Josh writes: When Steve MicIntyre writes “In the past few weeks, I’ve been re-examining the long-standing dispute over the discrepancy between models and observations in the tropical troposphere.” you might think you were in for a bit of a technical post – which, of course, it is – but it is also also very funny and well worth reading. It also inspired the cartoon below.
Click image to enlarge
H/t commenter ‘See owe to Rich‘ for the ‘hide the gap’ phrase.
..Josh, you should have put him sitting on the horse BACKWARDS !! That would be more his style…Great job as always…
“..on his horse…”?
How do you know it’s HIS horse ?? He probably stole it !
Marcus
April 25, 2016 at 4:53 am
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Strange looking ears for a horse. That and the face makes it look more like a mule or ass to me.
…or upside down. Wearing a helmet, of course–he’s not entirely daft.
His steed is correct but backwards sounds right. Ass-backwards.
That’s not a horse it’s an a$$ lol
Josh, minor correction. Secretariat’s actual Belmont win was by 31 furlongs, not 25. The announcer on the Youtube video of the race that Steve used simply called it wrong. Somebody found and posted the offical result. Great cartoon otherwise. I’m ‘sure’ Gavin will enjoy it….not.
A furlong is 1/8 of a mile. So you say Secretariat won a 1.5 mile race by 3.875 miles. Now that is a super horse for sure.
yeah, lengths. I am not into horse racing.
… that’s where English got the phrase `won by miles’ from 🙂
In my college physics class we would talk about converting furlongs per fortnight into meters per sec. I never thought that this would ever come up again.
Lengths?
Yup, I stand doubly corrected as a non horse racing aficionado.
That sounds better. How many rods is that by the way?
What’s a furlong?
The length of a furrow.
How long is furrow?
One furlong.
worth a firkin of beer
John Silver
Are you a sock puppet of Steve Mosher?
Well, the Belmont is a 12 furlong dirt track.
Secretariat won by 31 lengths but could have won by more if he was a shorter horse.
He set the world record for 1 1/2 miles and 1 1/8 miles and numerous track records including the Belmont obviously.
Another major controversy brewing here!
Was Secretariat’s victory margin 25 or 31 lengths or furlongs.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Lengths, but horse lengths are an inexact measurement, sort of like sea surface temperatures.
And Global Average Temperature.
Global Average Temperature isn’t even a measurement. It’s completely make-believe.
Global Average Temperature isn’t complete make believe.
But it has the same relationship to reality that the S&P index has to the value of all stocks.
If the S&P is going up it is likely the value of the average stock is going up. A claim the S&P tells exactly how much the average stock went up or how much your stock went up would be absurd.
To determine how much the earth is warming you would have to bury land sensors because that is where the earth is.
Measuring air temperature is like measuring the freon temperature in your AC system to determine the temperature of the passenger compartment.
“sort of like sea surface temperatures” Ah…. but in horses they simply have a horse race to settle the issue! More scientific that way!
It is accurate enough until you need a photo finish – then it is “win by a nose”.
New study claims fossil fuels could be completely phased out in 10 years !!
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/35187
Meanwhile, Venezuela runs out of toilet paper.
..Again ?? LOL
but what else can you do with your bushel of bolivars? and they’ll be even more economical tomorrow!
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=VEF&To=USD
Are they using both sides? At least on earth day, lol!
http://media.pcronline.com/eurointervention/issues/R_issue/3/epub/OEBPS/images/01_Kintscher_fmt.png
Household air pollution from solid fuels are number four on the list over causes reducing life length.
I just can´t see that United Nations is riding the right horse – by making electricity from fossil fuels less affordable and less available for the poor.
More than half of those items are guesses, not established fact.
Some insurance group(s) may be using those for adjustments, but that just means they’re charging more and paying less for listed identifiers.
I like how “alcohol use” is the only one that has the potential to increase you life span.
Cheers!
http://www.statisticbrain.com/stress-statistics/
77% of Americans regularly experience symptoms of stress. Those of us stressed by the false global warmer claims should be able to sue them and get compensation, perhaps even punitive damages.
High Sodium? I don’t think so. Suboptimal breast feeding is what might get me
Who cares, the important scenario is that energy (ffs) is affordable.
Nice link. What an idiot and obviously the Sussex (lack of?) Energy Group is deep in the renewable energy scam the taxpayer crowd. I presume in his daydream world the existing renewable energy sources can somehow manage to cope with a long winter spell of high pressure with no wind, little sunlight and huge demand, especially given the plan in the UK to stop domestic gas use so all heating becomes electric, and electric vehicles as well I presume. La-La Land undoubtedly.
I see I forgot to close my blockquote. You’ve misspelled Steve’s surname.
My impression is that Gavin is not riding a stallion (NASA -space exploration) but a decrepit mule or even worse a donkey (NASA -GISS).
great cartoon Josh, btw must meet some time at the Kingston riverside, if you are still around, the Bishop’s might be a good venue,
It is not a horse and word you were looking for is ass.
This is a wild ass.
http://www.sdzsafaripark.org/sites/default/files/animal_hero/somali_hero.jpg
What Gavin is riding is a domesticated species called a dumb ass.
Are we talking mount or rider?
I wasn’t looking at it that way but there is at least one type of ass in the cartoon.
“Saturday silliness – Gavin loses it”
Assumption that Gavin actually ever had it may not be a warranted assumption.
Very good point.
