Dilbert creator, Scott Adams wrote a post on his blog yesterday that is well worth reading in entirety: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science
Adams notes:
It seems to me that a majority of experts could be wrong whenever you have a pattern that looks like this:
1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.
2. Prediction models are complicated. When things are complicated you have more room for error. Climate science models are complicated.
3. The models require human judgement to decide how variables should be treated. This allows humans to “tune” the output to a desired end. This is the case with climate science models.
4. There is a severe social or economic penalty for having the “wrong” opinion in the field. As I already said, I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist. Imagine how much worse the pressure would be if science was my career.
5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore. Our measurement sensors do not cover all locations on earth, from the upper atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, so we have the option to use the measurements that fit our predictions while discounting the rest.
6. The argument from the other side looks disturbingly credible.
One of the things that always fascinated me about jury trials is that attorneys from both sides can sound so convincing even though the evidence points in only one direction. A defendant is either guilty or innocent, but good lawyers can make you see it either way. Climate science is similar. I’ve seen airtight arguments that say climate science is solid and true, and I’ve seen equally credible-looking arguments that say it is bunk. From my non-scientist perspective, I can’t tell the difference. Both sides look convincing to me.
Again, read the entire essay: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science
Steve McIntyre writes in comments:
I write the Climate Audit blog. I first began serious study of paleoclimate when I asked Michael Mann for the FTP location data of his data (for the Hockey Stick) and he said that he had “forgotten” the location, but that one of his associates would find it for me. The associate said that the data was not in any one location, but volunteered to find it for me. I was astonished that a result could have been so widely disseminated without any sort of formal audit – not realizing at the time that “peer review” for a journal was a limited form of due diligence.
Scot [sic] writes: “You probably are not a scientist, and that means you can’t independently evaluate any of the climate science claims.” I had mathematical knowledge and skill and decided that it would be an interesting task to actually try to verify Mann’s results. It turned out that he had made a grotesque error in his attempt to calculate principal components, had withheld adverse verification statistics and had weighted his reconstruction on stripbark tree rings that were inappropriate.
When I examined other attempts to estimate temperature in the past 1000 years, I encountered problems with every one of them, incurring, in the process, severe antagonism on the part of university academics.
However, after being involved in the controversy for many years, I think that far too little attention (none) is paid to a very fundamental difference between “skeptics” and warmists on their respective perceptions on whether human emissions of CO2 thus far have caused “serious negative damage” to the world or not. Skeptics universally think not. Many do not dispute the idea that we are carrying on an “uncontrolled experiment”, but have nonetheless concluded that, through good luck rather than good management, the consequences have been inconsequential or even beneficial. On the other hand, warmists are thoroughly convinced we have already incurred “serious negative damage” though what they view as “serious negative damage” may well be viewed by a skeptic as relatively trivial, or, at worst, an ordinary cost and outweighed by other benefits. When I challenge warmists to enumerate the most serious of the damages experienced so far, I do not get answers.
Of the potential damages, sea level rise seems one of the most serious to me, but even there, some, if not much, of the potential problem arises from very long-term (Holocene scale) events that are not materially impacted by CO2 emissions.
While I have made numerous technical criticisms of work by climate scientists, I have mostly avoided commenting on policy, other than urging far better data archiving practices – a policy which many of my adversaries opposed. Needless to say, this has not prevented demonization from climate activists – a practice that obviously does not enable them to “persuade” their opponents and critics. Quite the opposite. In my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.
Over last about five years, I had a few (two or three) serious discussions with “warmists” and in all these cases we generally agreed on all evidence, but just couldn’t agree on what conclusions to draw from it. They’re all scared by the future, even if they admit the current state is not all that bad.
For most people, climate change is a religion. They were told something over and over again so many times that they accepted it as truth and now work on spreading the word without having the intellectual potential to put it under scrutiny. They just believe it’s true.
Hi Kasuha
Here is adequate scientific evidence that there is nothing to worry about – that global warming is a false crisis. I have known this since 1985, since I first became aware of global warming alarmism.
Clause 1 says climate sensitivity to CO2 is very low, so low that NO dangerous global warming will result from current or probable future increases in atmospheric CO2.
Clause 2 says we don’t even know what causes what, and both sides of the fractious global warming debate have probably “got the cart before the horse”.
Furthermore, not one of the warmists’ scary scenarios has materialized – they have a perfect negative predictive track record.
That is the science, now to the politics:
When you find warmists falsifying data and models, and lying, threatening and intimidating skeptics, why would you ever believe anything they say?
