Climate Audit

Randy

a kindred spirit – most be something about the water in Canada . . . another math “snoop”

CRUSADE AGAINST SLOPPY MATHEMATICS

With large frauds found in global warming claims

Douglas Keenan, a London-based Canadian mathematician, has made it his mission to lead the battle against the sloppy or malicious use of mathematics. You might think there isn’t much scope for different opinions in mathematics, but when you’re dealing with the interpretation of data, it’s entirely possible for divergences of views to arise. The wrong interpretation can be made at times, and even consciously made. In particular, in the field of climate studies, opposing points of view are often backed up by scientific research that is based on the mathematical analysis of data. Because mathematics gives such pieces of work a stamp of credibility, politicians often rely on them. It is therefore all the more important for them to be carried out with care.

. . . the rest is at http://antigreen.blogspot.com/ entries for Sunday Oct 21st (he’s in Oz)

Filippo Turturici

I signal a very early start of European winter.
Snow and frost by mid October in Russia, Finland or Scandinavia may be unusual but surely not exceptional. Even in Poland and the Baltic states it is unusual but not a record.
It is more rare and almost exceptional in Central-Southern Europe: today we had snowfalls in Munich, Salzburg and Vienna; and, really exceptional and maybe record-breaking, we had some flake of snow or some snowfall in Italian towns like Bologna (plain south of river Po, North Italy) or Ascoli and Teramo (near the Adriatic Sea, hills of Central Italy), even with frost just above 200-400m altitude in the North and 600-900m altitude in Central Italy; while, on the Italian Alps, they are already preparing ski paths with snow cannons below 2000m altitude (very early, mid altitudes ski season begins on 8th December, sometime before even November, it was since 2003 and 1997 that we did not have snow so low for October), and remember that snow cannons may work only with temperature some °C

dscott

Excellent article on CRUSADE AGAINST SLOPPY MATHEMATICS, “Douglas Keenan, a London-based Canadian mathematician, has made it his mission to lead the battle against the sloppy or malicious use of mathematics.” http://antigreen.blogspot.com/ and http://www.informath.org/ his website. I suggest Mr. Keenan as a mathematician would be a potent ally in your work here.

Steve: If you look at the early posts in this category, you’ll see that the Chinese issue, one of the issues mentioned here, was originally raised at climateaudit (which Doug K acknowledges in his article) http://www.climateaudit.org/?cat=52 .

Larry

OMG, it gets worse:

The authors had smoothed the data for their study, confused standard errors with standard deviations, used incorrect parameters, and confused daily temperatures with average temperatures. Once all these sources of error are taken into account, the year 2003 does indeed display high temperatures, but not unexpectedly high ones. It’s no surprise that the Nature editors hadn’t noticed anything, since the data was never put at their disposal, and they never asked for it either. Had they done so, they would easily have seen through the authors’ game. The mere fact that the grape harvest model gave a temperature for 2003 that was 2.4 degrees Celsius above the temperature actually measured by Meteo France should have made the editors suspicious.

This makes dendrothermometry look like science by comparison.

See - owe to Rich

I think this article, which I drafted before seeing Steve’s plea at the top of Unthreaded 23, fits in nicely with his suggestion that we should nominate subjects worthy of threads.

I should like to add some comments to the topic which John V and others have aired recently, on what else other than CO2 could explain the increase of about 0.5C in the period 1975-2005. This seems to be an important enough topic to be worth its own location on this site (or should there be a wiki for it?). So consider the following, all under the assumption that significantly less than 100% of the 0.5C is due to CO2:

1. It is a natural variation and we shall probably never know what caused it. This sounds lame, but it is approximately the position of an eminent climatologist. I asked Lindzen this question at the Institute of Physics in June, and that was basically his answer, plus a murmur about oceans.

2. It is due to heat exchange with oceans, and while we do not understand it now, one day we might. This is a serious possibility, since it is known that the oceans have a vast heat content compared with the atmosphere. If ocean currents change in cyclical ways, and have recently brought less cold deep water up to the surface than usual, then global warming would be expected. Kristen Byrnes (http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunderd/id11.html but this link isn’t working for me) has analyzed La Ninas and El Ninos and found that a predominance of the former was a possible explanation of cooling from 1940-1970. Of course, in cycles, what goes up must come down and vice versa…

3. It is due to changes in albedo, which may, or may not, be understood in terms of solar changes and length and strength of the solar cycle. Anthony Watts has recently posted on albedo here.

4. It is due to pollution (oil) on the oceans (I saw that suggestion somewhere here).

There may be several others of which I am not aware.

Rich.

Nasif Nahle

Your mom is a brilliant writer, Steve M.

Anna Lang

RE #1

That is an eloquent piece of writing, Mrs. McIntyre. Thank you for the momentary escape from another rainy and snowy weekend!

Philip_B

I agree with John V that you cannot just dismiss the ROW data. Other places have high quality networks and they clearly show warming, in particular parts of Western Europe and Australia. Where I differ, is I consider a global mean temperature, further reduced to a decadal trend, an uninteresting statistic, which doesn’t tell us very much about what is causing the warming, and arguably obscures far more than it reveals. What I’d like to see is a thread that looks at when and where warming (and cooling) is occuring and discussion of why?, winter, summer, day, night, urban, rural, etc. What do sites that are cooling have in common, what do sites that are warming in daytime during the winter have in common, etc?

For example, this study from Pune, India finds winter cooling and summer (monsoon season) warming over the 20th century. Their explanation of increasing particulates causing the winter cooling and the monsoon rains clearing the particulates along with an increase in cloud cover causing the summer warming seems plausible.

Note, the link above is to a Google cache as the link to the original article is (temporarily?) broken.

Larry

RC is attempting to rebut Botkin.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/global-warming-delusions-at-the-wall-street-journal/

It’s one of their lamer columns, but this is news to me:

Botkin: The medieval optimum was a good time

Response: Maybe it was, if you’re interested in Europe and don’t mind the droughts in the American Southwest. But the business-as-usual forecast for 2100 is an entirely different beast than the medieval climate. The Earth is already probably warmer than it was in medieval times. Beware the bait and switch!

That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone claim that the medieval warm period coincided with a drought in the desert SW. Is this a new claim?

Steve: There’s evidence of drought in the American SW. Some medieval trees are presently underwater in Sierra lakes. This was held by Llloyd and Graumlich to have produced lower treelines for foxtails (and presumably narrower rings) – which in the rubbery Team World is then interpreted as cold temperatures.

steven mosher

RE 22. try this. unthreaded theme song;

Gerald Machnee

“Keeping then honest” (Global Warming) on CNN on now.

MattN

I’m cleaning out my moms basement today. I run across a stack of old Science News from the 80s. The April 30th 1988 edition coverstory: A Warmer World, page 282.

The picture in the story is of the computer model projection. It predicts a 2-3C warming by 2010, beyond the warming of the 1980s.

So. Here we are on the doorstep of 2010. How have we done? Were the models right? Did we warm 2-3C since the late 80s?

The answer:

[img]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/_nhshgl.gif[/img]

Not even close. Maybe .3C.

From the article:

[quote]”If temperatures don’t follow the predicted path, it will mean the models are overestimating the greenhouse effect, says Hansen”[/quote]

I’d say by at LEAST a factor of 10.

BTW, that Hansen fellow would be James Hansen, head of NASA-GISS.

And that concludes our lesson today.

DeWitt Payne

JM

I have a problem to put to all of you:

Temperature of the Earth atmosphere should depend of the heat flux from Earth’s interior. How do we know that this flux is constant?

We don’t. However, the total heat from the core amounts to 1.4 ZettaJoules/year compared to 3850 ZJ/year from incident solar radiation or less than 0.04%. Even a 10% change in core heat flux, which is highly unlikely, wouldn’t amount to much.

Geoff Sherrington

GCMs explained, etc., 2007 papers

Those interested in the status of modelling philosophy might gain from

http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/u0106636v6g14764/

Geoff.

henry

There’s a paper out about droughts (length, frequencies, etc)

This paper investigates the incidences of long-term droughts lasting ten years or longer throughout the world during the 20th century.

The researchers discovered 30 such long-term droughts during the century. Seven occurred from 1901 to 1920, seven occurred from 1921 to 1940, eight occurred from 1941 to 1960, five occurred from 1961 to 1980 and only three occurred from 1981 to 2000.

This data does not support the contention that, because of global warming (anthropogenic or natural), “droughts are becoming longer and more intense.”

Narisma, G.T., Foley, J.A., Licker, R. and Ramankutty, N. 2007. Abrupt changes in rainfall during the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 34: 10.1029/2006GL028628

James Erlandson

Today’s Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal
Global Warming Delusions The popular imagination has been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Global warming doesn’t matter except to the extent that it will affect life–ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

John V.

#25 MattN:

The picture in the story is of the computer model projection. It predicts a 2-3C warming by 2010, beyond the warming of the 1980s.

I don’t why the magazine got this so wrong. Hansen’s paper from 1988 is here:

Click to access 1988_Hansen_etal.pdf

There is a graph of temperatures predicted by the model on page 7.

A cleaner version is near the bottom of this page and it includes observed temperatures:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

The first thing to notice is that none of the scenarios predict 2-3 degC warming relative to the reference period. The worst-case model predicts ~1.5C. Perhaps the magazine mixed up Celsius and Fahrenheit.

The second thing to notice is how well scenario B matches observed temperatures. (Scenario B was called the “most likely” scenario, and the one that closely matches actual emissions).

The difference between model and prediction is ~10%. What does that say about the model?

MattN

Steve, I’ll see what I can do. It might take me a day or so.

John, the maps on page 8 are the ones in the Science News article. Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but I see more than a 1.5C projection from the 1980s to the 2010s. I thought it was closer to 2-3C.

Let’s say the map really is a 1.5C projection. That would make the projection off by a factor of 5 (vs. 10).

I am an engineer. My first job out of school was as a process engineer for an optical fiber company. If my yield and output projections were off by a factor of 5, I’d be fired.

theduke

#1: That’s as good as travel writing gets.

Bruce

JohnV

Referring to the graph in #38,

the jump in annual mean from 1908 to 1945 was .6C.

It has only gone up .4C since.

Why would anyone suggest the smaller jump wasn’t caused by some “unknown climate forcing” such as the huge change in solar energy reaching the earth?

John V.

Bruce, that’s not even what we’re talking about. Move on.

SteveMc, your usage of 1934 vs 1998 for USA48 comparisons has led to this kind of ridiculous cherry-picking of single-year comparisons.

Are we talking about climate (long term changes in weather patterns) or comparing randomly chosen record years?

Steve: John V, NOAA issued press releases saying that 2006 was the warmest US year ever. Don’t blame me.

Nasif Nahle

Models are sensitive to own ideas, not to reality. Some people are doing models that match with their ideas, then they compare their models with the real world; if the real world behaves differently, they fabricate some solutions so their ideas prevail over the real world. That is how models are working today in climate science.

John V.

Filippo Turturici:
Don’t get me started on the global warming trend since 1998. Search Unthreaded #22 starting at comment #37.
The year-to-year change in global average temperature has a distribution that looks normal and has a standard deviation of ~0.5C. So, it’s not surprising to see warm years scattered throughout the record. Since we’re talking about climate it’s more appropriate to look at longer term averages. It’s also more appropriate to look at trends (linear fits) instead of differences.

Nasif Nahle:
I will concede the point that it’s possible to “fabricate some solutions” to fake a model. (I assume you didn’t mean to imply that anybody is intentionally, ie fraudulently, fabricating anything). Why has nobody been able to create a model that matches reality without including AGW?

John V.

Bruce, SteveMc does not want us going back into this, and he’s right.
Here are some links so you can read what I wrote about this previously (hint, in the first half of the century it was the sun):

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2200#comment-150160
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2200#comment-150436

I will not respond again until there’s a new thread.

Reference

John Stossel – give me a break – Al Gore expose – 20 October 2007 (YouTube 8:07 mins)

Larry

50, are you agreeing that it was wrong for NOAA to make that statement? Are you agreeing that Hansen and RC and all the rest of the alarmists shouldn’t have ever brought up the red herring of 1998 in the first place?

John V.

#52 Stephen Richards:

Adding in a parameter which just happens to solve a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that the parameter is the reality. It could be, but not absolutely necessarily.

Nothing is “absolute” in science. Formal proofs are only possible in math. That’s why scientific papers (and the IPCC in particular) uses measures of confidence. What’s your level of confidence in AGW being false?

Larry

54, the you’ll agree that this is meaningless:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pfsf/is_199903/ai_1390927783

1998 WARMEST YEAR OF MILLENNIUM, CLIMATE RESEARCHERS REPORT
National Science Foundation by Cheryl Dybas

Researchers at the Universities of Massachusetts and Arizona who study global warming have released a report strongly suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium, with 1998 the warmest year so far. The scientists have also found that the warming in the 20th century counters a 1,000-year-long cooling trend.

The study, by Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona, appears in the March 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union. The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

And Mann, Bradley, and Hughes are speaking out of turn, then.

Mark T.

It’s snooooowing here in COS! Winter has begun after a no-show autumn, hehe.

Mark

Mark T.

I suppose there’s also an implicit assumption that we can model the climate, at least given the parameters we do understand, which has also yet to be proven.

Mark

Robert in Calgary

Here’s what I found online, not quite the same article? But the same date.

“Has the greenhouse taken effect?”

Quotes Hansen at the end.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n18_v133/ai_6690279

Larry

62, in theory, yes. But here’s the rub: the further back in history you go, the less reliable and accurate the data becomes. So while a longer term difference will tend to exclude more noise because you’re effectively averaging out the noise over the period, it will also inherently have more noise in it, as the quality of the data degrades. We’re still trying to ascertain the quality of the surface station record and the proxy records here, precisely because those issues were glossed over by the people who get paid to get it right. But in broad strokes, it’s a fair statement that the proxies aren’t as high in quality as the surface stations.

Which leaves you with the inevitable conclusion that the only reliable numbers that you have are in the 20th century, and even they are somewhat suspect. Given that, Mann et al have no legitimate basis to say that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium, and as it turns out, it wasn’t even the hottest of the century. In other words, the hyperbole is based on nonsense [and believe me, Steve, I’m working hard to not go off on a vent tangent on that point].

H

#55 John V:

#52 Stephen Richards:

Adding in a parameter which just happens to solve a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that the parameter is the reality. It could be, but not absolutely necessarily.

Nothing is “absolute” in science. Formal proofs are only possible in math. That’s why scientific papers (and the IPCC in particular) uses measures of confidence. What’s your level of confidence in AGW being false?

What’s your level of confidence in AGW being false? 😀 😀

I think there are not many persons here who doesn’t accept that humans influence our climate. Deforestation, farming, CO2 etc. all have some effect. But how big is this influence? Is it really catastrofic? I have to say that I have almost zero confidense that the current climate models can predit the global temperature accurately at year 2100.

From your earlier comments and the linking the three IPCC figures here, I understand that you have quite high confidence for them and the model behind them. Why? Because the last curve seems to match the measured curve? Do you know which model was used? Do you know, how they added AGW? Do you know, how the model parameters were determined? And how they were fitted before each run?

John V

Larry:
I agree that a comparison of the 1990s to temperatures for the last millenium can not be made with much confidence. I should have read the article more carefully. For the record, I’ve never been a big believer in dendroclimatology (or whatever it’s called).

Buddenbrook

I wonder if the obsession on the “trinity” of Hansen, Mann and Gavin could be affecting our perception of alarmist CO2 science. These three are obviously an endless source of bad science and amusement, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that others would be too?

UC

John V: How long term averages would you prefer?

Steve: Nice little town this is, Ill be back soon, hopefully 🙂

John V.

theduke:

The information in that article is totally at odds with what we now understand were the warmest years in the past century.

I don’t understand your point. The global temperature has been trending up for the 18 complete years since 1988. (Please don’t talk about cooling since 1998 — we’ve been there and it’s not true for any sort of trend measurement). What is “at odds with what we now understand were the warmest years in the past century”

theduke

John V.: my mistake. But I still find it interesting that in 1988 the five hottest years globally were in the 1980s, but that in Hansen’s latest reconfiguration of the data for the ten hottest years in the US, that none of the years are from the decade of the 1980s.

Geoff Sherrington

Re #47 John V

“A model that matches reality”. If we knew reality, we would not have to model.

Problem 1. I’m having a hard time working out what reality is (in surface temp especially). Which USA temp reconstruction graph is the flavour of the month for Oct 2007? Why?

Solution 1. Leave CO2 out of the equations, tweak the remaining forcings and assume a growth rate for temp recovery from the LIA.

jae

70:

On top of all of that, the controversy is mostly over consequences; i.e. are Hansen’s “tipping points” going to appear, and cause the feedback to increase?

The weirdest thing about all this is that we have ABSOLUTELY NO CLEAR DEMONSTRATION of any net positive feedbacks. To build a theory on mere unproven suppositions is unique to Hansen’ version of climate science (really “climate politics”). I think water vapor exerts a negative feedback, contrary to the Hansens of the world.

tom

Count the “torpedos”

A compelling presentation by Bob Carter of the facts of climate change to a recent public forum in Australia.

Climate Change – Is CO2 the cause?

Pt 1 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&eurl=http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31660

Pt 2 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vN06JSi-SW8&eurl=http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31660

Pt 3 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iCXDISLXTaY&eurl=http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31660

Pt 4 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQQGFZHSno&eurl=http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31660

crosspatch

“The global temperature has been trending up for the 18 complete years since 1988”

Yes and I believe there is a growing body of evidence that calls that data into question. Particularly data acquired in China, the former Soviet Union and certain stations in the UK using painted metal Stevenson screens. If you look at temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, there is no such warming signal at all. And looking at year to date temperatures (up to September 30, 2007) according to NOAA’s graphing page the downtrend in North American temperatures since 1998 is real. So we see a down-trend in North America and no trend in the Southern Hemisphere. Basically all the warming on the planet appears to be confined to Eurasia. Not exactly “global”.

The thing is that if I had temperature from 1000 stations globally that showed flat temperatures and then added in 100 stations that were undergoing nearby urbanization and their records showed a regular increase over time, when I add them to the other 1000 stations, the mean of the “global” network then shows an increase. That does not mean the increase is “global” simply because the “global” average increases. It just means the “global average” increases. It could be completely due to warming in only one region of the planet. I have seen absolutely nothing to date that leads me to believe we are seeing any actual planetary warming on a global scale.

John V.

#67 H:
My level of confidence in the IPCC consensus is roughly the same as the IPCC levels of confidence (a little lower in some areas). That would put my confidence at somewhat less than the most fervent supporters. I am involved in analyzing the data to see for myself. As I’ve told SteveMc in the past, my expectations may different than many in this forum but I am still digging for confirmation or refutation.

Also, although I believe the IPCC consensus, that does not necessarily mean I support the actions or words of anyone involved in the IPCC. I won’t elaborate further for fear of starting another flame war.