+1
Schmidt’s objections to Christy’s graph are pathetic.
However showing the spread of models and a heavy average line also misleads IMO, the correct comparison would be between observations and the RCP 8.5 (business as usual) scenario model output alone.
Christopher H
That’s a valid point. And they use the ‘spread’ called ‘inter-model variability’ and argue it should be viewed as a measure of ‘natural variability’, and use it for calculating all kinds of (misguided) proabilities and confidence in how certain they are when attributing temps to CO2-emissions.
I tried to include a picture demonstrating this earlier, bu failed/’comment could not be posted’.
I’ll make another try!
Contd.
But it is far worse still if you consider that what they are showing are solely anomalies.
When you look at what all those models perform, and how well they manage to capture and model ‘the climate’ an actual temperatures it looks far worse:
http://s20.postimg.org/fp1c9gs59/CMIP5_Models_Actual_Temps.png
In essence, these models are unfit to describe the climate and temperature to an extent one order of magintude larger than what that whole AGW-bouhaha has been about so far. And this after decades of ‘the foremost expertes and scientist’ doing their absolute (and lavishly funded) best!
That horse has diabetes.
I just don’t get the validity of baselining predictions at the mean.
As time goes on, your predictions are guaranteed to get better.
If the Dow is at 10,000 today and you predict it will be 50,000 by 2050
and it actually ends up at 10,000, you missed reality by 40,000.
If you get to rebaseline, at 2050 you can say your model was only off by 20,000.
As time goes on, you are actually changing the history of how your model performed
in the past (does’t that theme sound familiar).
Yup.
An anomaly is a difference.
If I plot the Dow anomaly from today, the anomaly is zero (the current Dow minus the current Dow is zero).
If you predict a Dow anomaly of 40,000 in 2050 and it ends up 10,000 in 2050, the 2050 Dow anomaly is 0. Your error is 100% (you predicted a change of 40,000 and it didn’t happen).
No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig the result is still ugly. The prediction was completely wrong.
This has been a big problem of mine for a long time. The choice of base period that centres all the data. Zeke is famous for it including when he he is showing adjusted versus raw temperature data.
If you centre the data, it always looks like nothing is really different but if you use the “right” starting point (as in the proper one to use) it is much clear what is really going on.
Steve reproduced two very simple charts from Roy Spencer which should make this clear enough to everyone (the centre base period need to be called out every time this “trick” is used (as in “Mike’s nature trick” type of misrepresentation).
Good illustration of one of the vital points of statistics almost NEVER observed. It shows very clearly the danger of misleading by trying to use the statistical data as a PREDICTIVE tool! It (statistics based on past measurements) never is and never will be a sound basis for prediction yet it is consistently used that way. No matter how much someone WANTS it to be predictive, it just ISN’T!
it’s one thing to compare trends based on anomalies but aligning models and observations based on anomalies doesn’t strike me as valid. Consider a model who’s initial value is 14deg C where the equivalent observation is 10. The 4 deg difference means a lot in terms of the actual real world affects and even how the model reacts over time. Either show the trends themselves or the actual values but don’t align the anomalies when you’re discussing trends since it implies something about the models that isn’t true no matter how you align them if they don’t have the same starting values.
Obviously they are anomalies not real temperatures so this isn’t true.
If I define the anomaly as the difference from 1980, when the model and real temperature trends are plotted, if the chart starts at 1980 both anomalies are by definition zero.
Nothing nefarious has been done.
Any claim I have done something bad, wrong, or incorrect is absurd.
Way-hay! I think this is the first Hat Tip I’ve ever had, for “hide the gap”. Thanks!
Here is the full comment I made at Climate Audit:
“I really can’t believe that a scientist with peer-reviewed papers to his name, like Gavin Schmidt, would stoop to trying to hide the gap in such a way. In a race with error-prone observations, the only thing at issue is how to fairly draw a line between the runners at the start of the race. It is not whether the correct time to draw that line is at the start of the race or in the middle of the race.”
Rich.
All this distracts from the fact the troposphere is not doing its CAGW dance, that’s the bottom line, the rest is a face saving exercise by Schmidt.
Schmidt must protect the models, or he is jobless.
Self preservation.
Gavin’s Horse had a head start. The real horses caught and passed Gavin’s, thus winning by less of a margin. Gavin declares “Victory!,” because he also had another handicap: the fix was in. The fixes are always in. After all, “It’s a ‘Consensus’!” Yea and Verily, so sayeth now even The Pope!
Just think what we “mainstream” Climate Scientists could do with a few thousand Climate Models covering a 360 deg. radius of uncertainty with Spaghetti. We could “predict” everything perfectly! And if we eliminated all uncertainty everywhere by Modeling out a Solid Spaghetti String Sphere, we’ve just built the TOE! And The Masters Of The Universe truly are us Humans….But sadly, injustice has prevailed. All that’s been lacking is enough “Rich Nation’s Own” Spaghetti Green Sauce. Of course Exxon has no doubt been hiding that trick from us too, even as they bilked all Humanity of some of its Green Sauce and life-spans. Just like “they” did with the Tobacco Leaves!
Hear me my friends, you can’t accomplish all that with mere Tea Leaves. Exxon must have been using Spaghetti, and Virgin Olive Oil! Of course we’ll still need to..er..”replicate” their findings a few million times, for the Children!
“Gavin loses it”
DId he ever have it?