The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, and the best prediction of warmists’ future behaviour will be just like their past – 100 % false,
Best wishes for the Holidays to all, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/24/water-vapour-the-big-wet-elephant-in-the-room/#comment-2056092
[excerpted]
1. In reality, climate sensitivity to CO2 (ECS) may not exist in a practical sense, or may be so close to zero as to be insignificant. Many scientists believe that significant atmospheric CO2 increases started circa 1940 when fossil fuel combustion accelerated, but since then, global temperature has gone up, down and sideways, which suggests that Earth’s climate is dominated by natural drivers and the impact of atmospheric CO2 is relatively insignificant – if ECS exists, it is probably less than 0.3C/(2xCO2).
…
2. The other “elephant in the room” is that atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales. Few academics want to discuss this subject because they “know” that CO2 drives temperature, and typically they just want to debate the magnitude of climate sensitivity to CO2 – or essentially, by how much the future can drive the past. 🙂
Post Script:
Ferdinand will probably weigh in again re Clause 2, trying again to persuade me that his “Mass Balance Argument” is relevant to what I am saying here – it is not.
That time scale argument is actually pretty thin. The construction of CO2 records from ice cores depends on assumptions as to how rapidly air bubbles get entrapped by snow compaction. I honestly don’t believe we can know this precisely; it is just modeling all the way. If you look at the official Antarctic records, the (model-dependent) time lag is pretty variable.
I agree with the rest of your points. One would think that mankind’s perfect record of failure re. doomsday predictions should give people pause, but it rarely does. This time is always different, apparently.
Hello Michael – not “thin” at all.
Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record and also by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
Happy Holidays, Allan
Reference:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/31/watch-global-co2-jump-with-el-nino-over-time-then-look-at-the-whys/comment-page-1/#comment-2335540
[excerpts]
To falsify the false global warming alarmist hypothesis, one only has to show that CO2 lags and does not lead temperature, and why, which I have done.
…
My hypothesis was discussed extensively in 2008-2009, because it contradicted the popular notion that increasing atmospheric CO2 primarily caused rising temperature, which was false. Both sides of the fractious global warming debate (the warmists AND the skeptics) bitterly contested my hypothesis.
The close dCO2/dt relationship and resulting 9-month lag of CO2 after temperature is now generally accepted, even among many warmists. The best counter-argument the warmists have suggested is that the ~9-month lag “must be a feedback effect”, which is a cargo-cult argument:
“We KNOW CO2 drives warming (our paychecks depend on it), therefore it MUST BE a feedback effect.”
… Here is one depiction of the subject dCO2/dt vs T relationship, although I think it is slightly different mathematically from my own, which I suggest is technically more correct.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
If you want to check my math, the 2008 spreadsheet is here – see Figures 1 to 4.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRaeFig5b.xls
I used UAH LT and Hadcrut3 for temperatures, and global CO2 concentrations back to 1979. The dCO2/dt vs T correlation holds.
In a separate unpublished spreadsheet I used Hadcrut3 and Mauna Loa CO2 back to 1958 and the correlation still held.
I no longer use the surface temperature data, Hadcrut or other, because I have lost confidence in its accuracy, especially due to all the recent “adjustments”.
In conclusion, I remain reasonably confident that the future cannot cause the past (in our current space-time continuum). 🙂
Regards, Allan
Post Script:
Statistician Bill Briggs also examined my hypo in 2008 using a completely different approach, and supported my conclusion (even though I did not like his methodology much. because it only examined a 12-month lag).
http://wmbriggs.com/post/122/
See also Humlum et al, January 2013, written five years after my icecap.us paper:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
Highlights
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.
– Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.
– Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
****************
There are multiple independent lines of evidence and reasoning that should each be sufficient to prevent anyone from believing that there is much to worry about.
For anyone well educated in the relevant subjects to truly be fearful of CAGW would seem to require a mind bogglingly selective attention.
Allan, the effects responsible for the 9 months lag and the 800 years lag are surely different. On the short time scale, seasonal changes of photosynthesis and plant decay are important.
My comment referred not to the (trivial) seasonal variation but to the 800 years time lag that was inferred from ice cores. I have played numerical fitting games with the EPICA records myself and know that they do not provide solid support for this widely reported number.
Hi again Michael,
I wrote above:
“Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record and also by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.”
In my shorthand, ~ means approximately and ~~ means very approximately (or ~squared).
It is possible that the causative mechanisms for this “TemperatureLead-CO2Lag” relationship are largely similar or largely different, although I suspect that both physical processes (ocean solution/exsolution) and biological processes (photosynthesis/decay and other biological) play a greater or lesser role at different time scales.
All that really matters is that CO2 lags temperature at ALL measured times scales and does not lead it, which is what I understand the modern data records indicates on the multi-decadal time scale and the ice core data records indicate on a much longer time scale.