#70 Larry:
While it’s impossible to prove a negative, it is fully possible and reasonable to express a level of confidence in a negative. For example, I can not provie it but I am extremely confident that reindeer can not fly. I was not asking for a proof.

I understand you not wanting to answer.

As for the consequences of AGW, that’s another discussion for another time. By necessity it includes political, economic, and ethical considerations. I’d hate to even try to get into those in this forum.

John V.

#80 Geoff Sherrington:

If we knew reality, we would not have to model.

Even with a perfect understanding of reality, we would have to model to predict the future.

assume a growth rate for temp recovery from the LIA

What is the cause of the growth rate for temp recovery from LIA?

Bruce

JohnV

5 of the 6 hottest years (1998 is 2nd) currently are in the 2000s

In the Southern Hemisphere, only 2002 was warmer than 1998.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts+dSST.txt

The CRU has no subsequent year warmer than 1998 in the Southern Hemisphere.

1998 0.457
1999 0.219
2000 0.192
2001 0.329
2002 0.375
2003 0.371
2004 0.299
2005 0.329
2006 0.288
2007 0.254

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/s17.htm

The Northern Hemisphere is receiving record amounts of sunshine.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5723/847

John V.

D’oh! Bruce got under my skin — again.
Sorry for the little outburst above, particularly since I don’t even like top-10 lists.

Nasif Nahle

John V.,

I could not say that the “errors” in the models are intentional or not. However, things go straight and extremely simple: Some AGW supporters are modeling a relation CD-Tropospheric Temperature introducing unreal ciphers to their models. For example, many AGW authors consider the absorptive power of CD is 0.9, when the charts, tables, etc. obtained by observation-experimentation indicate that the absorptivity of CD, at its current concentration in the atmosphere, is 0.0009, that is 0.00002 lesser power than the emissivity of CD. By that reason, CD cannot store exceeding energy for too long periods. Consider that CD is not a blackbody, but a real body and that many “constants” have not a clear origin, suggesting that those ciphers were invented intentionally to fit perfectly in something.

theduke

John V: allow me to make a general observation: You are clearly an expert when it comes to quantifying the data as it has in the recent past been understood and generally accepted. But when it comes to understanding the quality of the data (or lack thereof), which is the raison d’etre of this blog, I think you are at a distinct disadvantage.

There is enough information in this blog’s archives to cast doubt on the accuracy of much of the data that is being used by AGWers to advocate dramatic and possibly disruptive changes in the way mankind interacts with his earthly and atmospheric environment. I think you need to take the time to go through the archives. I’ve only begun to do so myself. It’s enlightening.

Nasif Nahle

My # 98 is addressed to John V. Sorry 🙂

Dave Dardinger

re: #81, Jae:

I think water vapor exerts a negative feedback, contrary to the Hansens of the world.

Don’t fall into that trap of saying “water vapor”. You mean “water”. That is. water in all it’s forms, including vapor, liquid and presumably solid as well have a net negativing feedback, (which which I agree.) But clouds don’t consist of water vapor, but small globules of liquid water. A clouds are what produce a net negative feedback. Vapor is indeed a positive feedback albeit one which has been overhyped. The AGW promoters are all careful to state that we skeptics are wrong, and won’t acknowledge that water vapor is a positive feedback. But they equally carefully ignore clouds and say it’s not possible to quantify if clouds are net positive or negative. They could be right but I don’t think they are. And they should be honest enough to admit that if they can’t quantify clouds, they can’t determine the net sign on water feedback. And if they don’t know the sign of water feedback, the whole edifice of AGW collapses.

Filippo Turturici

JohnV, #47, I do agree: global temperature trend present a net warming, in the past 30, 120 and 250 years. But, since 1998 warming trend is below 0.1°C error range, so being meaningless as real warming (other way, you should consider that since 2002, for both HadCRUT and MSU World is even cooling a bit). Being 1998 the hottest year (or 2005) is indeed not very meaningfull, since e.g. we had some very hot global year (for the time) during 1945-1960 global temperature descent.
The matter would then be: could we identify a change of climate cycles, inside a period? Could temperature records and trends help this search (e.g. many things now suggest we are on a temperature peak like ’40ies one, ready to start a descent in next decade) or are we looking for ghosts?

MarkR

#83 tom. Did anyone look at the videos? JohnV and Boris in particular really should. Also nice hat tip to SteveM, and Watts Galleries in Part 4.

henry

Since:

The latest GISTEMP global graph shows the 5 hottest years up to 1988 as being in the 1980s. The 5 hottest years up to 2000 are in the 1990s. 5 of the 6 hottest years (1998 is 2nd) currently are in the 2000s.

and:

(from the wiki charts) Following the common practice of the IPCC, the zero on this figure is the mean temperature from 1961-1990.

then:

Any anomaly measurements shown in current charts after 1990 will show an abnormal warm bias. Since data is available for years up to 2006, and a 30-year average appears to be standard, then re-zero the charts and show anomalies for 2007 and beyond based on 1976 – 2006. Also, closer to today, assumed that data is more accurate.

MarkW

A recent study out of China found that particulate emissions on the whole, produced warming, not cooling. That is, the warming caused by carbon black exceeded to cooling caused by sulfates.

jae

101: Dave D. I stand corrected. I meant to say water, in all its forms. Water vapor does store a lot of heat, but there is a big penalty for forming that vapor, the latent heat of vaporization.

John V.

Nobody (especially me) is interested in another many-against-me battle. I will answer the points that were directed at me and then leave this thread for a while. You can all have your rebuttals but please avoid bringing up new points.

#94 Jon:

please, it is at least a serious point of inquiry to consider why the SH temperature trend is ~1/2 the of the NH trend over the past century.
Granted discussing warmest years is not very meaningful. The important point is that explaining the NH/SH asymmetry is an important validation step for any purported explanation of the global trend.

The discrepancy between NH and SH temperatures is important, and is predicted by the GCMs (climate models). The abundance of water in the SH compared to the NH explains the difference. The ocean absorbs heat from the atmosphere without warming much. Land transfers heat to the atmosphere much more readily.

#95 Nasif Nahle:
Those numbers seem incredible — the models are wrong by 10000x? I’d like to read more. Do you have a reference?

#96 crosspatch:

“This figure compares the global average surface temperature record, as compiled by Jones and Moberg” and I believe we can all pretty much agree that they have an agenda.

Compare the Jones and Moberg compilation to GISTEMP or HadCRU. They are *very* similar. The satellite data was compiled by Christy (presumably the same Christy from the presentation you linked). I’m not going to respond to the presentation as it’s another new topic.

#97 theduke:

There is enough information in this blog’s archives to cast doubt on the accuracy of much of the data that is being used by AGWers to advocate dramatic and possibly disruptive changes in the way mankind interacts with his earthly and atmospheric environment. I think you need to take the time to go through the archives. I’ve only begun to do so myself. It’s enlightening.

I have been through much of the archives, and cross-checked them other sources. As I’ve said before, I’m here looking for problems too. Other than the “hockey stick” the biggest error that I know of has been the 0.15C post-2000 USA temperature. It had a global effect of 0.003C (0.006C for NH). I find the evidence of problems with the surface stations to be less than convincing. I’ll leave it at that.

#98 Nasif Nahle:

You should read this Science Magazine article…

It looks like I’d need to subscribe, and I’m not doing that.

#102 Jonde:

John seems to like to link wiki here a lot.

I link to Wikipedia as a convenient source of reference material. I have not linked to Wikipedia as part of an argument (other than possibly a link explaining the greenhouse effect).

#103 Filippo Turturici:
Argh. Please don’t go back into the temperature trend since 1998. It’s up, no matter how you cut it. It’s funny to me that you and others can use both a warm 1934 (in the USA48) and a warm 1998 to argue against the world heating up.

#108 MarkW:

No models, without or without AGW, “match reality”.

In broad strokes they actually do. They are not trying to predict the weather. They are looking for long-term trends. Differences between regions. Differences between temperatures in atmospheric layers. In all of these ways the GCMs do match reality quite well.

#110 Willis Eschenbach:

This statement is meaningless without saying what length trend you are talking about, and specifying which dataset you are using.

Choose your trend measurement: line-of-best-fit (any period over ~5 years), multi-year average, etc.
Choose your data set: GISTEMP, HadCRU, Satellite

crosspatch

“I’m not going to respond to the presentation as it’s another new topic.”

The part about satellite measurements vs. the surface record isn’t. It also appears that Jones and Moberg performed some kind of “adjustment” on their data according to the math in that presentation. My suspicion is that it was done to make it a closer “fit” with surface data but artificially inflating the value of certain measurements. Their data shows consistently warmer temperatures.

Nasif Nahle

# 113

John V.,

Those numbers seem incredible — the models are wrong by 10000x? I’d like to read more. Do you have a reference?

Yes, reality looks incredible; models looks credible. Do you like books? References:

Pitts, Donald and Sissom, Leighton. Heat Transfer. 1998. McGraw-Hill. Pp. 289-325.
Modest, Michael F. Radiative Heat Transfer. 2003. Elsevier Science. San Diego California.
Manrique, José Ángel V. Transferencia de Calor. 2002. Oxford University Press. England.
Bakken, G. S., Gates, D. M., Strunk, Thomas H. and Kleiber, Max. Linearized Heat Transfer Relations in Biology. Science. Vol. 183; pp. 976-978. 8 March 1974.

Finally, the mother of all analogous continuums:

Hottel, H. C. Heat Transmission. 1959. McGraw-Hill. New York.

Bruce

JohnV

Bruce — enough.
I was responding to a question from theduke about global temperatures.

The term “global” is being misuused if the claimed warming trends do not include the USA and the Southern Hemishpere.

Aren’t you curious as to why AGW is so selective?

John V.

Bruce:

The term “global” is being misuused if the claimed warming trends do not include the USA and the Southern Hemishpere.

I’m trying to stay quiet but your errors are too egregious. Since the mid-1970s (the period in which AGW is hypothesized to have become the dominant forcing factor) there has been substantial warming in both the USA and the Southern Hemisphere. Repeating the same falsehoods will not change the facts.

MarkW

Talking about cherry picking.

Since the mid-1970s (the period in which AGW is hypothesized to have become the dominant forcing factor)

And how is it that CO2 magically managed to become the dominant factor during the 70’s, despite the fact that for billions of years prior, CO2 had never managed to play a role, much less a “dominant” role in climate.

John V.

MarkW:
For my own education, I would appreciate a reference showing that for “billions of years prior, CO2 had never managed to play a role, much less a “dominant” role in climate”.

jae

Speaking model output, as I recall, NONE of them show a pause in warming like we’ve seen for the past 9 years (I don’t care if this “pause” has an insignificant slight positive trend, either). The models show a pretty steady increase in temperature through time; I don’t think that has been observed in the real world.

Sam Urbinto

Water, whatever it does, is the primary driver to all things weather-related. Rivers/lakes/oceans/seas, ice on the ground or in clouds, rain.

I’ve always found wikipedia to be at least nominally fair, although, pretty much mainstream IPCC-type info, regardless the particular personal thoughts of Shultz, Connolley and Arritt et al are. That said, you have to know the views of the dominent editors and take them into account when you read the pages. I don’t see any huge problems with either the explanations or the graphs, although they are a tad too pro-agw at times. (For example, some things are too vague and/or semi-biased, like the CO2 graph proclaiming “The industrial revolution has caused a dramatic rise in CO2” or the fact they use the HS graph.) But it’s not all that horrible. You have to remember the verifiabilty and “reliability” when requirements of wikipedia when you read that article tho.

BTW, I posted this on the possible (non-co2 and non-sun) causes of the current trend, whatever it is and whatever it means, at here. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2201#comment-150474

John V.

Bruce:

claim solar energy dropped in the 1980s onwards

I’ve never said that. My information shows that it stopped rising substantially — not that it dropped.

If you’re going to cherry-pick endpoints, at least fit a linear trend instead of a simple difference. I’m sure you’re having lots of fun subtracting warm years from cold years but it means absolutely nothing. Put a linear trend between any of your pairs of years and let us know the results. Don’t forget the R^2 values so that it’s clear which comparisons are really trends.

Craig Loehle

20/20 John Stossel had a go at Gore’s moveie

also:Re: models and CO2. It is asserted that CO2 must be included in the GCMs to match the past 40 years of warming. It is asserted that all competing theories don’t explain the warming. However, it is well-known that Lindzen’s infrared iris theory can’t be tested by the models because it involves clouds at a level of detail that the models can’t do. Likewise, Svensmark’s solar cosmic ray connection theory can’t be tested with the models because they don’t do clouds. (and both theories could be operating) Pielke has argued that land use may be affecting regional climates (but without any runaway possibility). Finally, we have the funny business with urban heat islands affecting the weather station data and maybe not being properly accounted for. When competing plausible theories (count them, 4, perhaps all at work at once) are on the table, it is disingenuous to say that they are invalid simply because your computers aren’t fast enough to test them or you don’t know how to model fuzzy things like clouds. Thus we can’t conclude by subtraction that the only factor left is CO2. If my friend is late for an appointment and all the reasons I can think of for him being late are discounted, that doesn’t mean it “must be” alien abduction!

MarkW

The charts have been provided here. Try unthreaded 22.

MarkW

SteveM has asked us not to get into changes in solar output.

Let’s just say that the real world is not as simple as the incomplete data JohnV keeps trying to put into the record.

I won’t go into it any further.

On the other hand, it does get kind of hard to refute JohnV’s frequent claim that everything else has been discounted claim, if you can’t bring in the data that shows him wrong.

jae

Speaking of modeling, I have “modeled” the 30-year average temperatures in July and December for 156 locations, all the way from Barrow, AK to Guam. It appears that temperature is extremely closely related to absolute humidity, when an excess of moisture is available (December). When there is a deficit of moisture (July), temperature is a function of solar insolation, absolute humidity, and the bareness of the land surface (which is related to moisture availability).

The equation for July temperature is T = ln(y/26.46)/0.0655, where Y is the product of insolation, absolute humidity, and a weighting factor for the bareness of the land. The R2 for the relationship is 0.88, and I am confident that the rest of the variation can be explained by local microclimate effects, especially the amount of irrigated (green) land in the vicinity. The solar insolation variable accounts for cloudiness.

The equation for December temperature is T = (ln((y+30)/0.443))/0.0678, where Y is simply absolute humidity. The correlation coefficient (R2) for this equation is 0.96.

I think these data show that almost all of the solar energy is “used up” in evaporating water, when it’s available. Of course, some is “used up” by photosynthesis. And some is used in warming the ground, but it seems to be a minor amount where there is a lot of moisture. That evaporated water stores heat, but dry ground stores even more, especially bare dry ground.

The other GHGs may affect temperature a little, but not much, IMHO.

Bruce

JohnV

Is a linear trend useful for predicting future temperatures?

I tend to lean toward this quote:

Although linear trend models have their uses, they are often inappropriate for business and economic data. Most naturally occurring business time series do not behave as though there are straight lines fixed in space that they are trying to follow: real trends change their slopes and/or their intercepts over time. The linear trend model tries to find the slope and intercept that give the best average fit to all the past data, and unfortunately its deviation from the data is often greatest near the end of the time series, where the forecasting action is!

If you looked at the Southern Hemisphere data in 1941 and 1998, would your linear trend have predicted the cooling post 1941 and post 1998?

jae

142: Don’t know how that figures into the relationships. The heat capacity of moist heavy soil would be much greater than dry sandy soil. Maybe some sort of lag. The heat in the wet soil will eventually evaporate some of the wetness. That process uses up a lot of heat. That’s the problem with heat storage by water vapor; an awful lot of heat is used up for evaporation (latent heat) and that does not affect temperature.

Mhaze

Nasil #95

many AGW authors consider the absorptive power of CD is 0.9,

Can you provide some examples of AGW authors who use a number similar to 0.9?

Thus saving me the trouble of searching a bit for it.

Thanks.

Sam Urbinto

I am from from another solar system. Since you can’t prove I’m not, I must be. 🙂

Bruce

JohnV

I have only said that a linear fit is much more useful than subtracting cherry-picked warm years from cherry-picked cold years (or vice-versa). There is a large amount of year-to-year variation in global temperatures. A simple difference of randomly chosen years can give any result you want.

The “result” I’m looking for is an explanation for big jumps in temperature in the 20th century.

The biggest jump came pre-1940s. Why? If not CO2, what caused it? Could the same mechanism have caused the smaller rise in the 90s?

Consider the Souther Hemisphere. from 1979 on. The net temperature rise from 1979/1980/1981/1982/1983 to 2007 is no more than .23 or as low as .07C. Yes, it got very warm in 1998, but that was the anomalous year.

The rise in temps is tiny. The trend from 1998 is down. Flat from 1997. Where is the runaway AGW caused by CO2?

1979 0.066
1980 0.083
1981 0.022
1982 0.042
1983 0.184
1984 0.046
1985 0.059
1986 0.053
1987 0.200
1988 0.145
1989 0.072
1990 0.154
1991 0.165
1992 0.088
1993 0.123
1994 0.105
1995 0.154
1996 0.147
1997 0.287
1998 0.457
1999 0.219
2000 0.192
2001 0.329
2002 0.375
2003 0.371
2004 0.299
2005 0.329
2006 0.288
2007 0.254

John V.

MarkW:

Quite a few, respected and reputable scientists disagree with your opinion, that solar, cosmic, etc., have no descriptive power w/ regards to the temperature record.

Great. I’d like to read the references. Please provide them. I’ve probably looked at most of them and their rebuttals already, but I may be in for a surprise.

Also, I’m still waiting for a reference re CO2 never impacting climate. The graph posted previously primarily shows that the world was very warm when there was lots of CO2. The correlation is actually pretty good if the CO2 is plotted on a logarithmic scale (as it should be since its effect on temperature is logarithmic — see junkscience.com or many other references).

nevket240

Maybe logarithmic to where the bands are saturated then it is just a passnger along for the ride.

regards.

look up Lubos site for more on radiance etc.

SteveSadlov

RE: #139 – It is interesting that the “worst case” scenarios for AGW seem to rely on vast expansion of “horse latitudes” type climates. I see little evidence of such expansion. Some people may point to the SE US drought, but I would attribute it to a colder than normal summer in the Canadian Shield.

Steve Moore

Has anybody else had a problem accessing ICECAP today?
It now comes up requiring authorization, which wasn’t the case two days ago.

PeterS

As a layman, here’s something I wonder about. It seems to me that a rise in CO2 and a rise in temperature are two separate, but coincidental, events and attempts to link them together fail. If CO2 fluctuation is thought about completely separately from temperature fluctuation, would it not be more fruitful? When all ‘objects’ in the first line of enquiry are considered, it appears that we have three – two variables and one fixed. The ‘variables’ are CO2 and used land (by ‘used’ I mean used for the annual cycle of crop growing), and the ‘fixed’ object is the globe. That is, two can (and do) change in size, and one cannot.

