Well, with a tiny bit more structure — the post 2000 behavior almost forms a third regime splitting off from the 1955-1974 behavior.
Ordinarily I tend to suspect things like this, because numerology is not science and post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy, but OTOH I “do” statistics, and this sort of (anti)correlation almost always signals either a confounding connection — one variable really is some sort of approximate transform of the other variable — or a really, really serious causal connection (which is confounding, no doubt, but in a good way). I would come dangerously close to believing an assertion like “The ocean and atmosphere countervary in temperature/heat content in steps” even without a mechanism.
But I think that the mechanism itself may be pretty simple. Air pressure alone may be the cause. High pressure systems cool the atmosphere via pressure broadening of the GHGs and reduction of humidity, but let sunlight penetrate into the ocean. Low pressure systems can warm the atmosphere but tend to reflect sunlight and prevent it from penetrating the ocean. The decadal oscillations tend to alter the distribution of high vs low pressure centers both spatially and temporally (but do so in a more or less chaotic fashion, a la ENSO and polar vortices, with decade-scale trends that suddenly jump to a different regime but don’t necessarily repeat in duration or strength or distribution).
Note that GHGs play a role in both warming and cooling in this scenario — the wings in the lower atmosphere have been known to be mostly cooling since the 1950s. Water vapor is complex and works both ways — albedo and as a GHG and as a latent heat transport agent.
Still thinking about it, though.
rgb

Next year has the lunar standstill, which apparently has been associated with transient climate disturbance as far back as the Neolithic. Any predictions for the effect of any such 2015 disturbance?

And what about the cooling in the seventies? I cannot see it in the escalator.

Bob has seen my escalator before, I can’t remember if Anthony has, whatever, feel free to use as your discretion, you might like to display it in the post (depending on browser, you may need to refresh the image).
Albert’s Escalator
Illustrating why escalator’s are embarrassing to climate science, especially if, like Tim Yeo & John Gummer, you think the last decade having record temperatures means anything at all

Doesn’t that first sentence express what Trenberth is saying is happening now?
Sure. As I said (up above) I think Trenberth is actually a pretty reasonable guy, unafraid to depart from the “party line”. The problem with his assertion is that it doesn’t address whether CO_2 is or isn’t an important factor in the overall warming, it reflect ex post facto explanation of what has happened, it isn’t a prediction for what will happen, yet. Trenberth has basically said that all of the models that neglect this process are badly wrong even if that isn’t exactly how he has framed it.
Note well that this is still a hypothesis. It is by no means a proven fact. The data is very strongly suggestive and convincing, but the hypothesis itself is not quantitatively rigorous. It still doesn’t properly explain how the atmosphere steadily heats when the ocean does not, or how the ocean steadily heats when the atmosphere does not, and AFAIK no models exhibit this particular counterintuitive countervariance but the data does.
This is in fact still more direct statistical evidence that the models have the physics wrong, deeply wrong.
But that also means that I cannot answer your second question about how important CO_2 is in the actual climate or this process. Nobody can, not yet. It is possible, even probable, that it has an overall warming effect and is in fact contributing some step height to the escalator, but the escalator was walking up (and rarely down) long before CO_2 started to increase and existing models cannot and do not predict any of this (as one can easily see from:

>Dave says: May 29, 2014 at 5:48 am
>Personally, I would listen more to what you say if you would discontinue the infomercials >advertising your book.
Dave, you should advertise your book here as well!

Steven Mosher says:
May 29, 2014 at 10:50 am
actually it helps to disabuse people of the notion that warming (of the ATMOSPHERE and upper ocean) will occur in a monotonically increasing fashion.
El nino is a pattern. it does not cause warming it is how the energy imbalance manfests.
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you mean exactly the same way cooling does……
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo4.png

“How is it possible for anyone passing beyond Groundlevel at University anywhere not to have learn what it takes to present valid arguments that can lead up to a sound conclussion?”
Lol.

What Mosher is saying, and I agree with, is that El Niño is descriptive of a weather pattern and not a cause (as in a new heat source) for global warming. The fact that it occurs and that the surface temperatures go up globally on average are automatic.
Bob is describing the mechanism of heat transfer that occurs during this process (not new heat creation).
Both are right and both views are helpful in looking at the the weather pattern.
Mosher believes the CO2 influence is causing an upwards inevitable rise in temperatures without regard to the checks and counterbalances present in the earth’s climate stability ie that rising CO2 may lead tofeedbacks in clouds etc that restore a balance albeit with more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Hence he cannot a accept that the temperature rise has stalled and is reversing.
Hence his comment.
He did not disagree with you.
Bob as soon as I get over my aversion to credit cards on line and develop some internet skills I will buy a copy. You should send one to Mosher gratis but he may already have bought it.
Please continue your work.
Ps no El NIno yet is there ?