This does not mean that temperature is the only (or even the primary) driver of increasing atmospheric CO2. Other drivers of CO2 could include deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, etc. but that does not matter for this analysis, because the ONLY signal that is apparent signal in the data records is the LAG of CO2 after temperature.
It also does not mean that increasing atmospheric CO2 has no impact on temperature; rather it means that this impact is quite small.
I conclude that temperature, at ALL measured time scales, drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature.
Precedence studies are commonly employed in other fields, including science, technology and economics. The fact that this clear precedence is consistently ignored in “climate science” says something about the deeply held unscientific beliefs in this field – perhaps it should be properly be called “climate religion” or “climate dogma” – it just doesn’t look much like “science”.
Happy Holidays, Allan
If Scott Adams was a climate-scientist, I would advise him to watch out for his career. Such thinking betrays the mind of a true scientist, and that is not welcome when ‘there is a planet to be saved’.
Now, here’s a thing, would you let the ‘experts’ who build climate models determine the ideal climate for you and yours? (Second-hand car, anyone?)
Many years ago a mentor of mine who I greatly (and still do) advised me to have the experts on tap, not on top.
1.
This false equivalence assertion is either intellectual laziness or just Adams blowing hot air at us for the sake of it.
I’ve been reading about AGW quite extensively for several years. I have not yet come upon even one (sorry, Ferdinand E., not even yours) “airtight” argument that AGW is fact. Not one. All I have read are guesses — all of which have anti-correlation and anti-proof against them, now. At BEST, they could be labeled, “educated guesses;” they have not even risen to “testable hypothesis” yet. (Well, heh, at “BEST,” they would say they were “settled science,” lol).
2. Re: Adams’ and not ruining his chances of making money by affirming science facts
I get that. But, why does he not just refrain from saying anything? Why take a wishy-washy, lukewarmer, intellectually dishonest, position in public?
3. Finally:
🙂
I get what you are saying, but I think that you are wrong here. Look at Dilbert; in the cartoons, he is frequently confronted with a situation where he can do something or not, to prevent a bad outcome. He virtually never does anything and the outcome is always terrible.
I think it is the same with Scott Adams; he is seeing the point at which somebody has to do something. And we all know that the way the sceptics have been doing it, fighting propaganda with fact, doesn’t work.
Dear Hive,
1. There is no alternative, Hive. Truth (facts, data, logic) is the only effective, enduring, weapon against lies. Lying to stop lies only comes back to bite you in the end. Credibility is essential to winning the Battle for Science.
2. Your definition of “work” is too narrow. Your time frame, too short. MANY people have testified in threads on this site that WUWT’s (and other pro-science realism sites’) science giants and their arguments persuaded them that AGW was a lie or, at least, started them well on the way to ascertaining that fact.
You believe (I challenge you to prove your assertion, if it is not mere belief):
1. WUWT/Anthony Watts’ exposure of the flawed U.S. surface temperature data collection stations;
2. Stephen McIntyre’s expose of the “hockey stick” tree rings;
3. Roy Spencer’s testimony about the satellite temperature records and lack of a lower troposphere “hot spot” and more;
4. WUWT’s (and others’) publishing the “Climategate e mails” in which Phil “Cheers” Jones, et al. destroy themselves out of their own mouths;
5. Christopher Monckton’s magnificent lectures and writing exposing the non-science of AGW;
6. Dr. Bob Carter’s careful writing about the flaws in the AGW arguments;
7. Richard Lindzen’s numerous, powerful, presentations and writing;
8. Dr. Harold Lewis’ letter resigning from the APS;
9. Jo Nova’s years of incisive reporting of the facts;
10. Mark Steyn’s writing, exposing the truth about Mann, et al. and more;
11. Lawsuits by Christopher Horner and David Schnare and others in defense of science facts;
12. Bob Tisdale’s years and years of painstakingly graphing ENSO;
AND I COULD LIST SO MANY IT WOULD TAKE 5 MINUTES JUST TO SCROLL PAST IT AT BREAKNECK SPEED.
that all this did not “work?”
Effects:
(yes, okay, the laughably weak, damned-out-of-their-own-mouths arguments and obviously-fiction movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” did much to cause these effects as well):
— Climate change is the LOWEST item on the voters’ list of “concerns”
— Internal combustion engine vehicle sales are doing GREAT (check out Chevy Silverado)
— Gasoline is as popular a purchase as ever
— EPA is backing off its coal-strangling regs.
— Congress filed Kyoto (and Trump will do the same with Paris) climate extortion in the round file
— Al Gore is rarely heard from
— “Who is Bill Nye?” asks anyone under 20.