For the interaction between the two variable objects to be successful, it requires a necessary increase in size of available CO2 (as fuel), and that increase would need to be compressed within the fixed space of the globe object. That is, the globe object cannot expand and contract – as if it were a balloon – in order to contain the increased or decreased size of the CO2 object and maintain a constant fixed ratio in its atmospheric space (of say, 3ppm).

An good analogy might be of a man who needs to take 1 teaspoon of sugar everyday dissolved in a fixed half-pint glass of water as a means of sustaining health. As he grows bigger, his required intake goes up to 2 teaspoons – but he still only has his half-pint glass to dissolve it in. But he knows if he drinks the full contents of the glass he will receive his required amount of sugar. On the other hand, if the globe could expand, the analogy would change to the man increasing the size of his glass so that the ratio of water to sugar always remained fixed.

I then wonder if this might have any value in explaining an increase in CO2 following an ice age. Wouldn’t the receding ice leave plenty of raw fertile land and a sudden demand for the oceans to release a lot more from its stored CO2 banks to fuel a rapid increase in new, growing vegetation?

jae

148: You rely only on Lockwood and Frolich’s paper, which has been criticized by at least three famous Solar Scientists that I know of. I won’t say more because of the scissors.

jae

152: Same here in So. Oregon. Must be using same NWS data here, too. 🙂

John V.

MarkW:

Do you ever read the responses to the criticism, or do you just read the criticisms and decide based on that limited knowledge.

I try to read both sides. I put more weight on peer-reviewed literature (peer review is far from perfect, but it’s also far better than nothing).

The graph showed that the world was warm when there was lots of CO2. It showed that it was cold when there was lots of CO2. It showed that the world was warm when there was little CO2. It showed that the world was cold when there was little CO2.

I said that generally speaking temperatures were higher when there was lots of CO2. I stand by that. I have also never claimed that CO2 is the only thing affecting climate. Over time scales as large as 600 million years there are huge changes in solar output and continental configurations. The sun has been and still is a very important climate forcing. I just don’t see how the sun explains the recent warming.

For the record, I would love for the IPCC consensus to be wrong. I have nothing to gain from CO2 restrictions. I live in Alberta where hydrocarbons rule. I grew up in the heart of the Athabasca oilsands.

If you only look for those things that confirm your opinions, and ignore everything else, it’s amazing how rarely your opinions are challenged.

The funny thing is that I feel exactly the same way about your views. (That’s not meant to be inflammatory — I really am amazed how two people can look at the same data and come to completely different conclusions).

jae:

You rely only on Lockwood and Frolich’s paper, which has been criticized by at least three famous Solar Scientists that I know of.

I’m not sure where the “only” came from, but I am familiar with L&F. I have also read Svensmark and Friis-Christensen’s response to L&F as well as Tamino’s counter-response (his most recent article).

Willis Eschenbach

I had said:

John V, you say:

“I don’t understand your point. The global temperature has been trending up for the 18 complete years since 1988. (Please don’t talk about cooling since 1998 — we’ve been there and it’s not true for any sort of trend measurement).”

This statement is meaningless without saying what length trend you are talking about, and specifying which dataset you are using.

John V. replied:

Choose your trend measurement: line-of-best-fit (any period over ~5 years), multi-year average, etc.
Choose your data set: GISTEMP, HadCRU, Satellite

OK, linear trend, ordinary least square error (OLS).

6 YR. TRENDS:HadCRUT:..GISS.:UAH MSU:RSS MSU
1988 — 1993 : -0.14 : -0.39 : -0.43 : -0.29
1989 — 1994 : -0.07 : -0.25 : -0.14 : . . .
1990 — 1995 : . . . : -0.12 : -0.02 : . . .
1991 — 1996 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1992 — 1997 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1993 — 1998 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1994 — 1999 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1995 — 2000 : . . . : . . . : . . . : -0.02
1996 — 2001 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1997 — 2002 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1998 — 2003 : . . . : . . . : -0.06 : -0.04
1999 — 2004 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
2000 — 2005 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
2001 — 2006 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .


7 YR. TRENDS:HadCRUT:..GISS.:UAH MSU:RSS MSU
1988 — 1994 : -0.06 : -0.24 : -0.25 : -0.11
1989 — 1995 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1990 — 1996 : -0.04 : -0.02 : . . . : . . .
1991 — 1997 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1992 — 1998 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1993 — 1999 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1994 — 2000 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1995 — 2001 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1996 — 2002 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1997 — 2003 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1998 — 2004 : . . . : . . . : -0.08 : -0.06
1999 — 2005 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
2000 — 2006 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .

8 YR. TRENDS:HadCRUT:..GISS.:UAH MSU:RSS MSU
1988 — 1995 : . . . : -0.04 : -0.04 : . . .
1989 — 1996 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1990 — 1997 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1991 — 1998 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1992 — 1999 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1993 — 2000 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1994 — 2001 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1995 — 2002 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1996 — 2003 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1997 — 2004 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1998 — 2005 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
1999 — 2006 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .

w.

John V.

Willis, you win that one. 🙂
Approximately 13% of the year/source combinations show a negative trend.
Surprisingly, ~2/3 of the negative trends are prior to 1998.

Larry

169, how do you define “prior to 1998”? Is that only the periods that end in 1997 or earlier?

MarkW

JohnV,

Generally speaking is not a scientific standard. The fact that CO2 and temperature move high and low, independantly of each other is sufficient to prove that CO2 does not drive climate.

paul

Subsequent to the above post it seems the article was in the US Academy of Science and states that CO2 levels are 35% higher than first thought so global warming is happening even faster than first thought. Note to those compiling temperature info: please find a warming to correspond with this latest CO2 research.

Gunnar

aurbo, great post, an excellent summary of the real issue

>> Is anyone aware of an analysis of night time minima?

I did read a study on nightly minimums several years ago. I didn’t understand the significance at the time, but they found no AGW signature. I think it involved measurements in the American Southwest.

Jon

John V. writes:

The discrepancy between NH and SH temperatures is important, and is predicted by the GCMs (climate models). The abundance of water in the SH compared to the NH explains the difference. The ocean absorbs heat from the atmosphere without warming much. Land transfers heat to the atmosphere much more readily.

Well, that doesn’t explain the pivot in the divergence–the divergence is most pronounced in the past ~20 years.

Anyways, I stepped into this without the background of the prior conversation. I don’t have the time to often read these free-for-all threads. I’m not ‘against’ John V. I just raised a red flag b.c., the dismissive tone seemed excessive. My point is that a NH/SH divergence discussion is interesting.

I hope to see more of it.

paul

Re: 176
The person interviewed on NZ radio was Corrine Le Quare from the University of East Anglia in the UK. She claims amount of CO2 being pumped out is 35% greater than first thought and the oceans are not taking up the extra so there must be more in the atmosphere.

John V.

#171 Larry:

how do you define gprior to 1998? Is that only the periods that end in 1997 or earlier?

Is there any other way to define prior to 1998?

M. Jeffus

From: http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1687252007 researchers at the University of East Anglia report that “Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen 35 per cent more quickly than expected since 2000…

From: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentac.html Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere increased from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) in pre-industrial times to 382 ppm in 2006 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth Systems Research Laboratory, a 36 percent increase.

According to these references the amount of CO2 has increased by 36% since pre-industrial times. And, the rate of increase of CO2 has increased by 35% since 2000.

See http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ for “Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide – Mauna Loa” and “Annual Mean Growth Rate” from 1959 through 2006.

Larry

186, if you look closely at the CO2 data, the rate of change is never consistent from year to year. It always increases (since 1958), but not uniformly. There have been some papers that relate the rate-of-change to solar cycles. So there’s no reason to think that a short-term move from 1.5 to 2.5 ppm is remarkable.

You could turn that argument around; if CO2 is rising more rapidly than in recent history, why is temperature essentially flat?

Willis Eschenbach

paul, you say:

Anyone else seen all the news stories suddenly coming out regarding an increase in the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere and how this is excellerating global warming. Apparently everything is happening 20 years ealier than they thought. Headline news here in NZ and yet I have sourced the story from the UAE to May of this year. Who is pushing this stuff?

I’ve tracked it to this article, but the linked underlying PNAS study is not yet online. The article says:

Emissions increased faster in the period 2000-2006 (at 3.3% per year) than they did in the 1990s (1.3% per year) and are now higher than at any other time since continuous monitoring began in 1959. But there’s another devastating twist, according to Global Carbon Project lead author Pep Canadell and colleagues. There’s strong evidence that terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks aren’t working as efficiently now as they were 50 years ago. A series of droughts on land and changes in ocean currents – both largely down to us – mean that less atmospheric carbon has been taken out of the system. Things are getting worse faster than we thought.

If this were true, that the emissions have increased and the carbon sinks have decreased, we’d see the evidence in the annual change in atmospheric CO2. More emissions and less sinks would mean more atmospheric CO2 … but there’s no such signal in the record. Since science is based on falsifiable predications, my prediction, without having seen the paper, is that

1) They will compare the 2000—2007 airborne CO2 increase rate to the 1990’s (which were lower than the 1980’s increase rates)

2) They will scrupulously ignore error estimates, and

3) They will not account for autocorrelation in their statistics.

Time will tell …

w.

Whoa, hold the presses, I just found a version of the paper here that lays out their main arguments. Back soon …

Well, I was right on #2 and #3, wrong on #1. No error estimates, no adjusment for autocorrelation. In addition, they have given a 2006 emission value that is estimated, but they don’t give a source for the estimate.

crosspatch

Is there any place that does a dissolved CO2 in sea water graphic over time like the the Mauna Loa site does for CO2 in air?

And with regards to comment #186, yes, I have noticed that too. The alarmists are now acting as if CO2 is somehow in and of itself the problem and that has not been shown to be the case. I would expect CO2 to increase if we have a weather pattern that clears the Arctic Ocean of a good bit of ice in summer while at the same time having record ice pack in the Southern ocean. Solar warming of the surface water should cause outgassing of CO2 while the ice in the Southern ocean removes more water from contact with the atmosphere. And I would further expect any warming of arctic permafrost areas to release further CO2. So still I see no evidence that CO2 leads temperature change in this case as it could well be explained as a lagging indicator of temperature change.

aurbo

Re my 184:

Thanks to post #185, and after reading the Scotsman article, I have to revise my previous post. Le Quare was talking about the rate of rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, not the concentration. That rate of increase is consistent with the Mauna Loa data. Now for the reasons. I suspect there has been an increase in CO2 from several sources, not just the oceans or industry. Over the past few years we have seen an inordinate amount of forest fires and that may have some influence although I’m not prepared to gauge the relative orders of magnitude.

As for the ocean effects, storminess may bring more CO2 to the surface, but that implies a saturation deficit at greater depths and this mismatch should be resolved in short order by turbulent mixing and difusion. When things calm down, the surface is left with a unbalanced equilibrium with an excess of CO2 in the well mixed atmosphere above and CO2 should return to the oceans. The solubility of CO2 in water increases with decreasing water temps. At 20°C thesoulbility of CO2 in water is about 1800ppm; at 0°C CO2 solubility is about 3200ppm. Over the past 12 months, global SSTs have been declining fairly significantly. Also, and ironically, the expanse of open water in the frigid Arctic regions this past Boreal Summer should enhance the dissolution of CO2 in that region. It will be interesting to see which way the rate of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will develop during he next year or two.

John V.

Larry,
For completeness, would you mind also showing the Northern Hemisphere and global trends?
They’re available here:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/n17.htm
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm

jimDK

Professor bob carter on climate change http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
great video showing the temperature record and how normal the late 20th century warming really was

Nasif Nahle

# 145

Mhaze,

I had not seen your message, I am sorry.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=124412. Here the author assumed that the atmosphere is a blackbody with an emissivity of 1.0!

http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/energy_budget.html Here Trenberth gives the atmosphere an absorptivity of 0.83 and an emissivity of 1.0. The surface would have an absorptivity of 1.0. Pure blackbodies, not real bodies. 😉

http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/IPCCTP.II(S).pdf (from 2.3.1 to 2.3.5)

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/219.htm

I obtained the value of their CD emissivity by clearing the variable from the formulas that can be applied if my algorithm and their algorithm are the same. For example, from qg(x1) = [epsilon/1-epsilon] [sigma (T^4)1 (x1) – J1(x1)], which is the radiative exchange if conduction and convection occur at the same time. I apply also the formula derived from Fourier and, but including the value of emissivity.

There are more references where the authors consider the carbon dioxide like a blackbody.

Willis Eschenbach

Philip, you say:

Re#181

COO levels are indeed increasing faster than the IPCC predicted.

“The growth rate of carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions has averaged 3.3 percent a year since 2000, compared with 1.1 percent in the 1990s, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The rate rose 35 percent more than scientists had anticipated based on economic growth, said Corinne Le Quere, one of the authors of the paper.”

Note the 35% rate increase is relative to economic growth. The actual rate increase from a rate of 1.1% to a rate 3.3% would be 200%.

And of course, no one dares mention that under Kyoto CO2 emissions have accelerated 200% and Kyoto itself is substantial to blame for the economic growth versus COO emission discrepancy, because it drives energy intensive industries like steel out energy efficient countries like Germany and Japan and into energy inefficient countries like China and India.

There’s a couple of problems here.

First, you are confusing “COO levels” with CO2 emissions.

Second, their figures for 2005 and 2006 are estimates, not actual data. They say that their data comes from here, which in turn says that the data comes from the CDIAC here …

Third, the recent increase comes from China, where the figures are notoriously unreliable.

Now, has the recent (2000—2004) CO2 emission level been rising? Yes, but you have to look at everything in context. For that purpose, I always get as long a record as I can. Here’s the emissions data from the CDIAC, but instead of post-1990, this is the data since 1900:

We’re halfway back up to the 1950—1970 levels … EVERYBODY PANIC!

w.

Philip_B

Edited for clarity:

In fact the graph shows the annual rate of increase in CO2 emissions and we are going back to those rates of increase in CO2 emissions. Absolute increases in CO2 emissions will be larger than the rates of CO2 emissions as current CO2 levels are substantially higher than the 1950s to 1970s.

John V.

#204 MarkW:
Where I live (Calgary) it is usually around -15C in the winter. When a chinook blows in, it can go to +15C in less than a day. Does the fact that it can be warm in the winter mean that the correlation between seasons and temperature is “at best, coincidence”?

On geologic time scales, it is clear that CO2 has not been the primary driver of climate. It does not follow that CO2 can not be the primary driver now.

scp

Question. I’ve poked around NASA’s gistemp web site, but haven’t been able to find something I’d like to see. Is it possible to list the top (say 100, or however many) individual stations in terms of their contribution to the global temperature trend?

Gunnar

>> That’s a myth caused by 1998 being so warm. Plot the temperatures, remove 1998, and the trend is clearly upward.

Whoa, you seem to forget that your logic in this regard has been identified as invalid. You cannot remove 1998 in your effort to show that it hasn’t cooled, but then include the whole 98-02 timeframe in support of your claim that the trend is up (which has also been pointed out as insufficient reasoning).

John V.

#209 Gunnar:
I knew the idea of removing 1998 would cause trouble. I only suggested it as a visual indicator. As I’ve said before though, you can leave it in and the linear trends are still up.

The way the 1998 argument is used, skeptics can claim cooling for any year after a record warm year. Consider what will happen if 2010 sets a new record which is not broken until 2020. By 2015 skeptics will be claiming that warming stopped after 2010.

MarkW

What’s so special about 100 years ago as a starting point? It’s easy to show that the earth has been warming up on a regular basis since the end of the little ice age. In fact, I’ve read several studies that show that the rate of warming has been pretty steady for the last 400 years.

If we are to pick a point, why not prior to the LIA? If we choose the middle of the mideval warming period, I could show that the earth has been cooling for the last 1000 years.

jae

MarkW:
You have made the claim that CO2 has *no* effect on climate. That’s an extraordinary claim that goes against every published bit of science I’ve ever seen. The onus is on you to provide proof. Showing a less-than-perfect correlation when one was never claimed is not proof.

Every published bit of science? Are you jesting with the jousters here?

Larry

I think you guys need a time-out, before Steve pulls the circuit breaker on the thread again.

UC

Microsite effects in Formula 1 ..

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071022/ts_afp/autoprixbrainquiry

The stewards said that there was a discrepancy between the Formula One Management temperature of 37 degrees and that provided by the FIA and team-contracted meteorologists Meteo France, which was a few degrees cooler.

Steve McIntyre

Again please do not use this thread to engage in hackneyed arguments about CO2 lead-lags. Again an important topic; and again, merely exchanging opinions without canvassing the data and articles is too noisy. If someone wants to collate data and compare to articles, fine – but less venting of opinions please.

Sam Urbinto

To expand on my 355 (and kind of answer 358 using examples) and some thoughts on temperatures and temperature proxies.

Let me give an analogy about measuring trees as a temperature proxy using an A/D joke. How about a 1 bit A/D converter that adds 1 to a counter when there’s positive voltage, does nothing when there’s no voltage, and subtracts 1 when there’s a negative voltage, running at 100 terahertz sampling a 1 Hz sine wave? 😀 (For those of you unfamiliar with these things, the output of that would be 0)

So like coring a tree and interpreting the results, there’s always other factors in play and questions to ask. Like, what are we measuring and how are we measuring it, and how accurate are our results? Another analogy. 6 bits would have a one LSB error of 1/64th of the signal range. Take a 10V p-p sine wave at 60 Hz being sampled at 60 Hz. 1/64th would be .15625 But the samples are only in .1666 volt steps so if I’m remembering correctly and have it correctly, it doesn’t matter (I think if the BER is less than the step, everything’s fine.) Regardless, doesn’t matter — the question is really besides the number of A/D bits, what are you sampling, what’s the range and sampling rate etc… and what are you storing the results in? Same with temperature (or temperature proxies) – what’s our margin of error and what’s our signal?

Temperatures and average temperatures. Take temperatures of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 you want to average. You get 5.5 The “average temperature” goes to half a degree. Add another set of temperatures like the above but 0-10 and you get 5 for the average. (Both average and median, yay!!) Average 5.5 and 5 together and we’re down to a quarter degree at 5.25 But the temperatures themselves still only have 1 degree of resolution.

There is also the issue of tmin and tmax. Take 5 days, group 1. 10,20 9,21 8,22 7,23 6,24 They all give you the same mean daily temperature of 15 degrees. No anomaly. Now take 5 days, Group 2 11,20 10,21 9,22 8,23 7,24 They all give you 15.5 degrees. No anomaly. But the anomaly between the two 5 day periods is +.5 degrees! What if you do 10 day temperature means using both group 1 and group 2 to get group 3? You get 8.5 degrees. If you did that 3 times for a month and get the same pattern at 10 day means for group 3, you have no anomaly, but if you do it as six, alternating group 1 and 2, you get +.5 for the month. Or do group 1 group 2 group 3 group 3 and get +.125

It’s not the numbers, it’s what you do with them.