Robert Brown says:
“but there is no way that the addition of literally thousands of sampling stations would not reduce the error bars. In fact, reduce them by a factor of (wait for it) order \sqrt{1000} \approx 31 ”
I generally like your posts but if you add a drum roll to a statement, give it just one more proof read.
Adding whatever number of sampling points will not reduce anything by a __factor__. Simple example, you have 1000 noisy data points and you “add” another 1000. The noise is not reduced by a __factor__ of sqrt(1000) but by sqrt(2) or the gods of statistics would shit themselves.
You have to increase the number of points by a _factor_ to get the reduction of noise by the \sqrt factor.

Trenberth et al., are making it up as they go along.

You have to increase the number of points by a _factor_ to get the reduction of noise by the \sqrt factor.
I’m aware of that and I’m sorry I wasn’t sufficiently clear. I was assuming — possibly incorrectly — that there were only a handful of contributing measurements back in 1955 (as in literally — perhaps 4 or 5, maybe 10 or 20). Hence my statement about ORDER of . There are other reasons it might have been more or less than this number, as well — if they had 50 “sites” in 1955, but they consisted of 50 sites at only 5 locations, spread out within a few hundred miles of one another, the sites are hardly independent or randomly selected and might constitute only 5 “iid” samples as far as stats are concerned. Of course the same thing can be true (and is, to at least some extent) with the ARGO floats — they aren’t either uniformly distributed or randomly distributed, so even 4000 floats might not make up 4000 iid samples.
None of which should detract from the central point, which is that even if the number of “independent” sampling sites only went up by a factor of 100 (and it is my strong recollection that for most of the pre-Argo period, N was indeed never much greater than 50, with a lot of site correlation) there should be at least an order of magnitude reduction in the error bar between 1955 and the present. Its absence makes me wonder how they compute the error in what is supposedly a 3D kriging of sparse samples.
At that point we could go a step further and note that measurements of heat content can only be derived quantities from measurements of ocean temperature in depth (0 to 2000 meters according to the figure title). The entire data set including ARGO thus suffers from my incomprehension of how they can krige temperature in planetary oceans to that depth from only a 4000 — let alone 40 — sites to five or six significant digits absolute, using instrumentation that is likely not accurate to more than 3 or 4 digits on a good day with a tail wind for the first (pre-transistor) half of the record. How exactly did they measure the ocean temperature at 1 km of depth back in 1955? With a mercury thermometer (who read it)? With a thermocouple (who adjusted and normalized it, how were the results transmitted and tube-amplified, how did they handle the heat generated by the tube-driven apparatus)?
Remember, in 1955 electronics was still at the green screen radar level and kids were still listening to The Shadow on radio for electronic entertainment. It’s not that they couldn’t make precise measurements — oh, wait, yes it is. At least not without enormous expenditure. And who was funding this, way back then? So add in instrumental error to the error that ought to be reduced and I suspect you can easily find an additional order of magnitude — Ask Anthony about the error levels in MODERN WEATHER STATION apparatus using solid state electronics, and whether it suffices to measure something to 5 significant digits. Now re-ask the same question in 1955, concerning a piece of apparatus that has to be backed into a cylinder and then lowered to 200 atmospheres of pressure, from a ship that has junketed a small group of scientists to particular locations that, um, have just the right “scientific appeal”.
rgb

After 32 years of marriage I still don’t know what my wife is thinking, so I am fully convinced that ESP is a myth, and I *never* accept it when person “A” tries to tell me what person “B” is thinking. The AGW alarmists are always trying to do this – misrepresenting ‘deniers’ – and it always comes down to a straw-man argument.
They are also always applying simple linear regression (without variance calculations!) to raw data to produce illusory ‘trend lines’ which only delude them into believing they have discovered something profound. Their comprehension of statistics compares to that of a freshman business major – they barely know what a ‘mean’ or a ‘slope’ is, let alone their significance (if any).

Bernd Palmer says:
May 30, 2014 at 5:12 am
@Martin van Etten: “why then is temperature only going up, and not going down” What exactly should/could remove the excess energy from the planet?

Global temperature does not equate to energy of the planet. You can relate the temperature of a glass of water with its energy content because it is a homogeneous system, the planet is not.

Ninos neither add nor detract from the earths climate system, as the only energy coming into the system is from the sun’s rays, and the only energy departing the system is infrared thermal radiation from earth to space. Ninos are just weather events driven by the movement of energy within the Earth’s system.