— Big money long ago abandoned wind and is currently dropping solar
Do you REMEMBER what was being said in the 1990’s and early 2000’s about climate? “The earth has a fever” — “planetary emergency.” Now? Mostly silence.
And you think that ALL of that was simply because the public saw through the propaganda on — its — own???
I see it differently. But for the science realists, we would be much worse off.
Time.
Just a matter of time till the last rat disappears, for they are fighting for a lost, utterly worthless, cause.
AGW is over.
The money is gone.
THANK YOU, SCIENCE GIANTS!!! Keep up the good fight until the world is completely rid of the climate rats!
With gratitude to them (and with amazement that anyone could fail to see the above),
Janice
P.S. And, no, it is not contradictory to say, “AGW is over” and — “fight on to the end.” Rats breed quickly. They cannot win as it now stands, IF the science realists remain vigilant, for the climate rats must be completely eradicated to prevent a resurgence of the plague of AGW.
When no one can prove that, in the real world, CO2 causes global temperature rise; but a cult basis it’s religion on CO2 causing global temperature rise, that’s what did it for me.
I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but in business I have met a lot of con men, and boy, does climate alarmism ever reek of a con game.
Nor do I think it’s deliberate, or an organised conspiracy, It’s just a passing bandwagon that’s gathering momentum until it careers out of control and crashes. Which it will, Trump or no Trump.
Janice; I take it you are NOT a follower of Scott’s blog.
Question on semantics: why the expression “serious negative damage”?
Isn’t this a double negative or at best, pointless redundancy? If not, WTF is positive damage?
Remember Dilbert is biting office humor. It carries over to Scott Adam’s blog. Serious positive damage is horrible stuff like fewer weather extremes and lower insurance premiums (bad for insurance companies), more dangerous polar bears (bad for seals), a greening Sahel (bad for the Sahara desert), a reliable dispatchable electricity grid (bad for renewable companies and their subsidies). Horrible from a certain perspective.
I know this is beating a dead horse, but it is hard to believe that some people define science as a belief that is supported by the opinion of experts. As noted, science is not a physical thing, It is not an object, and you cannot go to the supermarket and buy a pound of science. Science is a methodology, or a group of ideas sequenced to learn how the physical world works. From theoretical formulations, to experimental design, to the necessary physical validation of said theory, science has nothing to do with beliefs. Beliefs have everything to do with religion, but nothing to do with the scientific method.
Beware the use of expert opinion. Experts have spent their careers accumulating bad records. Witness financial and market experts, most of whom cannot manage a stock portfolio to equal the average return of a stock index fund (Malkiel). Witness medical experts who have managed to get over half of all medical studies wrong (Ioannidis). Witness our economic experts that missed forecasting the entire banking mortgage disaster (Taleb).
What makes anybody think that climate experts are any better? As Mann has shown, some of these experts are just legends in their own minds.
Bob, remember Brad Keyes only does very biting sarcasm. See his main blog contributions at CliSkep. No need for him to label them as such for those of us in the thick of the fray. This thread was a marvelous example of the havoc he can cause with one Feynman deliberate misquote!!!
ristvan: Ah. A teachable moment. Thanks.
Very well put by both authors. Climate science a relatively quite and arcane field has suffered immeasurably from its infection by politics. To a lay person there seems little science left and much political grandstanding and money grubbing built up. The entire field is a mess akin to the US housing market in 2007/8.
Citizens concerned that that good ethics prevail in public policy are left with little choice but to pull the corrupted edifice to the ground. In the US we may now be able to begin that process. It will not be easy.
Climate theories regardless of model basis cannot pass any of Feynman’s criteria for science never mind all of them. Skepticism show not get tangled in the validity of hindcast UHI adjustment factors being too large or too small. If it isn’t science it isn’t going to be changed by applying scientific methods.
The Australian fake news site, ABC reports on “hottest year ever” bringing Australia’s highest ever crop yield. The irony for them probably went straight over their heads! Warwick Hughes has the link here: http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=4842
Judith Curry has a lot to say about this, and about science “heresy”. Beware “crusades” against “heresy”. One of the medieval anti-heretic “crusaders” is reported to have said, when asked how to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys: kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/12/05/climate-heretic-to-be-or-not-to-be/#more-22571
1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.
Not really. The term in general use prior to 1975 was ‘climate modification’. In ’75 Broecker published a paper entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” The Charney report published a few years later adopted Broecker’s terminology, when referring to surface temperature change, Charney used ‘global warming’, when referring to other changes that would result from increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used ‘climate change’. Thus the two terms evolved simultaneously,this is still the usual usage.