I question the meaning of an anomaly of averages, regardless of how many decimal places we have, and therefore question the resulting trend (especially since these are simply air samples supposedly indicative of an area).

I also question why what a tree did 500 or 1000 years ago is meaningful. So the tree grew better over this 10 years or that 100 years or another. Nice if you want to know how the growing season was over time and not much else.

Steve Sadlov

RE: #168 – Scorecard of the Big Bad Triple Barrel (It’s Got To Be Due To AGW) Offshore Wind Event, cont…

So, after I last posted on this, temps indeed declined. After sundown the breeze turned to NNW. By about 2200 local time there was even some humidity. Sometime during the night, we might have had a minor southsoutheasterly surge, given the apparent fire smoke (from Socal?) in the air at dawn to the SE (range ~ 120 NM). Again, no real inversion during the night and no true offshore winds prior to sun up. Today is make or break day for NWS model hype – by tomorrow we’ll be in onshore push mode unless something highly unusual happens. Latest CWA discussion prog’s warmer temps today than yesterday. In other words, they are betting on increased subsidence versus yesterday. Final obs from me – we had smog this AM, indicative of weak marine layer already toying with the coastal strip. I am shorting the High.

Steve Sadlov

RE: #201 – A picture is worth 1000 words. You can clearly see the increase in the West and Japan until ecological awareness sets in late 1960s – early 1970s. Then, later, the developing world, where there has never been and likely will never be such awareness, kicks in.

henry

Sam Urbinto said (October 23rd, 2007 at 11:04 am)

“I question the meaning of an anomaly of averages, regardless of how many decimal places we have, and therefore question the resulting trend (especially since these are simply air samples supposedly indicative of an area).”

I’ve been trying to say this on various blogs for quite a while now, and always get the same response: it’s the trend that matters.

Another thing: has the SH temp chart and the NH temp chart been offset to account for seasonal changes? Example: comparing 1990 NH to 1990 SH, shouldn’t the charts be shifted by 180 degrees (summer in SH equals winter in NH).

Now before you laugh, what if in that year, there was an extremely cold SH winter, and at the same time an extremely hot NH summer. Wouldn’t the average be closer to zero?

Sam Urbinto

henry, I would say “The trend is all that ‘matters’ because this is not ‘short term’ data.”

That conclusion hinges upon accurate, complete and meaningful data, but if you take that on face value and then use it to say something about the trend, that would be it.

Then you have to ask what it means. Is it an excessive number. What causes it. What to do about it.

So “Only the trend matters.” is incomplete and out of context but that’s all you’ll get, because the other issues get into either arguments, fields with unknown answers, or inconvenient subjects.

John V.

There was an error in my description of the graph showing sensitivity to the CO2-vs-temperature relationship. It should have been:
“Sensitivity analysis to the influence of CO2 concentrations on temperature (3.3C and 4.0C/doubling vs 6.0c/doubling):”

Sam Urbinto

Now all we have to do is find a peer-reviewed paper to see what doubling co2 actually does.

The Literature is all that’s important. Link a paper, put in a paragraph summarizing. If you are the reader of it, then agree or disagree with the main point in the paper. Simple. Like:

Person 1: Paper X proves temperature lags methane, by 800 trillion years: Link: {link to paper, name of paper} See page 10 particularly.

Person 2: Paper Y disproves that paper, it shows that methane leads temperature, by 800 trillion years: Link: {link to paper, name of paper} See page 19,102 particularly.

Person 3: I have read both those papers, each one makes the mistake of underestimating the isotope lapse rate in atmosphere band 5 by 1,000 orders of magnitude, page 88,314 in the first, and page 7 in the second. The first also wrongly concludes that measurements are accurate to 8 million decimal places, and the second uses integer when floating point would have been more appropriate. That was shown here in paper Z page 22 paragraph 3 {blockquote of complicated math formula} and pages 100 to 500 which describes the formula. Instead, page 12 in paper Z proves the link is that temperature and methane both lead and lag each other at the same time, by 10 seconds. Link: {link to paper, name of paper}

John V.

I just noticed another mistake in my comment #232 above. I was giving CO2 constants in terms of doubling, but the paper actually uses a natural log (2.718…). So, the values of 3.3, 4.0, and 6.0C that I gave should actually be 2.3C, 2.8C, and 4.2C for a doubling of CO2. Sorry about that.

#234 Larry:
I believe the values would have to be inclusive of all long-term feedbacks (positive and negative). The way I understand it, the effect of CO2 in isolation is not more than ~1.1C/doubling.

Again, I’m not saying this paper proves anything. I just don’t think its results can be used as an argument against CO2 influencing climate since they depend on CO2 influencing climate.

M. Jeff

The New York Times, November 7, 2006, “In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/science/earth/07co2.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1 discusses the Phanerozoic record.

Their Phanerozoic graph at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/11/06/science/earth/20061107_CO2_GRAPHIC.html has esthetic advantages over the graph linked to by John V., October 23rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm.

Sam Urbinto

That should have been “Pick a particularly warm or cold trending a 5 year period in the past; 2007-2012 could be either, or basicially flat at 0 around some leveled off plateau.”

Here’s a question. Forget we don’t know exactly what effects clouds, oceans, co2/methane/nitrous oxide/ozone concentrations, and so on, have on their own, much less in combination with each other.

The question is on particulates. There’s two types of particulates, in the air and on the ground. Has anyone seen anything showing if the cooling in the air is greater, less or the same than the warming on the ground due to them? Net warming? Net cooling? At equilibrium?

Steve Sadlov

RE: #225 – OK, here are likely highs and 1400 local time conditions for today:

Mhaze

New (old)subject. From Hansen 1988 presentation to Senate, written submittal I shall quote.

“The present observed global warming is close to 0.4C relative to ‘climatology’, which is defined as the thirty year (1951-1980) mean. A warming of 0.4C is three times larger than the standard deviation of annual mean temperatures in the 30 year climatology. The standard deviation of 0.13C is a typical amount by which the global temperature fluctuates annually about it’s 30 year mean: the probability of a chance warming of three standard deviations is about 1%. Thus we can state with about 99% confidence that current temperatures represent a real warming trend rather than a chance fluctuation over the 30 year period.”

Same comment is made in less detail in Hansen et al 1988, along with a forecast of 0.4 future increase within a few years(note the above quote is a hindcast). This is in a sense “Where it all started” and above paragraph appears to be the “scientific proof” of the assertion that global warming existed, as stated by the leading proponent of that theory in 1988.

Based on what we now know, are these arguments valid? Were they ever valid? My immediate guess is no, since we have Tung, others indicating solar variation over an 11 year period in the neighborhood of 0.2C, further Tsonis indicates longer term cycle with implied temperature changes.

Based on current temperature data from various sources and adjusting the standard deviation of annual mean temperatures as may be required based on better information, how would Hansen’s original method of looking at or claiming a 3 standard deviation from the norm hold up?

jae

O.K., I added a graph to my first spreadsheet (Fig. 8) that combines all July and December data, giving 312 data points for locations between Barrow, AK and Guam. As I expected, the data for the two months fit together perfectly, with a correlation (R2) of 0.95. It is very clear to me that, on land, the temperature is a function of solar insolation (probably representing cloudiness), humidity, and the amount of bare soil that is exposed (representing dryness). If adequate water vapor is present, temperatures are constrained by water evaporation. If there is insufficient water for evaporation, the temperature goes higher than it would if water were available.

jae

If I’m right on this temperature/moisture relationships, then drought situations create a double whammy. The low moisture causes higher temperatures, which cause lower moisture, which…Talk about feedback!

Sam Urbinto

That should have been ‘the atmospheric altitude and portion of the atmosphere’, and other factors do to the net amount’.

Now from another angle. First you take a leap of faith and grant some importance to the randomly sited sampling of air 5 feet over the ground over a 5×5 degree grid of a varying number of locations, take it for granted the numbers are accurate, and think averages of averages of average anomalies is a meaningful bit of data. Then you do the same with satellites sampling the water surface of the planet in 2×2 degree grids. After you trust the blending of the two also being meaningful, you come up with an anomaly for the “temperature of the planet”. It is indeed trending up over time, in any case.

But then you have to assume the above mentioned anomaly is the same measurement over the period and not just improvements in the measuring devices et al, other various causes that by-and-large can’t really be illustrated at this time with any degree of certainty (and are therefore not ‘scientific’), natural variation/part of a cycle we can’t see at these short time intervals, or mostly margin of error. Or aliens. Whatever.

Now even if all that is true (which seems rather unlikely) we then have to come up with a scientific (or even socio-political-pseudo-scientific, call it what you want, not the subject) explanation for it. So we take two things that have no direct demonstratable cause/effect relationship over time in the short term (compare temp/co2 on the same scale of 100 since 1850) and the long-term proxy evidence of trees and ice suggests there is not one either (at least over millions of years). While there is certainly more co2 now where its measured as its measured how its measured, that only went on during the last half of the 20th century. However, that does match the proxies going back to about 50 years after the industrial revolution started at least when the two overlap.

So there is no doubt that CO2 and temperatures have gone up, at least according to how we have determined to define that and implement it. If this determination/implementation is valid or not is not the subject of the debate. As you can see, we have taken many things for granted.

What is boils down to is if 100 or so ppmv of CO2 has directly caused an around .5 C upwards trend. If the question is phrased like that, there are two answers: We don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

Has this extra CO2, which we’ve created, caused the warming? Maybe. Has the pollution we’ve created that’s ended up on the ground caused the ice to melt? Maybe. Has what’s ended up in the air moderated the warming so it wasn’t 2.5C? Maybe. Have the cities we’ve built absorbed far more sunlight and created the warming? Maybe.

Taking CO2 in a vaccuum is meaningless, it’s not the only factor. Is it impacting the weather? Most certainly. Does the weather tracked over time become climate? Of course. Are there a lot of other poorly understood factors and mechanisms? Without doubt.

We can’t talk about weather here. We have to talk climate. Models are not scientific evidence. Scenarios are not scientific evidence. What it boils down for me is – can somebody prove mathematically that X CO2 = Y Temperature? Nobody here has found anything. Has there been a clear rise in CO2 every year with a clear rise in temperature every year? No.

So if you want to make the argument from either direction, all there is? Opinion. Why? Do people have opinions of what happens if you slam a car into a wall at 60 MPH? Do people have opinions of what happens if you douse 100 pounds of paper with gasoline and throw in a match?

The simple fact is that on one hand you have a clear every year upward increase in “directly measured” CO2 and on the other hand you have over a 1 C variation in the calcaulated sampled averages (depending on if it’s land/water, water, land, and if just water or land, where). The CO2 is in one place. The temp is in hundreds of places. What that says to me is that you can not use the comparison of the two at all, much less to anywhere near prove a direct causal relationship between the two, even if all the issues I listed at the beginning were not issues. The question is invalid.

But there’s a deeper issue here. Think about it. Why discuss any one factor? Why?

Does the motherboard power on a computer? Yes.
Does the power supply power on a computer? Yes.
Does the power button power on a computer? Yes.
Does the RAM power on a computer? No, but it allows it to be powered on.
Does a sound card power on a computer? No, and it doesn’t need to be there to power on a computer. Nothing will happen but a lack of sound. (And even so, no speakers, no sound)
Does a mouse and keyboard power on a computer? No, but you can’t use the computer (usually) if you don’t have them. The computer will be on but unusable.
Does a mouse or keyboard power on a computer? No, but it won’t boot if it’s set to halt on keyboard errors, the computer will be on but not fully.

This last sequence of questions frames the issue that many truths need qualifications, clarification, or both.

Sam Urbinto

Doh, “other factors due to”…

That “over 1 C” is if you look at the highest to lowest average for the yearly average since 1880 btw (Although I still contend it has no meaning, that’s the number we have, it’s a fact)

And I forgot this: Why is the trend important for temp when the years vary and the trend important for CO2 but the years don’t vary? (A distillation about them being different, I suppose.)

Now all that said, I invite everyone interested to go over to the GW wiki pages and read, not the article, but the article’s history and the talk page. It will probably entertain you. I would imagine it’s a great place to discuss this in detail (the talk page) because by and large that’s not censored at all on the scientific and wording issues and covered topics, from the looks of the conversation before I gave up on it after a few minutes. Go talk with William and Stephen and Raymond, I’m sure they’d be happy to help.

You know, it is the encyclopedia anyone can edit after all.

Then there’s always Motls, RC, Open Mind, and Rabett Run.

Sam Urbinto

These might help all in one place in this post:

co2 going back millions of years

temp changes during ice ages up to 450K years This has a delta T of -8 to +6 C

co2 levels in the same time period as above This goes from 200 to 300 ppm in the same period it looks like.

So does 100 ppmv cause +14 temp? 😀 Too bad they don’t have one showing both temp/co2, and on a shorter time scale…. (100k 10k 1k)

And one I don’t particularly like:

Mixing 450K year chart with 1000 year insert The industrial era started in 1750 not 1940, didn’t it?

The Phanerozoic chart shows 6-7 thousand ppmv around 450 million years ago. What was the temperature then? (I’m just asking, I don’t think you can compare anything to now) But take a look at the chart, where are, on the left side.

Anyway, here’s more:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Temperature_Gallery

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Carbon_Dioxide_Gallery

Nasif Nahle

Sam Urbinto, the things are quite clear. Temperatures could change from -3 °C to 3 °C in our Era, what’s the problem? There is no problem at all. Deviations from an “ideal” zero are not abnormal because “zero” cannot be sustained by nature forever. GW and AGW are just ideas.

henry

Mhaze says:(October 23rd, 2007)

“New (old)subject. From Hansen 1988 presentation to Senate, written submittal I shall quote.

“The present observed global warming is close to 0.4C relative to ‘climatology’, which is defined as the thirty year (1951-1980) mean. A warming of 0.4C is three times larger than the standard deviation of annual mean temperatures in the 30 year climatology. The standard deviation of 0.13C is a typical amount by which the global temperature fluctuates annually about it’s 30 year mean: the probability of a chance warming of three standard deviations is about 1%. Thus we can state with about 99% confidence that current temperatures represent a real warming trend rather than a chance fluctuation over the 30 year period.”

In 1988, they used a 30-year period that ended 8 years before.

Here in 2007, they’re using a 30-year period that ended 18 years before (61-90).

Why can’t ANYONE produce a chart that compares 2007 anomalies to a 30-year period that ended in 2006? The data IS available, and probably more accurate (less missing data, more stations, newer equipment, etc.)

My guess is that the anomolies will not show as large a positive swing with “hotter” average data…

John V.

#258 MarkR:
The key point is that the graph showing poor correlation between CO2 and temperature on over 600 million years, and supposedly thereby proving that CO2 does not drive temperature, was created with a model that explicitly uses a response to CO2 doubling of 2.3C to 2.8C. Without the CO2 influence the model does not match reality.

MarkR

#261 JohnV. See fig 8 of the Geocarb III Paper. Actual 13C Data is compared to the model data and shows good correlation with the model. The actual 13C data for CO2 does not correlate with temperature, and it does not say that anywhere in the paper. The model is built on assumptions, it is not of itself “data”.

What the modellers are doing here is the same as the Hansen type temperature modellers. They are tweaking the assumptions to match reality and saying that is proof. It is no such thing, it remains a tweaked model.

John V.

#263 MarkR:
I’m not saying the paper proves anything. All I’m saying is that it’s results can’t be used as an argument against CO2 influencing temperature (as MarkW has done). Here is my final sentence from my original post about the paper:

“Of course, this doesn’t prove anything. It does mean that MarkW’s argument against CO2 affecting climate based on this graph will need to be re-considered.”

You are dismissing the paper now but it was you that posted the link to it last night (with other links supposedly showing that CO2 does not influence temperature). See #196 above. Was it a good paper last night?

MarkR

Phanerozoic Temperature Chart

Phanerozoic CO2 Chart

No correlation

MarkW

One problem with drawing a trend line from the 70’s is that time corresponds to the last time the PDO shifted from cold phase to warm phase.

In a world in which we have recently discovered climatic cycles that last decades, 30 years is too short a time period to draw any meaningfull trends form.

MarkR

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years–Daniel H. Rothman

The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic
correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at
tectonic time scales.

Bishop Hill

Three letters in The Times (London) re David Bellamy’s recent article. One claims that the Hockey Stick isn’t broken!

John V.

MarkR:
My point was not that there is correlation between CO2 and temperature over 600 million years. (I concede that there isn’t; the R^2 is about 0.33).

My point is that the lack of correlation alone can *not* being used as an argument against the influence of CO2. Why? Because of other factors over that time scale such as continental drift and even a large increase in solar output. The graph that has been used to argue against CO2’s influence actually *depends* on CO2’s influence.

John V.

henry:

Hmmm, what if you start with negative perturbation ?

Still stable.
I’ll try to get more details later.
In the meantime, download my spreadsheet and try different things.

MarkR

#277 JohnV. The graph is of CO2 v temp. They don’t correlate. End of.

Please, why look for the devious, when the obvious is staring one in the face? Why not use your undoubted skills to look statistically for a real causation for temperature change? PS Now it’s night time for me.

John V.

#281 MarkR:
You stated the paper was a source of CO2 measurements. Your comments re Figure 8 made it appear that you thought it was showing CO2 measurements. Since it doesn’t, kindly direct me to the part of the paper that does.

Allan Ames

[snip – photons?? gimme a break]

SteveSadlov

I predict this thread will be prematurely closed.

Larry

271, interesting that Tamino has such a nuanced understanding of the physics when it comes to Stossel’s cartoon, but Gore’s cartoon which is demonstrably a lot less accurate is close enough.

John V.

Back to the Phanerozoic CO2 and Temperature Plot:

The original plot showed poor correlation between temperatures and the CO2 concentration:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2200#comment-149629

I digitized it so I could investigate further. Here’s my digitized version:

The correlation is indeed very poor: R^2 = 0.185

—–
The greenhouse effect theory postulates that temperature and the logarithm of CO2 should be

related. With that in mind, I converted the CO2 concentrations to CO2 doublings (log2 of the ratio

of CO2 to current CO2):

The correlation is still not very good: R^2 = 0.338

—–
Digging a little deeper into the GEOCARB III model that was used to generate the CO2 profile, I

realized that there is a linear trend of 7.4C over 570 million years due to increasing solar

output. That is, the sun alone has been responsible for 7.4C of heating.

Since we’re looking at the correlation of CO2 to temperature, I removed the solar contribution and

got the results below:

The correlation is now quite good: R^2 = 0.588

—–
So, it appears that even over 600 million years CO2 and temperature correlate quite well.

Here’s my spreadsheet if anyone wants to check my work:
http://www.opentemp.org/_results/_20071024_Phanerozoic/PhanerozoicCO2andTemp.xls

John V.

welikerocks:

JohnV, but you can’t zoom in and map the temp of the planet in 50 yr or 100 yr or even 1000 yrs going back that far and say what C02 did do or not do to the temps with our concentration levels so small now

I’m not claiming that you can. MarkR and MarkW have been proclaiming the poor correlation of CO2 to temperature in geological time scales as proof that CO2 can not influence climate. There are two problems with the argument:

First, poor correlation only shows that CO2 does not dominate over that time scale. No single factor dominates on that time scale so the argument is flawed.

Second, the correlation on that time scale is actually quite good.

I’m not claiming this as proof of anything. I’m only showing the problems with the supposed proofs of MarkW and MarkR.

MarkW

What I’m saying is that if CO2 changes 10 times larger than what we are experiencing today did not affect climate, back then, then you need extra-ordinary proof if you are claiming that the small changes in CO2 we are experiencing today are going to dominate the climate.

John V.

UC:

Ok, something wrong with my Matlab implementation then. I find this quite interesting exercise.

I apologize. My system is also unstable for a negative perturbation. CO2 goes negative and the log blows up.

welikerocks

JohnV, fair enough but I disagree with a good correlation as well. Making a nice graph like this distorts HUGE amounts of time Co2 lags there , nor does it illustrate to others that Co2 does nothing to stop ice ages, nor does it represent ice ages well, even with Co2 in huge amounts compared to now, or show that the lack of it doesn’t stop the Earth from warming anyway. How did the temp go up at -300? Or down at -250 MY? Co2 is present yes but may have nothing to do with any temp change according to this graph. Its just there and the temp may influence its concentration; not visa versa. And enough said and done from me here. 🙂 I don’t want to be snipped.

See - owe to Rich

1. I have been getting a bit bored by the back and forth between JohnV and MarkW on global temperature trends. Not so bored though, that I can refrain from the following comment to JohnV. If you are supporting the use of 8-year averages, as per your #218, are you not being a little short sighted? Wind forward to January 2009 when the 2008 results are in. HadCRUT3 is currently on 0.443 for 2007, and is looking pretty static. Suppose we end up with 0.443 for 2007, and the same for 2008 too (and personally, if I had to bet, I would place both these below that value). Then the linear trend for 2001-2008 is going to be 0.0001+/-0.0041 C/y, or +/- 0.4C per century.

Of course, this current flatness may not continue (Hadley expects an upturn again early next decade and Archibald expects a downturn), but we should at least be trying to understand what the data is telling us.

2. Nasif: I should like to thank you for explaining where my calculation of CO2 sensitivity went wrong. But I can’t, because I didn’t understand your posting :-(. I wonder if you could try again, with a few more words between the equations? Is the problem that the radiation flux at the surface is hard to measure, or that convection makes the black body calculation totally inappropriate? Or something else?

3. Solar cycle 24 is getting later by the day. So, incidentally, are the HadCRUT3 temperatures for September. The August ones were posted on September 17th, but it is now a week later in this month without any new figures. Could they be finding them difficult to believe 😉 ?

4. I notice that very few people are heeding Steve’s request for subjects for proper threads. Anyway, here’s another one: the weather. I find a lot of Sadlov’s (and others) observations interesting, but I would prefer it if they were kept together in a place one can choose to look at or not.

Rich.

Sam Urbinto

Actually, thinking about that chart on reflectivity percentage. What absorbs the most insol? Water, wet dark soil, forests, meadows, crops, wet sand, dry soil and desert. (I bet metal concrete and asphalt are low on the reflectivity list as well)

No wonder air temps seem to be increasing. A lot of that stuff is man-made and prevelent. (Maybe there’s Waldo?)

AGW! AGW!

So to move on, is everyone pretty much willing to accept a statement like “The correlation between CO2 and Temperature has had an historical R^2 of .338 after adjusting for the greenhouse effect theory that postulates that temperature and the logarithm of CO2 should be related. This is based upon GEOCARB III and other models used by R.A. Berner and C.R. Scotese.”

For those intersted, link is here at Plant Fossils of West Virginia: Climate and the Carboniferous Period

CO2, R.A. Berner, 2001 via GEOCARB III model http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Geocarb_III-Berner.pdf
Temp, C.R. Scotese, unknown. I think it’s ESH-GIS 2.0 (???) as part of the Paleomap project. Might have been 1994 in ____ Carboniferous paleocontinental reconstructions, in Cecil, C. Blaine, Edgar, N. Terence, Predictive stratigraphic analysis; concept and application, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA, United-States. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin., p. 3-6., Reston VA.
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

Anyway, so, back to the question.

Has anyone seen anything showing if the cooling in the air is greater, less or the same than the warming on the ground due to them? Net warming? Net cooling? At equilibrium?

welikerocks

Over most of history CO2 has not been dominant. There is evidence that it has been substantial (not dominant) for the last 400 thousand years. In my mind it has become very important (if not dominant) in the last 30 years. Why? Because of the rapid rise in CO2 concentration (~30% in…

Yet keep in mind on your graph there “substantial and important” is plotted at “0”. 🙂

John V.

MarkR:
A couple of the links you provided above showed a very close correlation between solar cycle length and temperature. I was intrigued and looked into it.

Page 51 of http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Gerhard_Climate_Change.pdf

Although it is unsourced, the plot presumably comes from Lassen 1991 (no reference) which correlated Northern Hemisphere land temperature to solar cycle length. The paper had some issues, but nothing overly important:

Click to access Laut2003.pdf

More importantly, Lassen updated his results for the latest solar cycle in 1999:

Click to access sr99-9.pdf

He now finds that:

“We conclude that since around 1990 the type of Solar forcing that is described by the solar cycle length model no longer dominates the long-term variation of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature.”

That is, the excellent correlation of NH land temps with solar cycle lengths stopped after 1990. It shouldn’t be difficult to update the analysis for the latest solar cycle (which just ended). Perhaps someone could volunteer?

SteveSadlov

RE: #290 – These charts are very disturbing to us creatures who depend on oxygen that gets produced by organisms which depend on CO2. The long term trend is not very comforting. I want to find a new planet to live on.

SteveSadlov

For 250M years we’ve (warm blooded animals) have been living off of the oygen derived from the CO2 liberated by the great exitinction (and subsequent fungal action).

Paul O

John V.

Lassens paper uses MBH 98 for temperature data. That likely explains the divergence, and the hockey stick shape of his charts

Peter Lloyd

HELP PLEASE !

David Bellamy had a good blast at AGW in The Times (of London, Comment section, p19, Oct.22.)

There are several responses in today’s Times, Oct.24, one of which, from the Exec. Director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research states as a matter of fact that there is no record over the last 55 million years of a simultaneous ice age in both hemispheres.

I know this to be incorrect – somewhere in this Swiss cheese I call my memory are a couple of papers containing indisputable data showing extensive ice caps in both hemispheres at the same time, quite recently in this context (i.e., within the last 500,000yrs) – but I can’t find the references. Can anyone help? I often get letters published in The Times and would love to spike his one, but if I can’t get the reference quickly the thread will grow cold.

Thanks in advance.

John V.

Sam Urbinto:

You can’t selectivly remove things, you get different figures depending on what you do.

That can be true — you have to be careful.
It would be better to use ANOVA if I remember my stats correctly. I don’t want to dig any deeper on the Phanerozoic though.

Paul O:

Lassens paper uses MBH 98 for temperature data. That likely explains the divergence, and the hockey stick shape of his charts

The agreement with the older MBH98 data is actually very good. The divergence is in the last 20-30 years. There is now a new data point avaialble with the solar cycle that just ended. Any volunteers to plot temperature against solar cycle length up to 2007? It’d be a new result — never before seen. (I’m away from my work computer or I’d love to do it).

Anna Lang

In response to Steve McIntyre’s request, I suggest a “Five Star Anthology” thread providing links and annotations to articles that represent the best of the best in climate research. These would be articles with the potential to become classics in the field. How to choose? That might require a thread of its own!

Mark T.

You’re applying linear control theory to a system with logarithmic feedback. It doesn’t work that way.

This statement misses the point I was getting at (I understand the logarithmic feedback), but…

I applied an initial perturbation of 0.001K (one thousandth of one degree Kelvin). The linear system is of course unstable. The logarithmic system stabilizes at T=288.3K and C=493ppm. The amazing thing is that the logarithmic system is *always* stable, regardless of q and a; they only affect the stabilization temperature. The logarithmic system also has a faster initial response.

This was my point. The feedback is actually a logarithmic term which decreases with increasing CO2. It is stable, of course, because the aggregate gain continually decreases, a point I have made in several posts. As you note, the quickie simplified version is always stable, and likewise, the concept of a “tipping point” is nonsense.

BTW, I have no particular gripe with the 2.5K per doubling other than the simple fact that it has never been proven for our atmosphere, it is merely assumed. If there is one, I’d love to see it as would Steve M. (given that he has an open request for just such a thing).

Mark

John V.

#321 Bruce:
Yes, the latest non-peer-reviewd Svensmark & Friis-Chrstensen critique of L&F comes to that conclusion. Tamino has an interesting (also non-peer-reviewed) counter-critique:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/how-to-fool-yourself/

Given the very strong correlation between solar cycle length and NH land temperature in the past, I’m still curious about the last cycle. Any takers?

Mark T.

No need to apologize since the actual comment chain was spread out over multiple posts as well as multiple threads. The “tipping point” concept that I refer to, btw, is actually even deeper than that and it gets into a lead/lag discussion that is often mis-interpreted by many, and delving into what I mean gets too close to the “snipping point”… 🙂

Mark

John V.

Spence_UK:
I am not a statistician. You seem very capable in stats. Please do a proper analysis on the data (to your standards), rather than just poke holes in my analysis.

I resent the implication in your post that I have employed statistical tricks to support my case. Remember why I was looking at the data in the first place: MarkR and MarkW were using it as a “proof” that CO2 could not influence temperatures. With your stats knowledge you must have realized the “proof” was invalid. Why are you so quick to jump on my supposed errors but willing to allows theirs to stand?

For the record, the trend that I “added” was actually removing the solar trend added by the GEOCARB III model.

You tell me:
Is there a statistically significant correlation between CO2 and temp in this data? (Hint: There must be since the CO2 was calculated using an explicit temperature term).

Nasif Nahle

# 303

John V.,

The total increase of CO2 since 1800 has been 101 ppmv. It would be true if we assume that the “standard” concentration of CO2 is 280 ppmv. The IPCC said on its original paper that the contribution of human activities to the total increase of atmospheric CO2 was 33.98%. 33.98% from 101 ppmv is 34.32 ppmv. That’s correct. If you are right, then the contribution of humans to the increase of CO2 would be 9.09 ppmv. However, if you’re assuming that the increase has been 381 ppmv, then the contribution of humans to the CO2 atmospheric concentration would be only 34.29 ppmv.

David Smith

An Antarctic ozone hole update is here . You’ll have to click on the images and then click refresh to get the latest data.

The black dots are the latest data. The 2007 ozone hole looks quite normal compared to the 1990-2001 baseline.

Jonde

Ah, this whole CO2 and temp argument start to get really boring, REALLY boring. You do not get anywhere, you sit around the computer all the day and counter attack you arguments constantly. You have been doing this for how many Unthreaded already? To find some interesting topics between your spam starts to get really tiresome. Please, please, please, stop it.

My tiny rant is over.

Nasif Nahle

Jonde!!! You’re pretty right!!! 😉

Mario

A part any statistical question, in these (interesting) historical temperature & CO2 graphs one should not forget to mind well the X-axis scale:
even if a variation in CO2 levels would bring a corresponding variation 10 MILLIONS YEARS LATER
perhaps these days we shouldn’t be too tremendously worried,…

Tom Vonk

Spence UK

“What is of far more interest to me with that plot is that the magnitude of the temperature swings at different scales are commensurate with long-term persistence and complex statistical structure across scales. This is a common trait for complex, natural, non-linear systems (in particular chaotic systems with phase space transitions). Such systems tend to throw up oddball results if you apply conventional linear analyses, and you need to tread very carefully.”

Yes .
I always like to mention the question (well known in some circles and virtually ignored in many others) :
“What is the average diameter of all branches of a given tree ?”
What does “average” and “standard deviation” mean in this case and can one compare trees using such numbers ?
What can one infer from those numbers , if anything ?

Now the weather behaves like tress in that respect and people using statistics in climate should be sure that they can properly answer the questions above .

As you say , one has indeed to thread VERY carefully 🙂

Bruce

JohnV

What exactly did I lose?

Credibility.

I’ve only been participating on this site for a short time. When I first came here you kept pushing AGW. You kept claiming it couldn’t be the sun because solar energy was lower in the 90s. That turned out to be false. Now you are trying to push the idea that the Sun has no significant impact on warming in the 90s. That also turned out to be false.

John V.

Bruce:

You kept claiming it couldn’t be the sun because solar energy was lower in the 90s.

Again, I never said that. I said that solar energy stoppped rising, not that it fell. You have now brought up dimming and brightening from aerosols and I have acknowledged that fact. (Dimming and brightening are different than solar energy as they are related to aerosols).

See - owe to Rich

Re #335 “The current solar cycle (#23) has not yet ended. Current predictions are that it will end around March of 2008 making it an unsually long cycle which has some ramifications in studies of cycle length and climate.”

Usually the important point is the minimum between the 2 cycles. According to Archibald (who quotes others), the minimum activity generally occurs between 12 and 20 months after the the new polarity spots. These have not been seen yet, and since the transition between 23 and 24 is looking unusually slow, I doubt that minimum will occur before 2009, over 12 years after the previous minimum.

Incidentally, I have seen two figures for the date of the last minimum: 1996.5 by Archibald and 1996.8 from a text file on Lassen’s website. Is the latter generally believed to be the more reliable?

The 0.3 year difference will be important when considering how far back into the 19th or 18th centuries we have to go to find such a long cycle as 23 will turn out to be.

Rich.

JamesG

“There are several responses in today’s Times, Oct.24, one of which, from the Exec. Director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research states as a matter of fact that there is no record over the last 55 million years of a simultaneous ice age in both hemispheres.”

That seems to make a lot of sense to me. If the Milankovitch cycles don’t introduce much energy (which is generally acknowledged) then by thermodynamics, any ice age in the North must be balanced by a warming in the South and vice versa. Probably each hemisphere’s ice age was caused by convection changes eg a shift of oceanic current from North to South or South to North. In heat transfer the secondary convective changes are often more important than the initial radiation change.

Nasif Nahle

John V.,

I was only demonstrating that the argument that it proves CO2 does *not* affect temperature is invalid.

Does this assertion denote that CD is a source of energy? In which way the CD “affect” temperature? Isn’t it normal and negligible?

Bruce

Simultaneous ice ages:

“The results are significant because they indicate that the whole Earth experiences major ice age cold periods at the same time, and thus, some climate forcing mechanism must homogenize the Earth’s climate system during ice ages and, by inference, other periods,” says Michael R. Kaplan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh who conducted the work in a postdoctoral position at UW-Madison.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040319071426.htm

Sam Urbinto

If you think that’s bad over there on the wildfires, you should go check out media matters and their take on agw.

Anywayz.

Since we’re having fun with graphs, here’s a few. This is all GHCN-ERSST.

This is 1880-2005 temps on a +/- 5 C scale, with both linear and log trends. I thought if we’re going to log co2, why not see what temp does with a log vs trend line?

Why not look at the linear 125 year trend on a .25 degree scale? Look! The warming starts in 1910! 🙂

Checking 20 year moving averages are always fun. Here’s OCO(left Y, its scale, 0-400) and temp (right Y, its scale, +/-.6) on the same graph.

Trend for 98-05 with both linear and log.

Whoa, that does look pretty scary! 2000-2005

This shows that for the period of overlap of ice core and air, there is a definite relationship in the trend, although it does diverge slightly. This rather proves that ice cores do show short term what the air is doing in a different location.

And the final graph of 1832-2004 OCO with the global anomaly plotted on the same Y scale. I think you’ll find this one particularly entertaining.

vercingetorix

I recently created a prediction market at Inkling Markets to predict the smoothed sunspot number at solar max of cycle 24:

Sunspot Prediction Market

So far, there’s not enough volume to get anything out of it, but it’s free to sign up and trade, so we can change that if there’s enough interest. This might be a fun method to track the storm count predictions as well.

John V.

#356 UC:
I think the instability arises from the linearization of the CO2 response to temperature (the a constant).

I would like to improve the equations by using a more realistic model for CO2 absorption and release from ocean water. (I’m thinking of modelling the planet as a big ocean with a uniform temperature — obviously not correct but fun to play with). Any ideas where I could find the CO2 in ocean water info?

John V.

You could make the temerature trend even flatter by plotting CO2 parts-per-billion.
But then I’d probably plot it in parts-per-thousand. That’d make you worry. 🙂

Mark T

Oh crap, that last bit used an lt. symbol rather than “less than”… it should read:

As soon as log(x)/x is less than 1/g, the system stabilizes. Since the limit of log(x)/x approaches 0 as x increases,

Mark

Spence_UK

Re #338

Agreed Tom, good to hear from you!

One person who could do with understanding your question would be Figen Mekik who, just a few days back, posted his worry about “Sweatin’ the Mediterranean Heat” over at RealClimate. And guess how he reviews the historical rainfall in the region? Why yes, the team’s love affair with tree ring proxies continues, with a splendid historical reconstruction from precipitation-sensitive trees.

Hmm, strange though, looking at the graph, I can’t see any of the complex statistical structure that one would expect in such a series. It is almost as if Harold Hurst had never existed…

Sam Urbinto

LOL, right, ppmt 🙂

Well, the point was not to flatten the line or “fool people by adjusting the scale” or whatever of course (I’m not saying you’re saying that, just I’m saying it). I did put up +/-5, +/-.25, 0 line at value begin, and both readings with their own Y-axis after all…. Partly to show that there are different ways to look at (or think about) the data. Partly because I have issues with the way some of the stuff is presented. I’ve seen some very AGW-centric folks complain about massaging the charts or what have you, who have no problem skewing graphs to accentuate the HUGE WARMING TREND (Or don’t think they are skewing them when they are, because of their preconceptions). Me, I try and be fair… 🙂

I think it’s also a bit of playing with the numbers to show both lines on their own scale, considering that one is 100s (of ppmv, yes, but we are talking about atmospheric concentrations) and comparing it to one in 1/10s. As in inserts of CO2 at one scale of temperature on another is. Now what I would consider interesting would be to graph CO2 not in ppmv, but by its relative greenhouse effect potential (as shown by ModelE) along with the potential of clouds, ozone, water vapor, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide and “others” on the same graph. But of course, the clouds and water vapor would totally dominate the graph, so I don’t expect any of the mainstream folks to do so. (or they’d leave off the clouds and water vapor because “they aren’t forcings” when of course if you’re looking at the GE, it doesn’t matter what they are, forcing or feedback) But I fear that type of graph is a bit beyond my abilites.