Well while that’s great for the scientific literature, in popular parlance it definitely shifted from “global warming” to”climate change.”
Those of us in Gen X (among others) that actually watched and read the news on a regular basis over the last two decades can attest to that.
“Those of us in Gen X (among others) that actually watched and read the news on a regular basis over the last two decades can attest to that.”
That’s right. I lived through the whole era from global cooling to global warming. After the world started warming up in the 1970’s, global warming became the focus and the terms “global warming” and “climate change” were used interchangeably, but in the early days “global warming” was by far the one most used, and then it gradually transformed into “climate change” being the term most used. And I think that transition took place because of the pause.
Terms do not “evolve” via usage in a single paper, or even a dozen or more. The preponderance of usage has been “global warming” in earlier years, then “climate change” later. Broecker clearly was an outlier in using the terms interchangeably. Citation of one subsequent report is nothing more than charney picking.
This is exactly what needs to be done. There needs to be an Open Source Temperature Reconstruction, where all additions, subtractions, edits and adjustments are made in broad daylight. The concentration of power is mindboggling considering someone like Michael Mann and James Hansen can spread nonsense that costs the taxpayers trillions of dollars. We simply can’t afford to allow activists corrupt science for their own personal agendas.
I fully believe Hansen is sincere. Not so, most Warmists.
Damn those lying Warmists! Damn them I say!
Yes . . Corporations are required to submit to independent audits annually.
Just why Climate Science™ is permitted to audit their own work is a mystery.
wherever there are multiple variables and politics, you can be pretty confident that self interest is likely
“5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore.”
Well, we all know about the temperature adjustments to the land temperatures that the NCDC implements in GHCN-M. It is probably about 0.6C overall now that has been added to the trend without real justification.
But they are also doing this with the Ocean SST anomaly records now. Bob Tisdale has commented on this a lot but recently I have had a good look at it.
Do you know that they have thrown out the SSTs recorded from the satellites ($ billion of dollars spent by Nasa and the NOAA putting these dozens of satellites up there and they are supposed to be very accurate) but when the NCDC moved from ERSST V3 to ERSST V3b in 2013, they just got rid of the satellite measurements.
“However, the addition of satellite data led to residual biases. The ERSST v3b analysis is exactly as described in the ERSST v3 paper with one exception: ERSST v3b does not use satellite SST data. The ERSST v3 improvements are justified by testing with simulated data.”
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/extended-reconstructed-sea-surface-temperature-ersst-v3b
AND, then they threw out all the drifters and buoys and Argo floats in ERSST V4 recently implemented in 2015. Huang 2015 Part 1 and Liu 2015 Part 2 and finally in Karl 2015.
“Buoy SSTs have been adjusted toward ship SSTs in ERSST.v4 to correct for a systematic difference of 0.12°C between ship and buoy observations. Although buoy SSTs are more homogeneous and reliable than ship observations, buoys were not widely available before around 1980.” If you are just adjusting the bouys to the Ships (and doing this continuously ever after, then you are not using the bouys.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1
Well, I had a look at these.
Throw Out Satellites:
You can’t find ERSST V3 (ships, buoys and satellites) anywhere anymore (the NCDC has scraped the record out everywhere) BUT, naturally I have an old saved copy of the last version ERSST V3.5.1 only up to July 2012.
This is why they threw out the satellite data (noting that they really only got going around 1981 or so). REALLY. This tiny difference is well within any type of error margin and made no difference whatsoever.
Throw out Bouys:
And then why did they throw out the buoys (noting that they really only got going around 1980). REALLY. This tiny difference is not difference at all. Huang 2015 Part 1 and Part 2 and Karl 2015 were all based on a fake premise. There is no real difference.
Even if you go back to 1947, You can not say there is any real difference between the Ships and Bouys and just the Ships. There is no rationale to cherrypick different periods like was done in Huang 2015 and Karl 2015 to try to pretend there is some difference. They actually added 0.12C to the trend from 1947 to 2010 based on this difference. After 2010, who knows what was added to the trend.
But then, if you have now thrown out the satellites previously, and then the bouys, you are are only relying on the ships now. Since this record ends in 2010, now you have room to bump the record up.
Now if we go way back now and compare the last ship, buoy and satellite record, there isn’t much difference overall, but now one has complete control over what get reported from now on because its all random ship engine intake adjustment algorithms.
There you go. Now you know why. Everything can be calculated in a basement office at the NCDC with ZERO transparency.
And now all we can rely on is the lower troposphere satellite measurements because the GHCN land temperatures from the NCDC are just completely adjusted out of all imagination. And now even the Ocean SST is nothing but adjustment algorithms.