This isn’t tho:

Here’s two, a chart using 14 C as the mean global average as a number and plotting the anomaly against that as the “zero line”. The first is on a 1.2 C scale and the second is (to me) a more realistic scale; the annual temperature range in a notional place where every year, the low is 0 C and the high is 40 C If that town had a stable low/high of that, and they experienced the warming, what would that look like to them?

But that pales in comparison to this:

As far as the rest, as I said, start here and work your way backwards…..

🙂

Nasif Nahle

I agree with Sam Urbinto. I don’t see that Anna had said that she was supporting any viewpoints from the articles.

I think this article is worth to read, although I do concur with some assertions there, I don’t agree with other notions:

Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?

John V.

Sam Urbinto:
I think a fair scale for temperature would be the limits of ice ages in the last 400K years or so. That gives a scale for what a few degrees can do. I’d say the same for CO2 but that’ll get me in trouble. 😉

Anna Lang

RE #361 Nevket240

In #307, I posted the reference to a new article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This article and its authors are receiving attention in the news media, including my morning newspaper. In an attempt to find out more about this article, I encountered various headlines, each presenting a spin on the paper’s findings. Since I saw no posts about it, I brought it to the attention of readers here. Apparently it caught your attention and you have formulated an opinion. I have yet to do enough research on the matter to formulate mine.

RE #365 and #366

Sam U. and Nasif N., thank you for correctly interpreting my intentions.

Jaye

I guess you been watching too many shows like “Planet in Peril” which I think should be renamed “Age of Enlightenment in Peril” because of all the dross the warmers are feeding to the public.

Hoi Polloi

Interesting debate on Climate Change here: http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=296504

Maybe some of you want to throw your expertise in?

John V.

Mike B:
I never said otherwise. The “few degrees” referred to what’s happening right now.

henry

aurbo says (October 25th, 2007 at 4:31 pm

“Re #341:

The convention you mentioned has been standard practice at NCDC for over half a century. The practice is that when the previous 3 decades have been compiled and edited, the 30-year monthly normals shift to include those three decades. The current standard normals are for the period 1971-2000. Apparently the AGW crowd hasn’t caught up with that yet.”

Neither, then, has the NCDC or the IPPC. New temp charts still have old average. Has ANYONE seen “updated” charts containing the new references?

You probably won’t, because of the APPEARANCES these new charts would give. To compare data between charts, and have any “hot” year suddenly “lose” two-tenths of a degree (making the “cold” years seem colder) is something they don’t want to have to battle.

But updated charts would show, during the past 30 years, that half of the years fall under the “zero” line (i.e, the most “warming”, or sustained positive anomalies in the past 30 years would occur AFTER 1994). Currently, the sustained positive anomalies begin in about 1985.

JZ Smith

133:

20/20 John Stossel had a go at Gore’s moveie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FI0U5JOtoo

Thanks for the link. I had DVR’ed it and even showed it to my wife, who doesn’t really follow GW except as reported in the MSM. (We are in the San Diego area and were otherwise occupied during the original broadcast!)

Is it true what JS reported that co2 increase follows increase in temp?

Sorry for dumbing-down your discussion!

Craig Loehle

re: 380 Yes, over ice ages, temperature changes direction up or down about 800 to 1000 years before temperature, repeatedly. This does not disprove AGW, just that CO2 did not force the ice ages.

SteveSadlov

RE: #334 – I’d much rather discuss vulnerability to another late Phanerazoic Boundary-like extinction. I have some ideas. Perhaps: Low CO2 + extraterrestrial object impact = massive phytoplankton die off. We are now at a level of CO2 not far above what existed during the Permian.

Michael Jankowski

Re#380, the other posters are right. However, Stossel was directly addressing Gore's PowerPoint slide, which would suggest the distant past rises in CO2 and temps have historically been simultaneous.

Mike B

John V. #376

Mike B:
I never said otherwise. The “few degrees” referred to what’s happening right now.

You most certainly did. I quoted you. And what’s happening now is “a few tenths of a degree”, not a few degrees.

henry

Ray Pierrehumbert is writing a book on the physics of climate. Chapters and a computer based workbook is available.

John F. Pittman

#385 Cloud cover is far from similar when comparing dry South West to soggy South East US. A factor like you used for cover for land should be added to the SE as a heat blocking factor for sunlight by clouds, especially in summer time. The humidity and cloud cover in summer tend to negate each other as in they moderate the temperatures. In the SE after the rainstorm, it is apparently hotter to humans. The clouds are gone and relative humidity is high. The sun then increases both the temperature and the humidity, such that one regrets the rain (sometimes).

Buddenbrook

In their latest posting RC are asserting that we can rule out low climate sensitivities, and that for 450ppm (not doubling, 450ppm) +4.5C warming is much more likely, than below +2.0C.

What their arguments for this are, who knows. Where the certainty comes from, who knows.

Nasif Nahle

Following the logics of RC writers, 290 million years ago the temperature on Earth was 27.33 °C above the median temperature. That would be a temperature of 60 °C… Poor dinosaurs. That implies that the temperature along the Eocene was 53 °C… Heh, heh, heh… 🙂

Nasif Nahle

# 395

Jae, I think that high humidity is a large uncomfortable factor for humans. Remember thermal sensation.

jae

Jae, I think that high humidity is a large uncomfortable factor for humans. Remember thermal sensation.

Nasif, it’s not just thermal sensation, it is the fact that the perspiration cooling system can’t work well when humidity is high (which again demonstrates the huge amount of energy that goes into vaporization). Thermal sensation is purely a function of temperature.

John V.

Nasif Nahle:

Following the logics of RC writers, 290 million years ago the temperature on Earth was 27.33 °C above the median temperature.

The peak CO2 concentration that I have found is about 7000ppm, or roughly 26x pre-industrial levels, 520 million years ago.

26x is ~4.7 doublings (that is, log2(26) = 4.7).

The temperature was about 22.5C but the sun was dimmer, accounting for 7C, so the equivalent temperature was 29.5C.

The current average temperatures is ~12C, giving a difference of 17.5C.

Dividing 17.5C by 4.7 doublings gives 3.7C/doubling. That’s pretty consistent with other numbers I’ve seen published. No problems there.

Nasif Nahle

John V.,

Why do not make the calculations straightly? Alpha = {4.5 K / [Ln (CO2 x2/CO2 st)]} / 4 (sigma) (Tb^3). That gives a value for alpha of 24.46 W/m^2. This is the RC calculation. Now clear the value delta T and introduce the magnitude that you’re referring to, that is 7000 ppmv. The result is 21.4 K above the median.

BTW, the iron stains from 290 million years BD (Permian Period) were the result of intense heating of rocks by the Sun, thus the Sun does not seem to have dimmed. Dinosaurs and aquatic animals did not start dying of cold, but from starvation.

nevket240

Anna:
apologies. I misunderstood your position.

Being an Australian my English isn’t all that good.

regards.

Pat Keating

407
Who said anything about convection currents and what is your point there?

The real point should be that the poles themselves were not apparently in synch.

Where is your evidence for that statement?

Richard Sharpe

Follow the money.

THE GOLDEN CHAD: Ceci n’est pas un Prix, c’est un morceaux non decoupe’ doree

steven mosher

Climate sensitivity paper

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/the-certainty-of-uncertainty/

steven mosher

RE 413.

I wasted 10 bucks on the article. what they dont relaize is that they just describe a system
that can only be controlled by a totalitarian regime.

That is, a system that is very sensivite ( long tail on the high sensitivity side) and LONG
time constants.. like 30 years..

If, for example, you plan for a high sensitivity ( 6C per doubling)and apply controls
accordingly you have to wait 30 years or so to see if you got the control right.
In the meantime, inthe intervening years, your going to get noisy jumpy feedback signals
from the land temp record that could cause you to abandone your control setting or feed in more.

Imagine if you would that Al Gore put on huge carbon controls. Theory says
the warming signal really only shows in long term trends. Now imagine in the few years
after Gore slams on the carbon brakes that you get a couple years of anomalous cooling.
The historical record is chock full of sadlovian fault scarps where the temps cool by 1C
on a year to year basis. That would be a political nightmare. Impose harsh controls and
BAM it cools. Then youre poor and cold.
Or imagine the opposite you put in harsh controls and you get a 1C spike the next year.
More harsh controls?

One thing for sure, the control setting will be wrong. No goldilocks here.

Anna Lang

RE: #406

G’day, Nevket240:

There’s no problem at all. Australian English is such a colorful language, please don’t give it up!! Sorry for not replying sooner, but I’ve had difficulty accessing the website and then getting this thread to load completely. Maybe it’s a hint I need to head over to the tip jar . . .

Best to you,
Anna

steven mosher

re 404. Dont forget hansen says the Long term sensivity is 6C per doubling

bender

How are probability and STATISTICS involved there? I thought “tuning” amounted to just trial and error and SWAGs.

You seem to think “trial and error” is not a statistical process. The reality is that each “trial” is an experiment that costs you one degree of freedom. Trouble is many don’t want to pay that cost. The result is an overfit model of questionable validity.

You are aware that GCMs are tuned to a sample of “actual” climate scenarios? How are these sample instances chosen? Are they “representative”? What do they represent? The entire ensemble of circulatory possibilities, or just some select subset? Which circulatory features are considered structurally stable enough that they merit being a target of tuning? What is the proof that these features are structurally stable? Or is this an assumption?

The atmospheric circulation is a stochastic process. The models are stochastic. Fitting stochastic models to stochastic data is fundamentally a statistical exercise – even if the climatologists don’t see it that way.

Ask Wegman. [Ask him at the ASA workshop on statistics in climatology.]

jae

In my mind, “tuning” suggests an ad hoc selection of constants and variables that make the model perform the way you want it to (e.g., “let’s cut this value in half and see what happens”). If that is true, I just don’t see how you can assign some kind of probability function to the selected values. How do you assign a probability to a SWAG? Don’t waste your time responding if I am really that ignorant on this issue.

Philip_B

Australian research shows land clearing causes drought and warming.

He said eastern Australia was between 0.4 and two degrees warmer, and southwest WA was between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees warmer.

Perhaps we should be talking about ALW – Anthropogenic Local Warming, as well as Rural Heat Oceans.

bender

How may I run a coherent model if those factors, which affect intensely our appreciation of the air temperature, are stochastic and ergodic and I am not able to understand their ergodicity?

Exactly.

Now go over to RC and mention ergodicity in the context of atmospheric circulation and listen to the crickets. They don’t get it. Maybe they don’t WANT to get it. Maybe it’s too damning. But how is one to judge when the expert answers are so evasive?

UC

#420

Degrees of freedom seems to be a difficult topic in reconstructions as well. For example, you can run white noise through MBH98 algorithm, and it will tell that AD1820 step results are much more accurate than AD1400 results (that’s what calibration residuals tell..). Somewhat related to the loss of R2 in verification..

Explanation of the term 1/(n-p) in LS error variance estimation would be a good way to start for Team, as terms like (n-p-1)/(n-q-1) in the multivariate calibration case would probably be too difficult to understand.

bender

That knob represents a degree of freedom that was spent but never earned. That’s why they don’t want to listen to the new kid.
He’s telling them what they ought to know, or used to know, but have tried since to forget.

Steve McIntyre

On a previous occasion, I quoted Ellingson et al 1991, who studied GCMs of the day, noting that some models contained massively incorrect parameterizations of something as “simple” as CO2 radiation code, with the errors being up to 80 wm-2. Curiously the errors didn’t “matter” when it came to the impact of CO2. Ellingson observed archly:

The 30-80 wm-2 range of variation in longwave radiative flux computations discovered during this study are a significant fraction of normally observed latent and sensible energy fluxes. In the end it is these energy fluxes that control the climate. The reason that such large discrepancies in radiative fluxes have not seriously distorted model predictions of current climate is simply that most climate models are heavily tuned to give the “right answer” for current climate conditions.

Boris’ response was more or less – that was then; we’ve “moved on”. I’m sure that the problem areas are different – in the sense that gross errors in CO2 code have probably been ironed out since then, but I’d be surprised if tuning was completely absent from present day models.

jae

Ruckelshaus?

bender

Knobs provide an illusion of control. Paradoxically, more knobs can mean less control – if you don’t know what each and every one of them does.

But getting the model tuned is one thing. The real question is whether this tuning reflects the actual behavior of the whole global circulation, or just some special subset.

Analogy. Try building a neural net (overfit) model of stock market behavior and then use that to guide your trades. See how long you last before you go broke. That’s the difference between actual stock market behavior and patterns observed in some subset sample of time and space and circumstance. Is stock market behavior ergodic? That’s a good question. Is atmospheric circulation ergodic? Yes? In what sense?

steven mosher

re 438.

Yes, exactly.

Jaye

I’m a modeler of sorts, well I develop code that the engineers use in their models. Our stuff comes from a priori decisions about the physics involved. We determine the required fidelity of things like earth models, atmospheric models (scattering, path transmittance, meteorological conditions, etc.), material/radiation interaction, airframe equations of motion, sensor processing of the radiative environment we have constructed and a bunch of other things. What we end up with is a sim that can be very accurately predict the flight path of a guided airframe. When we “tweak” something its usually a decision to go with more fidelity based on the best available physics based models…use lowtran instead of an extinction coefficient to compute path transmittance to get a more realistic signal to the sensor model. I suppose where I’m going with all of this is that I’m amazed that models that don’t have this sort of pedigree are relied upon so heavily by anybody in the technical community. We also go through extensive IV&V by outside agencies…something that I don’t see happening in climate science. Maybe if there were a forcing function that related grant money and salary to actual performance (the standard my colleagues and I are held to) then we would might get better results.

bender

Re #441
Interesting. So go ask at RC what these instabilities mean in terms of the models’ credibility. Is the actual climate system that unstable? If not, why not? I bet you will be demonized within hours – the RC demonization-time being directly proportional to your level of persistence in questioning the high priests of climate science*.

*Call this ‘bender’s conjecture’.

Pat Keating

443
I’ll try that next time, but I doubt it will make much difference, since it didn’t blow up until it had gone on for several computer years.

H

#432

“but I’d be surprised if tuning was completely absent from present day models.”

In the article

PNAS | September 25, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 39 | 15248-15253

Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content

B. D. Santer & al.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/39/15248

The authors claim humbly:

“Detection and attribution studies have now moved beyond “temperature-only” analyses and show physical consistency between observed and simulated temperature, moisture, and circulation changes. This internal consistency underscores the reality of human effects on climate.”

There is not really substance for such a claim, but the interesting part was the results in figure 5 of two GCMs. Models give different precipitable water changes for the last century with GHG only, but aerosols balance the results. Clear result of tuning.

only GHG only aerosol both
PCM 1.5 -0.5 1.4
MICRO3.2 2.2 -1.3 1.4
Ratio 1.5 2.6 1.0

bender

Re #446:
1. Santer et al. (2007) also concede that:

The credibility of these conclusions depends on the reliability of model-based noise estimates.

They go on to try to half-argue that these noise estimates, so critical to their attribution test, are reliable. I’m not convinced. Not by anything I’ve read at RC, anyways.

2. It’s not surprising that 20 “different” models would appear to converge on a common result. They have evolved under a fairly strict regimen of groupthink.

3. Temperature goes up, and so does water vapor over the oceans. Is anyone surprised? How does the water vapor response increase the likelihood of human attribution over and above a presumed temperature response? It doesn’t; they’re non-independent. The Bayesian priors don’t change a bit.

Jaye

mosher,

Yea you are close. Except that we have gotten to the point where one of the main reasons for flight test is to validate the models. In the area I work in they are that good. Lots cheaper to develop a test matrix where only 10% of the tests actually involve sending an “asset” down range.

But we aren’t the only industry doing this kind of thing. Back, oh about, 10 years ago when F1 racing had lots of driver aides they ran sims for each track varying anything you can imagine. They used the results tune the shift profiles, engine parameters, etc. Of course, now the big emphasis is on aero in F1 given the budgets for the top tier teams I wouldn’t be surprised to see that some major advances in CFD are locked in the safes at Ferrari and McLaren.

My point was that if you really have to make something work and simulation/modeling is one of your main tools you don’t muck around with “tuning” unless you have a solid causally based rationale for doing so.

steven mosher

451. YUP.

At the time the F117 was designed the RCS prediction codes could only predict returns from
flat surfaces ( and some curves like cylinders) So, to meet the spec you had to prove by modelling
that the design met the spec. Then prove it again on the pole with scale models, then prove it
full sacle in the feild. Eventually, the codes were written to model the return from curved surfaces
and then you got curves. At least that’s the story the B2 guys told.

steven mosher

re 453.

I could not say. I sat through the briefing where some guy put up equations marked TS/SAR
That was funny. classified equations. very few people were allowed to see the actual code.
It was almost as bad as GISS.

B Culver

who is this Dr. Singer? Dr. Bell is a puppet. Harper is a patsy. Gore is a hero.

Steve Milesworthy

#444 Pat Keating

What happened in the years prior to the blow-up? Without CO2 the climate must surely have been waaaay out of sample.

Sam Urbinto

“The “few degrees” referred to what’s happening right now.”

Well, in acutality, we’re looking at bottom to top (or trend) of not even a degree as we all know. So of course the “few degrees” is what’s expected from an estimation and based upon current trends. We don’t know with any certainty what causes the trend (we think CO2) that the trend isn’t normal (we think it’s not) that the trend is a problem (we think it is) and that the trend will continue (we think it will). But we don’t know any of that, really, do we?

As I’ve said, I tend to think even the idea there is such a thing as a “global temperature” is false in the first place, and none of that matters. But even if it is meaningful, we have all these assumptions about the rest of it. We can’t just take one component out and say “aha”. Reading jae’s post on the water tells me how interdependent everything is, and how reality is sometimes counter-logical and sometimes not.

MrPete

Actually, was thinking of more a simple test of the GCM’s — Question C below. Since I have no idea whether this all is incorporated into GCM’s, I cannot suggest that GCM’s would be useful for your proposal… but perhaps this model is useful, apart from GCM’s. My amateur opinion:

jae apparently has a model that approximates Tland=f(insolation,humidity,land use)

Assuming he didn’t treat [land use] as a tuning knob, that’s not bad for not even using real absorption / land use data.

If the model is extended using real land use data, and still holds, then that’s a very interesting thing. A simple model, with physical basis, that relates important aspects of climate.

My “test” questions:

a) What proportion of this model is measuring anthropogenic aspects, what proportion is “natural”?

b) Yes, does this model speak to AGW vs Land Use in any useful way?

c) I would hope, that the GCM’s already incorporate this as a baseline. Anyone know?

jae

BTW, I think this model also explains the high temperatures during the dust bowl days in the 30’s. The dryer it gets, the hotter it gets. That’s the REAL feedback loop.

Pat Keating

458
That’s a good question — so good I don’t have an answer. I do runs overnight, and tonight I will run it up to a date just before the instability error message (12/98), and let you know.

mccall

Mr McIntyre-

Looks like we’re getting farther from a defined climate sensitivity in “Inevitable Uncertainty” at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol318/issue5850/twis.dtl

This points to a ScienceMag climate sensitivity perspective titled “ATMOSPHERE” Call Off the Quest,” by Myles R. Allen and David J. Frame at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/318/5850/582

Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable? is the recent ScienceMag abstract referring to Roe and Baker paper on sensitivity.

Layers upon layers of …

bender

link in #467:

Myth 5 – Climate models are too complex and uncertain to provide useful projections of climate change
There have been major advances in the development and use of models over the last 20 years. The models are based mainly on the laws of physics. There are also empirical techniques which use, for example, studies of detailed processes involved in cloud formation. The most advanced computer models also include detailed coupling of the circulations of atmosphere and oceans, along with detailed descriptions of the feedbacks between all components of the climate system including the cryosphere and biosphere. Climate models have been used to reproduce the main features of the current climate, the temperature changes over the last hundred years and the main features of the Holocene (6,000 years ago) and Last Glacial Maximum (21,000) years ago.

The bottom line is that current models enable us to attribute the causes of past climate change and predict the main features of the future climate with a high degree of confidence. We now need to provide more regional detail and more complete analysis of extreme events.

bender

What the writers of myth 5 in #470 fail to appreciate is that the distance bewteen skeptics and alarmists, measured in practical terms of the CO2 sensitivity coefficient, is not all that large (a search of CA will indicate results of a poll conducted last year on that subject: A in AGW =20% vs 60%, skeptics vs alarmists). Indeed, I would argue that the difference is smaller than the net uncertainty computed from the the GCMs. Which is precisely why they won’t calculate that uncertainty: they know the answer. As good as the GCMs are, they are (probably) not good enough.

This is the kind of garbage obfuscation that you get from RC. What are these “main features” of the current climate? What is “current” climate anyways? We don’t know what the circulation looked like even 150 years ago, so how can the GCMs correctly duplicate that which is not known? Does the past circulation not matter? “Correctly” simulating temperature change 6000 and 21000 years ago is hardly impressive, considering that these models are supposed to simulate the atmospheric circulation. And what does it mean if they do not? That the tuned parameters are off!

They say these models are based “mainly” on the “laws of physics”. (a) What does “mainly” mean? That twelve out of a thousand parameters are freely available for tuning? That’s still quite a bit of room for overfitting! (b) “Laws of physics” are one thing, physical, measurements quite another. Don’t tell me these physical parameters have no standard error associated with them. They do. And in using those paraemters to make an inference about a free parameter, those errors will propagate multiplicatively. So much for strong inference. “Laws of physics” are what the emperor cites to keep the ignorant plebes away. Hooey.

UC

467

Myth 2:

Over much of the last 1,000 years most of the variability can probably be explained by cooling due to major volcanic eruptions and changes in solar heating.

As MBH98 Fig7 tells us.

The final piece of the jigsaw is that as well as producing CO2, burning fossil fuels also produces small particles called aerosols which cool the climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. These have increased steadily in concentration over the 20th century, which has probably offset some of the warming we have seen. Only when all of these factors are included do we get a satisfactory explanation of the magnitude and patterns of climate change over the last century.

What is satisfactory explanation? Add input variables until residuals look white?

BTW, got interesting result when I replaced Temperature PCs with solar in MBH98 algorithm. Similar RE values as in the original, and R2 goes down in the verification. I’d try this with 1980-present data, but the proxies are not yet updated.

MrPete

I wonder what other data series could be plugged in to good effect? We could create a nice “quilt” of hockey stick graphs. A great way to demonstrate the extreme confirmative value of today’s influential real climate science.

Sam Urbinto

Thought exercise. What happens to temperatures (only) if:

CO2 drops to 0
CO2 drops back to 300
CO2 continues to climb about 1 ppmv a year average
CO2 jumps to 7000
CO2 is our entire atmosphere

If you have mathematical formulas showing proof of your opinions on this, please show them. Otherwise just think about it. 😀

Hasse@Norway

Tim Patterson Lecture:

Gary

#479

I suspect something has got lost in translation. When using modtran (I am a chemical engineer but amateur climatologist) I get a change in radiative forcing of about 2.8 w/m2 when CO2 is doubled from 380 to 760 ppm. Is this coincidence that it is close to the 2.5 C quoted. By my calcs this is equivalent to only about 0.7 C rise.

Boris

When the model
Hindcasts well,

Well, that’s a gross simplification. The model must hindcast well, sure, but it must also conform to physical laws and observations. Yes, bender and et al will tell you that there are some free parameters and those parameters plus measurement error equal infinite uncertainty. But try to get a climate model to give a CS less than 2C. Go ahead, try.

482:
MODTRAN does not include feedbacks, as mosher rightly implies.

steven mosher

RE 484.

Yes Boris. I was not indicting that the laws of physics were not being followed.

Essentially it is akin to “finding” the proper gains for a flight control system

these gains are not “derived” a model of the physics of flight and the effect of
control surfaces is employed. The Flight control engineer then experiments with the
model trying different control systems and tries different gains on those forcings
to create an airframe that is manuverable and stable.

In the end he has a set of magic numbers that represent the gains applyed to the controls.

The raw physics of C02 would give you a “gain” that was derivable and verifiable.

Other feedbacks and their cross couplings complicate the problem immeasurable I suppose
and a close form solution is probably not possible ( speculation) so they use
GCM to estimate the “total gain” of C02, which is the gain plus the gain due to feedback.

UC

MrPete,

I wonder what other data series could be plugged in to good effect?

Jean S suggested Number of Nations, based on this page. Here you go:

Needless to say, good REs again, R2 drops, etc.. 😉

JZ Smith

I posted the following in a San Diego area forum.

The response was this:

I wish one or more of your “smart guys” would go over there and straighten these guys out. I, unfortunately, am not smart enough about this stuff. (Though I read this site hoping to get smarter!)

Nasif Nahle

Does a rock give milk? Sorry for my grammar…. 😉

steven mosher

Nasif,

I am trying explain why there is no paper. The sensitivity constant is a gain, actualy a complation
of gains Ganin due to C02 physics ( even though you disgree with them) and then gains due to
other feedbacks.

This composite gain is not a derived quantity. It is a quantity observed when GCM are excercised

Charney, for example took the gain from one model ( 2) and the gain from another model (4) and
Averaged them to get 3C. from 1969 to 2000 this stood. I am analogizing it to “finding” the proper
gains for another dynamic system. You don’t solve an equation to find the gain for the pitch control.
You excercise a model and try various gains and fiddle with that number so you get a stable plane
that pitches quickly, doesnt overshoot and hit a stall regime, and has good handling qualities.
You have other feedbacks ( pitch due to roll, picth due to yaw) that complicate this. It’s an
educated trial and error. Inthe end you have a pitch gain that accounts for other feedbacks as well.

So in Climate you would have this: Warming due to C02 absorbtion; warming due to albedo, warming due to
ice sheet melting, etc etc etc. All of these other feedbacks are loaded into the C02 gain.

Why? because C02 is the parameter they believe they can control.

Boris, I trust I the argument about right, yea or ney.

steven mosher

RE 492: No, Iraq gives oil. sorry for the pun

Buddenbrook

This has probably been suggested in the past, I hope, but it’s something that would be beneficial for the scientific debate of CO2 alarmism.

TGGWS has reached tens of millions of viewers around the world. There is one problem with that documentary, it doesn’t touch the crucial points, it is highly speculative, highly populistic in a wrong way, hardly scientific and on more than one occasion twists the truth like Al Gore. There is a possibility it has done more harm than good. A RC stereotype of the skeptics, something they love shooting down to avoid the real issues.

But enough with that. It is a reflection nothing more. Someone should get together the real skeptics from Pielke, Watts and others to our host here and make a similar documentary, but this time make it strictly scientific. Pictures of the surface stations, graphs (people love graphs, ask Al Gore), the models and their reliability, the Y2k error, the hockey stick silliness and the dishonesty involved, the IPCC bias in selecting peer reviewed studies, Gore’s mistakes etc. but above all the real scientific questions

People love controversy, so it is bound to reach millions of viewers, including politicians. That’s when the climate scientists have to come out of their shells and debate the issues they have been dodging and avoiding for many years. (And you could make some money too!)

Such a documentary would be of crucial importance in time for the next round of Kyoto, debate of which is bound to start in 2008 or 2009. The alarmist goal is to achieve a global, legally binding mega treaty by 2012, one that could cover anything between 8-18 years, and cost trillions of dollars to world economy. That would make the political fight horribly difficult. A lost battle?

It’s admirable you do this important work, but for it to have a wider effect, you need to popularize this stuff.

Nasif Nahle

# 494

Steven Mosher,

I agree with you, Steven; it is clear that the IPCC experts will never release a paper containing an algorithm to damage the numbers. Nevertheless, you should agree with me that we can find out how they made the miracle works on. Solve this puzzle: we have the measurement of the albedo at a given area that was determined ten years ago. I measured albedo again on the same area but I realized that albedo has decreased and the ground is absorbing more radiation than it was doing it ten years ago. I reviewed again the composition of the soil and find that chemically it is the same composition than it was ten years ago; but something has changed and I don’t know what it is. Something changed in only ten years and it could be the most tiny and undetectable factor on ground. What could it be? I don’t know, so I’ll make a conjecture on the reason. It was bull’s milk. Is my guessing on the gain? No, it couldn’t be, even in a milky Iraq.

CO2 does not offer the thermal capabilities enough as to cause a change of temperature of the magnitude proposed by the IPCC, so the panel made-up an irrefutable hypothesis. If the change occurs and the models run right, then they would say the CO2 was culprit; if the change doesn’t occur and the models don’t match with reality, they would say the feedbacks masked the warming effect of the CO2. Can you gain a gain with this kind of sortilege?

On the other hand, I did mention that the value of alpha, which it is supposed to be a constant of 5.35 W/m^2, has been “tuned” to 24.46 W/m^2; thus, it appears that the final gain has been the CO2 GH effect. They have adjusted the physics laws to make the models agree with reality; however, is it not supposed that the physics laws are the verifiable and unbreakable? Well, here is an example on the way the IPCC changes the rules of the Universe.

bender

Re #500
Soil moisture near the surface?

steven mosher

RE 500.

To be clear, I’m not defending the practices. I’m am merely trying to give an exposition of
how they come up with the final gain. Tamino has a nice rudimentary explanation. It also clued
me in that there will most likely never be a derivation. From my standpoint it is important to
understand their process. If the final gain is “read off” the GCM, then some of benders comments
about turning knobs become doubly critical or exponentially critical.

Nasif Nahle

# 504

You’re enough clear, Steven. BTW, tuning knobs is exponentially critical, especially if the final objective has been unspecified for a long time, let’s say for almost a century. The complexity of the set of tuned knobs increases with the progress of the tale. Each explanation comes with another free tuned knob inside, but with a half of the knob in a black box. That’s the way the hypotheses none based on the reality end, like a spaghetti of tuned knobs that have neither head nor tail. I cannot say that a prediction made from a ModTran introducing a value of 0 ppmV of CO2, 1.7 ppmV of Methane, 30 ppbV of O3, etc, will unavoidably produce an output of energy radiated from the surface of 249 W/m^2, for example. Why? Because we have many variables in the surface, which are not subject to GHG effect, that affect the load of energy transferred to the atmosphere. Even the smallest change in the behavior, the succession, or the permanence of biological communities inhabiting some area of surface can become a strong factor on altering the output of energy…

Steve Milesworthy

#504 Steve Mosher (and other previous posts)

Yes, your exposition concurs with mine.

And currently a significant proportion of climate scientists are in search of the best value of sensitivity which includes all those tricky positive and negative feedbacks. Using models is one method. Using recent observations another. Looking at palaeoclimate a third. Examining individual contributions of particular feedbacks (eg CO2 feedbacks from plant changes) a fourth.

Of course you can bang on forever about the uncertainties of models. But being on the inside of a model being constructed for post-AR5 (and therefore arguably with a vested interest) I don’t personally see any agenda to create models with a high sensitivity. The scientists involved in the construction of the model never mention CO2, global warming, sensitivity, catastrophe etc. (maybe they do all this in secret meetings to which I’m not invited 🙂 )

I went to a presentation by Myles Allen recently. From what I could understand, the likely (“consensus” if you like) figure is around 2.5-3C. It is possible that it could be higher (much higher) it is less possible that it could be lower. But I’d need a course in Bayesian statistics to understand anything else unfortunately.

His view seemed to be that we ain’t going to get any closer to a certain value any time soon. He suggested a pragmatic approach of setting a target of, say 2C, and adapt policies to meet it (ie. set CO2 targets, and if in 20 years we look likely to undershoot, the targets can be relaxed).

Nasif Nahle

# 508

Steve Milesworthy,

Those climate scientists that you mention on your message are changing the physics laws, then. I’ve not seen either they mention CO2, anthropogenic global warming, etc., but their models show that they had a preconceived idea and introduced exaggerated constants in their models. How is it that alpha CO2 in almost all the models is 24.46 W/m^2? How is it possible that some scientists tune the “constant” alpha so it fit in a preconceived idea? Perhaps they don’t mention it, but it is evident have that they were influenced by the preconceived idea and introduced the concept on the feedbacks so the results always give frightening outputs.

pochas

Steve Milesworthy #508:

Will this “post-AR5” code be open-source? Since our mostly free-market economy will now be subject to innumerable regulations regarding carbon emissions, surely the code should be published in the Federal Register?

Larry

504, keep in mind that if there’s an feedback gain G, the effect after feeding back on itself again and again is F = 1/(1-G), so that if G is 0.5, F is 2, G is 0.67, F is 3, G is 0.8, F is 5, etc. When you get G near 1, F goes to infinity. So if they’re doing some sort of a loosy-goosy eyeballing of G, they can have a huge influence on the value of F, just by being a little high on G. This is how Hansen can come up with a number like 6C, with a straight face. All it means is that the pre-feedback number is, say, 1, and then F is 6, so G is 0.83.

Steve Milesworthy

#512 pochas
Some of it is under an LGPL-type license. Some of it is available under a research license. The code will be easy to get hold of, but will be hard to run at appropriate resolution without a supercomputer, though I expect low-res versions will be developed.

steven mosher

RE 508.
Thanks. I need the debate needs to progress beyond the “point” that there is no derivation.
My sense ( by analogy) is that there can be no derivation The composite gain is an empirical
constant determined by observation of the past record or by perturbing physical models.

“And currently a significant proportion of climate scientists are in search of the best value of sensitivity
which includes all those tricky positive and negative feedbacks. Using models is one method.
Using recent observations another. Looking at palaeoclimate a third. Examining individual contributions
of particular feedbacks (eg CO2 feedbacks from plant changes) a fourth.”

Yes, each of these establishes a varying set of boundary conditions. Outside of those
conditions the system is either unstable or not skillful in hindcasting.

“Of course you can bang on forever about the uncertainties of models.
But being on the inside of a model being constructed for post-AR5
(and therefore arguably with a vested interest) I don’t personally
see any agenda to create models with a high sensitivity.
The scientists involved in the construction of the model never mention CO2,
global warming, sensitivity, catastrophe etc.
(maybe they do all this in secret meetings to which I’m not invited )”

Yes, I’m not concerned about your vested interest. You’ve always been logical
and civil. I just wanted to get clarity about why there was no derivation.
When I read Tamino it became clear to me why a derivation would not be forthcoming
and why asking for one was a bit of a misunderstanding of sorts. I’d suggest
getting over the misunderstanding and actually moving on to the process of gain
setting.

“I went to a presentation by Myles Allen recently. From what I could understand,
the likely (”consensus” if you like) figure is around 2.5-3C.
It is possible that it could be higher (much higher) it is less possible that it could be lower.
But I’d need a course in Bayesian statistics to understand anything else unfortunately. ”

Well Roe and Baker explain quite well I think the reason for the asymmetry. It’s fundamentally
mathmatical. However, hitherto undiscovered negative feedback loops might alter the result. If there
is a bias in climate modelling, I would say it is most likely to be a bias against finding or
proposing negative feedbacks. Speculation of course. In my previous line of work we would assign
a team whose job it was to find or propose negative feedbacks.

“His view seemed to be that we ain’t going to get any closer to a certain value any time soon.
He suggested a pragmatic approach of setting a target of, say 2C, and adapt policies to meet it
(ie. set CO2 targets, and if in 20 years we look likely to undershoot, the targets can be relaxed).”

Well, I would humbly suggest that he doesnt understand control systems, feedback loops, or politics.

Whatever the initial controls are set at, they will be wrong. AND The feedback signal is noisy and capricious.
people won’t wait for 20 years to see if the controls are “working.”

If they were smart they would tie controls to signals like SST or Sea level increases. In other words,
when you set a control to see if it works you check the predicted response with the actual
reponse and close the loop on the error. If Land surface temp is the response then you have an extremely
noisy response that it takes 20 years to filter. So, I’d pick a different response to measure, like SST
or sea level rise. Just a thought.

Mike Hollinshead

Attention Ian Castles & David Henderson
New Articles on Economics of Climate Change
Joseph Stigler ed.

Publisher: The Berkeley Electronic Press
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COLUMNS

Joseph Stiglitz “A New Agenda for Global Warming”.
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Sheila M. Olmstead and Robert N. Stavins “A Meaningful Second Commitment Period for the Kyoto Protocol”.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art1

Kenneth J. Arrow “Global Climate Change: A Challenge to Policy”.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art2

Thomas C. Schelling “Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties and What They Imply About Action”.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art3

Lawrence H. Goulder “California’s Bold New Climate Policy”.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art5

Scott Barrett “Proposal for a New Climate Change Treaty System”.
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Joshua S. Gans “Do Voluntary Carbon Offsets Work?”.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss4/art7

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Rognvaldur Hannesson “Letter: The Other Problems with the Stern Report”.
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*NEWS* The Economists’ Voice was shortlisted for the 2007 Best New Journal Award by the Association of Learned and Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP).

_______________________
CITATIONS & SUMMARIES OF PUBLISHED ARTICLES

Joseph Stiglitz (2006) “A New Agenda for Global Warming”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 3: No. 7, Article 3.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol3/iss7/art3

SUMMARY:
Joseph E. Stiglitz presents his plan for getting the United States and the Developing World to address global warming, and argues that by failing to address this problem, the United States is implicitly subsidizing energy usage and engaging in unfair trade practices.

Sheila M. Olmstead and Robert N. Stavins (2007) “A Meaningful Second Commitment Period for the Kyoto Protocol”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 1.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art1

SUMMARY:
Robert Stavins and Sheila Olmstead propose ways to modify the Kyoto Protocol for its second commitment period (2012-2016) so that it will provide a way forward that is scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.