You can easily subtract 0.5C from the NCDC and GISS and Had Centre and BEST global temperatures because that is how much unjustified adjustment has been done.
All the data is here. (Except I don’t think there is a copy of ERSST V3 available anywhere on the net anymore). (and if you find a copy of ERSST V3 somewhere, please let me know. The NCDC seems to have been very thorough in scaping off every version of it off the internet everywhere. Like why would they do that? ).
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
I have a 2009 and 2013 ersst version in my archives.
A Gordian Knot to be resolved with a slice of tropospheric microwaves.
============
Forest Gardener, for 2015 and 2016 at least, I think you would have to create your own record from scratch after gathering all the raw data that was used previously and is still produced. Contacting the WMO, the bouy operators, the satellite operators and get them to send their data to you. Some of this is available in various formats across the internet but certainly not all of it. You really need to have an agency with 20 years experience putting all this together to be able to do so. There will be no way to double-check the data now starting in 2015. Ocean SST is just a number produced at the NCDC now. The independent Ocean SST indices are slowly being discontinued now. Even HadISST was decapitated by a NASA-funded study in 2016 citing errors in the satellite derived records.
Bill Illis wrote: “There you go. Now you know why. Everything can be calculated in a basement office at the NCDC with ZERO transparency.
And now all we can rely on is the lower troposphere satellite measurements because the GHCN land temperatures from the NCDC are just completely adjusted out of all imagination. And now even the Ocean SST is nothing but adjustment algorithms.”
There’s the long and the short of it: The satellite records are the only thing we can rely on. NOAA/NASA have completely botched the surface temperature records.
There are lots of people using this bogus NOAA/NASA surface temperature data in their work, which means lots of people are reaching erroneous conclusions.
I see people are still talking about ‘ppm’ when referring to CO2 levels,
but I doubt that the ‘man in the street’ comprehends this. Better I think
is to say that CO2 as a component of the atmosphere, compared to
other components, has increased from 3:9997 to 4:9996.
When possible, I use parts per 10,000 by volume. But that’s for dry air.
If you ignore all the other GHGs, which is reasonable, as they are measured in billionths in our air, and accept a whole atmospheric average of two percent for the main GHG water vapor, then here’s the situation:
We’ve gone from 203 greenhouse effect molecules per 10,203 air molecules to 204 GHE molecules per 10,204 air molecules since AD 1850. Bear in mind that each of the 200 H2O molecules is a lot more potent in retarding loss of heat to space than is each of the three or four CO2 molecules.
Ooh, scary!
A good way of putting the numbers into perspective and making them more meaningful to the non-engineers among us.
Even better we understand that ~ 93% of CO2 is in the oceans.
That adds some perspective.
Well thanks for clearing THAT up. Can I interest you in some lovely new ice-free property in Greenland?
Frank Ciccarelly
Good offer if the price is right!
Personally I recommend anybody reflecting on it to check out the current Greenland record ice mass increase and factor that into the price.
I use pennies in a ten dollar bill
Re Steve McIntyre’s comments, these days there’s a thing called “Data Management Plans”. Quoting http://otago.libguides.com/data_management “Good research data management is a series of activities that make it easier to locate, access, share, and use data. It applies to all forms of data and to all disciplines. Researchers should invest time in planning and take action throughout the research data lifecycle to ensure it is managed well.” This is a relatively new thing, but it’s increasingly the case that research funders expect you to *have* a data management plan and to carry it out and for the data to remain web-accessible for a long time. _That_ is what the current norm for research is. I do recommend reading that page to get an idea of the standard that modern climate (or any other) research should be held to.
It was all the experts who drove Tschernobyl, Fukoshima and Sellafield, Harrisburg and Tcheljabinsk. Perhaps it will be the experts to cause the fate of the earth.
At AGU next week I expect, perhaps a good bet, to see Chrissy McEntee, Her Majesties Ship, flanked by a flotilla of Rent-a-Cops, as if CA State-Troopers, cutting a wide swath and leaving a bigger wake in their passage through the throngs of … unimportants, i.e. the ‘paying’ attendees.
I’ve started calling myself a climate change “doubter”. The response from warmists has been tepid. 😉
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Interesting read from the Mr Dilbert (Scott Adams)…
Highlights:
“I endorse the scientific consensus on climate change to protect my career and reputation. To do otherwise would be dumb, at least in my situation.
“And as we can plainly see, the cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist.
“While it is true that a scientist can become famous and make a big difference by bucking conventional wisdom and proving a new theory, anything short of total certainty would make that a suicide mission. And climate science doesn’t provide the option of total certainty.
“And if the risk of climate change isn’t real, I will say I knew it all along because climate science matches all of the criteria for a mass hallucination by experts.“
It’s getting hotter here on planet earth.