Kenneth J. Arrow (2007) “Global Climate Change: A Challenge to Policy”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 2.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art2

SUMMARY:
Kenneth J. Arrow explains why something must be done to limit global warming even if the Stern Report inadequately discounted future costs.

Thomas C. Schelling (2007) “Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties and What They Imply About Action”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 3.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art3

SUMMARY:
Thomas Schelling argues although the uncertainties regarding climate change are many, the certainties create certain urgencies and inaction is an extreme position; he emphasizes technological advance and governmental sponsorship.

Lawrence H. Goulder (2007) “California’s Bold New Climate Policy”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 5.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art5

SUMMARY:
Lawrence Goulder describes California’s recent commitments addressing Global Climate Change and recommends that a cap-and-trade program play a key role in achieving the state’s climate policy goals.

Scott Barrett (2007) “Proposal for a New Climate Change Treaty System”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 6.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art6

SUMMARY:
The existing international agreements on climate change are inadequate, according to Scott Barrett, and a new approach is needed.

Joshua S. Gans (2007) “Do Voluntary Carbon Offsets Work?”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 4, Article 7.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss4/art7

SUMMARY:
Voluntary purchases of offsets for carbon emissions have been criticized as potentially increasing emissions. However, Joshua S. Gans argues that even if offsets do increase the consumption of carbon intensive goods, net emissions will always fall because these goods will become less carbon intensive.

Rognvaldur Hannesson (2007) “Letter: The Other Problems with the Stern Report”, The Economists’ Voice: Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 4.
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss3/art4

SUMMARY:
The Stern Report seems optimistic about the cost of emissions reductions, and does not seriously face the fact that stabilizing the climate could require keeping much of the world in poverty, according to Rognvaldur Hannesson.

Steve Milesworthy

#521 steven mosher
I didn’t realise I was hitting a hot button as I’ve not been to realclimate for a few days!

I think the suggestion of setting a particular temperature rise was just a simple way of presenting the idea.

I thought soviet-style disasters usually involved massive diversion of resources toward some industrial aim without thought to the environmental consequences 🙂

steven mosher

RE 522.

By soviet style I’m refering to the lack of adequate feedback for the system to self correct.
A command style economy with no consequences for getting it wrong and all the incentives to
cover up your error. I think closing the loop on land surface temp would be a gross error
( Not that that would be your final suggestion, sorry for popping off) Closing the loop on
C02 emmissions doesnt work either, since the question at hand is the effect of doubling the
control input. I have no doubt that a stable system could be specified ( feeding back a
signal such as SST or sea level rise ) But I doubt whether it is politically viable.
FWIW.

Sam Urbinto

Oh, and I forgot:

You are wasting your time bothering to look into it further.
You are wasting your time bothering to take tree cores.
You are wasting your time bothering to visit and take pictures of surface weather stations.
You must have an ultior motive.
You must be a conservative.
You must be trying to disprove the simple truth because you are a wacko.
It is so obvious AGW is causing disasterous warming, if you can’t see it you are obviously of below average substandard intelligence.

Sincerly yours,

Dano Tamino Rabett III

steven mosher

Sea level is projected to rise about .5 meters in the next hundred years.

How do you prepare for this: Cut C02 and impact everybody. Or design a policy to
make those who get the benefit of sea side living pay?

Second quesion: what is the total cost of protecting the US coastline against a 1 meter
rise in sea level.

Guesses anyone?

DR

The Lyman ocean heat content correction has been officially released for those interested. Notice something strikingly different in the Introduction in this version compared to the original from 2006?

Click to access hc_bias_jtech_v1.pdf

There is an accompanying paper as well:

Click to access hc_integrals_v1.pdf

Steve Milesworthy

#528 steven mosher
The 0.5m prediction excludes changes due to ice sheet dynamics.

#531 dinosaur
Only as long as you can afford to build and maintain the levees.

jae

533: I think I can show you are wrong, except for coastal locations. I’ll try to get some more results posted today.

MarkW

The claim that meltwater will cause glaciers to slide into the oceans has been pretty well disproven.
What other dynamic were you thinking of?

M. Simon

OT:

Have you seen this?

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/11/when_skepticism.html

John Christy turns down his share of Nobel

Boris

If they can build new orleans 2-3 M below sea level a 1m rise should be a big easy.

It would probably turn out as well too.

M. Simon

Steve: I should have known better. To save you the trouble:

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=55387187-4d06-446f-9f4f-c2397d155a32

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.

But Dr. Gray isn’t an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray’s mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.

“The whole process is a swindle,” he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

Nasif Nahle

Doctor Christy is a very intelligent scientist that knows that models are plagued with uncertainties.

Mark T.

2. Mandated disclosure during real estate transactions that invlove land that would be
inundated by AGW, say 10M rise.

Both homes I’ve purchased in my life included a flood-plain description/rider of some sort. The first, in Florida, had an obvious (though actually unlikely) potential for problems, but the second, in Colorado, is in an area that we lovingly refer to as “the plains of West Kansas,” with no hope of ever being affected by rising water of any kind.

Mark

steven mosher

RE 539.

Yes, I know rebuilding NOLA is the worst kind of folly. So, I know my proposal is a pipe dream.
However, on principle I believe in putting costs where the risks are.

M. Jeff

Today’s Wall Street Journal, “When Predicting Sea Levels, Ice Sheets Are a Wild Card”, gives a brief overview of information from MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW — NOVEMBER-DECEMBER.

Excerpt from WSJ: … The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year predicted that seas would rise between about seven and 24 inches this century. But the panel conceded that the estimate might be unreliable. That’s because knowledge of how ice sheets are disintegrating is so limited that scientists didn’t take their role into account. Instead, the estimate was based on better-understood factors like melting glaciers and heat-related expansion of water volume.

Along with more sophisticated mathematical models, scientists hope an archaeological expedition will give them a clearer picture of how the ice sheets react to rising temperatures. Next summer, a team of scientists plan to drill into an ice sheet in Greenland to study a block of ice formed 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when Greenland was about 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today.

MarkW

Greenland was 12 degrees warmer than today, yet there were still ice sheets there????

That kind of puts the kabosh on the theory that a 1 or 2 degree warming in the next century is going to cause those same ice sheets to collapse.

jae

The front page of the local newspaper says that the glaciers on Mt. Shasta are expanding in size. But they also say that global warming will soon overcome them.

Michael Jankowski

Re#548, there are places that are limiting development along the shoreline, based on distance from shore and also elevation. I’ve seen it in FL. Insurance rates change dramatically when you get away from the coast.

NOLA just seems to be “rebuild, because we didn’t learn our lessons the first time.” Reminds me of “the Holy Grail,” and the guy who built his castle in a swamp (sunk twice, still standing the 3rd time).

tom

The Greenland-Antarctica Melting Problem Does Not Exist

http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/dadgd/article/the_greenland_antarctica_melting_problem_does_not_exist/#When:13:06:00Z

James Goneaux

http://www.livescience.com/environment/071030-tree-stumps.html

via

http://arewelumberjacks.blogspot.com/2007/11/trees-found-implication-ignored.html

Nice quote: “They’ve found trees under the ice, and somehow missed the point:

Obviously, the ice hasn’t retreated to an historic minimum. The trees grew there. The article doesn’t find it noteworthy that there were no glaciers there at one time…

Buddenbrook

Re: #560 That is a priceless quote

Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region’s rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum, a geologist said

David Smith

More tornado research:

Enquiring minds want to know…

Nasif Nahle

# 565

Evidently, there were not glaciers there 7000 years ago, instead there were forests… Interesting…

Buddenbrook

Ice retreats to “historic minimum” revealing forests used to grow there 7000 years ago. You just can’t invent this stuff. It reads like a script from Life of Brian.

Historic minimum(or maximum) has become a phrase that is freely repeated and thrown around, with no concern for whether it’s use is accurate or not.

Historic droughts and heat waves (not true), historic amount of hurricanes (not true), historically high temperatures (not true either), historic sea ice loss (since 1978 anyway).

I know it grabs headlines but climate hyperbole can’t sustain itself for ever, eventually it will start turning into ‘boy cried wolf’ and that’s sad because one day there might be genuine reason for concern.

Ken Coffman

When I got up yesterday, it was very cold, surprisingly cold. The sky was clear and the stars were bright, almost blinding. Obviously, the regional CO2 was at a minimum. I’m not sure what the current mix is, are we somewhere around 360 PPM? If so, then my guess is the CO2 was significantly lower, perhaps as low as 340 or 350 PPM. We definitely could have used more of that powerful warming agent. Yes, it was that cold up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Is there a cheap and easy way to measure the wild fluctuations of local CO2?

Nasif Nahle

Tabasco Mexico is under water, and here we have heard phrases like “non-precedent flood”, “the global warming has caused this first-time tragedy”, “It’s time to take radical procedures against climate change”. What we have not heard is that the rain is not so atypical on the region and that Villahermosa Tabasco Mexico was built three meters under the level of the two rivers that encircle the city. On the other hand, Tabasco suffers from inundations almost every ten years, thus it is not a first-time tragedy. The deforestation in that Mexican county has been unprecedented, not the rainfalls.

Paolo M.

David Smith says:
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:11 am

David,
I’m not surprised by the North Pole being so warm due to all that ice free ocean over there, but the surface implied is a very small part of the whole Earth. How is it possible, with those numbers, thta the rank for the globe is 4th?

Craig Loehle

Yesterday I gave a talk at a small college geography dept on my research on historical climate reconstruction. I got the usual questions one would get at a college seminar about my methods and results. Generally the audience understood and agreed with the issues about using treerings, but one oceanography prof was visibly angry the entire time, tried to defend the hockey stick and asserted that 20 feet of sea level rise was likely in the next 100 years. He made a seriously ad hominem attack with his final comment (calling me incompetent), which visibly embarrassed the group. At another college I gave a similar talk last year, and got 2 like that. My current ratio of fanatics based on this small sample is 3/60 or 5%. Quite a positive result, really, but boy do these people get upset.

Nasif Nahle

# 576

Craig Loehle,

It’s normal. There is always a fanatic without scientific arguments whose resources are based on attacks Ad Hominem. I’m sure your exposition is unbeatable, and this is the reason. I think that those people are obtaining profits from their antiscientific posture.

Larry

Referring back to comment 19 (sometimes it takes a while to spot the obvious), it seems that we have realclimate on record as saying that the MWP wasn’t limited to Europe. To reiterate, they said that during the MWP, there was drought in the SW US. So they’re saying that we had warming in Europe, but not in North America, but by some sort of coincidence, it was very dry in North America? Furthermore, the implication was made that the two were connected (i.e. a new drought would be a consequense of presant GW).

Wouldn’t the drought affect the treemometers? Possibly even making the treemometers read low on temperature due to insufficient moisture?

This would be an interesting question to pose over there, but the question would never survive moderation. And I don’t think the (“European warm period”) bunny would want to take it on, either.

Larry

Obviously, they want to have it both ways. But next time Rabett or some other Team cheerleader tries to deny the global reach of the MWP, just point them to that RC post.

Tripping on their own undies, they be.

Steve Milesworthy

Strong evidence for very rapid breakdown of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is not there, and the IPCC report doesn’t back it. But that’s entirely different to stating that the contribution from ice sheet dynamics is not included in the headline prediction of sea-level rise, and that it may be significant this century.

Mark T

Magic.

Mark

Philip_B

The interesting aspect to the tree stumps revealed by retreating glacier is that mature trees were overwhelmed by the ice too quickly for decay to occur, which is evidence that abrupt cooling is a feature of our planet’s climate.

Hans Erren

I have a feeling that Tamino doesn’t know what “R” is.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/analyze-this

cody // Nov 5th 2007 at 9:52 am Thanks, very nice, very clear, very well explained. Have you ever considered R, though? Spoken as one wearily wondering whether its worth the effort, but also tired of waiting for a spreadsheet to get through it all.

[Response: R squared gives the fraction of total variance which is explained by whatever model we fit. This has its uses, but it doesn’t really tell us the statistical significance; that also depends on the (effective) number of data points and on then number of degrees of freedom in the model we choose. So R alone doesn’t enable you to compute statistical significance. For me, it’s usually not worth the wait (but there are cases in which it’s useful information).]

steven mosher

RE 591. The first problem you come up against with comparing GCM to the instrument record is this:

GCM calculate daily average in a different way than the instrument record. GCM take a “true average”
integrating temps based on the time step specified in the model. Instrument records are (min+max)/2

I make no conclusion about the advisability of this.

Larry

593, these are Brits. In their minds, all of us on the west side of the Atlantic are colonials.

dscott

Steve, Since you seem to be on a roll with James Hansen’s stuff, you might want to consider this GISS Surface Temperature Analysis http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ Please notice the base year for the temperature anomilies 1951 to 1980. So Hansen has picked the coolest period to make temperature comparisons to current ones. You think people might get the wrong impression using such a cool time period?

Steve: the choice of base period for this type of analysis doesn’t bother me. It just moves things up and down. Note that this doesn’t apply for principal components analysis – where taking means over short subperiods can affect the result.

Sam Urbinto

Anyone calculated the anomalies using a base period of 1976-2005 or 1900-1929 or 1941-1970?

John F. Pittman

I used 1930 to 1960 baseline and for 1900 to 2007, no oceans. It appears that Waldo is on the edge of Antartica.

David Smith

I had lunch with several environmental consultants today. Their view is that carbon controls will be law in the US within several years, probably a cap-and-trade system for industry and power companies, among others.

I asked what a cap-and-trade would do that $90 oil is not already doing, meaning that the incentive for conservation is already strong. They said that it would encourage efficient companies to invest in energy conservation in less-efficient businesses (in exchange for their carbon credits) but that’s about it. They see no breakthrough technology to reduce or substitute for fossil fuel use.

They see vast amounts of money flowing in many directions in a few years and signs of early maneuvering by the smart-money folks.

I said that meaningful reductions would only some through reduced consumption, and that would flop politically unless people believed we are in a clear crisis. They agreed.

All in all a rather sad state of affairs.

Nasif Nahle

# 601

David… Do you have a link to October 2007 records? I need it to update some of my graphs. Thank you!

Bob Weber

If the climate is random and chaotic while computer programs are deterministic then if would seem to me that the computer models are doomed to failure. Where have I gone wrong?

Bob

KevinUK

So what does everyone think (particularly jae) of the chances that this newly discovered negative feedback effect by Spencer and Christy will be incorporated into the GCMs in time for the next IPCC (fifth) assessment report in 2012?

Time perhaps Steve M for another poll?

Alternatively, if the research done by S & C had shown the opposite effect i.e. that cirrus clouds in the tropics are a positive feedback, how much coverage, does everyone think, this would now be getting in the MSM?

KevinUK

JP

#602
A few snowy, subzero winters in North America and Europe may change the political climate a bit. Six hundred dollar heating bills in Nov-Feb have a way putting things in perspective. Politicians do like thier jobs, and despite the warm fuzzy feelings they get enacting carbon laws, most politicians will react to the heat put forth by distressed voters.

Congress does have a knack for coming up with solutions where no problems exist. I am reminded of the recent ethanol bill. This bill hasn’t done anything to clean up emissions. But it has created hyper inflation in the food market. Now, the price of corn based foods are tied with that of oil. Everything from milk to meat has seen double digit inflation.

Stephen Richards

JP

Oh for a $600 oil bill. Here, in France, I have just bought my fuel for the winter (1000 litres) $900. That was in august 2007. Well over a $1000 now.

KevinUK

Don’t know if anyone has mentione dthi sso far on Unthreaded but courtesy of iainb on the Numberwatch forum we have the following links

“FORCES International report US Surgeon General to the Office for Research Integrity in Washington.

Quote: “A denunciation of the fraudulent report of the Surgeon General on the effects of passive smoking on health has been deposited with the Office for Research Integrity in Washington, DC. Several organizations have co-signed the official complaint”

Full story here.

FORCES International Reports SG to ORI

Detail of the Complaint here.

Link to the Complaint
”

Can’t help but think how long it is going to be now before a similar report is produced in regard to the hockey stick?

KevinUK

Nasif Nahle

# 610

Thank you so much, David! I had UAH records, but the record for October 2007 has not been released yet.

mccall

From link on 10: “An early, surprisingly high positive correlation of increased cloud formation with enhanced cosmic-ray flux stimulated interest in this possibility, but further work with a more extensive database has negated it. This was not surprising, given a large number of other problems with this hypothesis too technical to review here.

Such conclusive statement and dismissal should have been footnoted in both the 1st and 2nd sentences — am presuming is Svensmark et.al. ’97 & ’99 in the 1st, Lockwood et.al. ’07 in the 2nd? No discussion of Svensmark et.al. ’07 reply to Lockwood or the many rebuttals cited in discussions at CA, Motl, Icecap and others. Referring to CA & other linked discussions of 14, see http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1827

jae

620: Yes 🙂

mccall

#619 mccall says: November 6th, 2007 at 11:01 am — refers to linked paper found in post 10 of the “Anti-Antiscience and Statistical Parlor Tricks” thread. That NGO paper is

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE TRIGGERED BY GLOBAL WARMING

A POSITION PAPER FROM THE CENTER FOR INQUIRY
OFFICE OF PUBLIC POLICY

AUTHOR: STUART D. JORDAN, Ph. D.

Sam Urbinto

“It would help if it didn’t come from Spencer and Christy, though.” Who else is doing such work? Did you expect MBH would be doing anything along those lines? Hansen? Why bother, it’s not the sun or clouds, we all know it’s carbon dioxide….

Maybe they could give it to somebody else to publish, although they’d just be branded nut job wackos too anyway, and laughed at and ignored by the cult, so what’s the point?

trevor

Nice piece on climate scepticism in Europe here:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110107A

Follow the Money

I think this Canadian news story will interest m,any here:

Whither the revered scientist

“”After two days of provocative 1ideas and spirited exchanges at an international gathering recently in Toronto, British museum curator Robert Bud neatly summed up the collective wisdom.

“The scientists are terrified.”

This widespread angst among scientists has been sparked by evidence that the traditional social compact between science and the public has been irrevocably sundered. Put bluntly, much of the public no longer implicitly trusts either scientists or their pronouncements about everything from climate change to the safety of children’s vaccines…”

Andrey Levin

In assessing the forthcoming changes in climate, Russian scientist Oleg Sorokhtin from the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology RAS promises us that in the foreseeable future we will witness only a cooling, and a really significant cooling at that. This forecast is based on analysis of changes in the Earth’s precession angle, meaning the angle of the inclination of the Earth’s axis on which the Earth rotates around the Sun, and on the dependence of the average temperature of the Earth upon this angle: the lesser the precession angle, the colder the climate.

http://www.istc.ru/istc/sc.nsf/news/20060621-3