The ice sheets are melting. Greenland is thawing. You don’t have to be a climate scientist to figure it out. You could be a farmer or a fisherman or an Eskimo. Or maybe a polar bear. The weather is getting crazy too.
It’s coming at us at top speed. The Climate Change Express…
Coo coo ca choo, waiting for go do.
===========================
Quite right, the record number of polar bears proves it; they are multiplying from around 4 000 a few years ago to currently around 25 000 because they understand that otherwise they are doomed!
Even if you ignore all the complicated predictive models, there’s plenty of historical evidence for climate change. The very fact that CO2 levels are 30% higher than at any point in time in the past 10,000 years is suggestive that some change, whatever it is, will happen.
It is to be noted 10,000 years is an exceedingly long time. The relevant XKCD comic (https://xkcd.com/1732/) gives a very good sense of perspective here. We truly have never before seen a CO2 increase on this scale. That’s 500 human generations — again, it’s an extremely long fucking time, the scale of which is comprehensible only after you put in some serious intellectual effort.
To say that this increased CO2 level might effect nothing at all is a bit naive. It is obviously going to affect SOMETHING, especially considering that the cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 levels and global temperature (i.e., the greenhouse effect) has already been well-established for over a century.
While we can agree that the greenhouse effect will cause some kind of global change, the nature of this change and the degree of this change can be reasonably called into question, especially in the absence of predictive models. As some have suggested, the CO2 increase might actually result in something positive for the planet, such as an increase an greenery.
But since it’s the very fate of our planet that’s being called into question, the only prudent thing to do is to go forward and take steps by assuming the worst, especially since the actual action steps being proposed are not particularly expensive, difficult or controversial.
Anything else is just careless.
We’ll get slight and net beneficial warming from man, and great greening, feeding an extra billion bellies, if not now then before long, and certainly sooner cumulatively.
Our miserable little aliquot of man added CO2 is a boon and is to be celebrated. There is no need for fear and less cause for guilt. This is a good man is doing; a small one, an initially inadvertent one, but one to be sustained nonetheless.
================
Scott’s entire article is based around the fact that the groupthink bias that exists among scientists is suggestive that popular climate change science may not be wholly accurate.
While this is a convincing argument (I agree that the groupthink bias exists), it can be argued that laymen (like Scott himself) are even more biased. They are affected by biases like the status quo bias and the positivity bias. Obviously these biases are even stronger among major political figures and business magnates, who are also compelled by vested interests.
This is especially suggestive considering that scientists actually look at the evidence while laymen like Scott essentially pull their opinions out of thin air.
On the whole, scientific consensus is PROBABLY more accurate than the layman’s opinion, and hence action should be taken accordingly.
But an outsider’s bias is less strong. They have no desperate need not to have wasted their career.
The point about climatiologists is that they use the Precasutionary Principle to justify only looking for evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the dominant factor in climate. If they look at the system from an unbiased viewpoint – looking for other dominant factors – they are called out as “anti-science” and banned from debates.
Climatology is the only branch of scince that refuses to debate with those who do not endorse the State approved policy line.
Taking the consensus of climatologists as evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the dominant factor in climate is exacly like taking the consensus of vicars on the reality of God. They are pre-selected for their bias and are not required to question it.
The difference is that there’s no evidence that God does not exist either.
But there’s no Tropical Hotspot.
In philosophical terms, equating a consensus of religion to a consensus of scientists amounts to global skepticism, which in my view, is not really a healthy perspective to adopt.
In the same vein, you might reject a doctor’s opinion on your health, simply because experts cannot be trusted. In fact, you might go as far as equally trusting a shaman and a qualified doctor who provide contradicting opinions, and then find yourself in a dilemma as to who to trust. This kind of thing has actually happened before in the form of the anti-vaxxer movement.
I’ll concede that a direct comparison between doctors and climate scientists cannot be made for many reasons, although they might be similar in some ways.
If you’re not going to trust predictive models for climate change, you can at least come to the concession to trust the historical CO2 data, especially since making these measurements would obviously be much simpler than complicated predictive models, and hence much less subject to bias.
If you can come to that concession, then read my other comment to find out why the CO2 data alone should be a huge cause for alarm:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/06/quote-of-the-week-mcintyres-comment-to-dilbert-creator-scott-adams-on-climate-experts/comment-page-1/#comment-2362682
Man’s changing the atmosphere. We’re all gonna die!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I did not equate “a consensus of religion to a consensus of scientists”.
I equated “a consensus of religion to a consensus of climatologists”.
And I explained why climatologists are not scientists.
They pre-select their opinion and then look for evidence to support it.
Science is self -correcting. Climatology is not.
Having an “ology” in the title does not make you a scientist. Only Virgos are so naïve as to think otherwise.
“scientific consensus is PROBABLY more accurate than the layman’s opinion, and hence action should be taken accordingly.”
oh NO !
A layman should NEVER trust a science (which is always wrong, remember that) . Always put a middleman between these two : an engineer that succeeded in making good stuff for the layman using the science. Then you can trust it.
I don’t trust Newton, Kelvin nor Einstein, i don’t trust the “scientific consensus” (for whatever this oxymoron means) that they did good science. I do trust the stuff (car, fridge and GPS) that showed their science to work, so i accept collective action based on their science.
I would accept AGW if either you tell me it cost pretty much nothing — this is why I accepted the Freon / ozone thing — but instead they tell us billions of billions ; or engineers routinely warmed greenhouses a couple of K with very minute trace of costless CO2 — but they don’t.
The truth is, the steps required to combat climate change are really not all that dramatic. We already have the engineering know-how in place to accomplish this.
Of course, understanding this requires a greater understanding of how the energy industry works, why humans came about to adopt oil and coal as the primary energy sources, and why a transition to sustainable energy is ultimately inevitable for humanity. This is simply out of the scope of this comments section.
The only solution to climate change being proposed is to accelerate a transition that is already happening. It really is that simple.
I highly recommend this blog post to learn about all of the above:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
It’s really not that hard. All we have to do is stop using cheap readily available energy and start using expensive, rarely available when you need it energy.
Because if we don’t, we’re all gonna die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“The truth is, the steps required to combat climate change are really not all that dramatic. We already have the engineering know-how in place to accomplish this.”
Yes they are, no we don’t. According to IPCC, at least : even utterly stopping right now dumping CO2 into atmosphere just delay CAGW by a few years, but don’t prevent the doom.
“a transition to sustainable energy is ultimately inevitable for humanity. ” Of course it is. Pretty much the same way a baby will ultimately get out of the womb of his mother, so what’s wrong with getting him out a few month earlier ? won’t kill him , will it ? oh …wait … Leave the kid alone. He will make the transition himself when ready.
Right now, humanity have, and cannot live without taking advantage of, a huge cellar full of canned energy. When (and if !) this cellar gets depleted (in a few century or even millennia), or made useless by some new tech, then will be the time to transit.
Right now, this is a move of a scared miser, that have rather act as if is cellar were empty, when it is actually full of food.
More evidence would be nice.
As an example, what would you say is the difference between a climate scientist and a medical vaccine scientist, and what would be the difference between the respective scientific communities?
I see a lot of parallels between the two.
I think if you want to look at an example of what is wrong with science, look no further than Stephen Hawking.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/21/politics/scientists-open-letter-trump-climate-change/
Here is one of the great minds in science joining the bandwagon of AGW when I wager he has probably not even looked at data and the science in any detail at all and despite his far superior interllect I would happily debate him in public about his AGW beliefs….because that is all they are beliefs not fact. He is just joining the consensus without question.
If a great mind like Hawking can fall into this trap then there is not much hope for free thinking science and debate.
Well, if all you had to go by was the Hockeystick chart, then you too would think humans are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to heat up. Gavin has fine-tuned the temperature chart so much now he has CO2 levels and temperature moving in lock-step, and gives the appearance that temperatures are just getting hotter and hotter and hotter as each successive year goes by.
If you believe you are looking at a true representation of reality in looking at the Hockeystick chart, then I can see why someone would believe in CAGW. And why should they question the chart? After all the “experts” swear by it. LOTS of “experts”.
The only way to change that belief is to demonstrate that the surface temperature chart has been manipulated improperly and does not represent reality.
Show someone a chart beginning in the hot 1930’s (hotter than 2016), and you will show them a chart in a slight downtrend. The complete opposite of what you see in the Hockeystick chart. The Hockeystick lie needs to be demonstrated to the clueless experts who believe in CAGW.
I would say the Hockeystick lie needs to be demonstrated to the general public, but the general public seems to get it without going to that effort. Their common sense tells them nothing unusual is going on in the weather, if you go by the polls which show AGW very low on their priority list.
If you want to shake the academics out of their delusions about CAGW, then blowup the Hockeystick chart’s credibility in public.
Hawking is probably the most insulated, cloistered, closeted person around and all we KNOW is what someone reports him saying via his Mac or his “interpreter.”
Next, has he gone over the data that no one can get their hands on or is his opinion as much politics and wishfulness as everyone else’s? Until all the raw data is available to everyone, I only see fraud and “cold fusion” levels of pseudo-science.