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Unthreaded #28
This entry was written by Stephen McIntyre, posted on Dec 18, 2007 at 2:26 PM, filed under General. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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Climate Audit 
607 Comments
John V
Youre so funny.
# 1079
John V.,
Not fair… Why you don’t plot the trends since 1900? If you do so, even 1998 would count for a global cooling; and if you go back to 500 AD, the trend will show a cooling, not a warming… 🙂
Trends…as in fashion trends? The long and the short of it in…hems? The cool and hot of it in…figures? The wet look versus the blazer in heat? The precipitous drop in…necklines versus the thunderous clapping from the multitude of adulatory fans breezing through azure UN pools in Baliesque climes?
Jae,
I agree. Convection is the main driver of heat transfer in any fluid, gaseous or liquid. Radiation is important for heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere, but once the energy is in the atmosphere the radiation passes to a minor plane. 🙂 (Grisly face). AGW shows the opposite leaving behind the heat transfer science, and adjusting physics.
The point is that CO2 has not the thermal capabilities (See Radiative Heat Transfer. Modest. Pp 341-343) to change climate. Climate is always changing by a strong natural internal variability system (See Physics of Climate. Peixoto. P. 25). I stand on my hypothesis about Solar Irradiance and natural variations of CO2 sinks.
OMG, aren’t we ever going to put this “why are the deserts hot” thing down and give it a rest?
If you can “put ‘er down,” please do.
John V. Considering the dataset I used.
The trend is up, no doubt. And accelerating. Yep. Picking the hotest year to show or not show a trend is no more valid than picking an arbitrary one or picking the coldest year. I agree.
That the temperature anomaly has a range of about 1 C since 1880 (at least using the stuff I used last time) is not under dispute. Neither is the fact that (at least using the stuff I used last time) the anomaly has never been higher, since 1880, than +.6185 (depending on dataset and what this December does and if 2007 gets adjusted later or not).
But with the upward trend one would have to conclude the trend will continue. Is that realistic? Sure. Is it meaningful? Who knows. Are we looking at more than measurements going up for (many) other reasons; or is there an actual increase in the Earth’s energy? Who knows.
If the anomaly goes over 1 or 2 or 3 what will happen? Different issue. SRES scenarios for those interested.
The only question is, has there has been a net gain in anomaly since the most recent high?
Aside from the UAH lower tropo not showing much.
I just want to see what happens when someone uses the models to compare the forcing by water vapor in dry areas (deserts, high elevations, high latitudesP with the water vapor in humid areas. Shouldn’t the same “radiative-convective” model be applicable?
4 Nasif
That is true in fluids of relatively high density, if ‘driver’ is replaced by ‘mechanism’. In vacua, it is absent. In rarifed gas mixtures such as the upper tropospere and stratosphere it is somewhere in between, much less important the higher you go.
I think it is fair to say that convection is definitely the most important mechanism below the tops of the tropospheric clouds, and radiation is the most important in the stratosphere. Between the cloud tops and the stratosphere, it’s not so clear.
# 9
Pat Keating,
But of course! you’re as always pretty correct:
Fortunately, lower troposphere is not vacuum; otherwise, we would be toasted immediately.
You’re right again. Let’s say radiation is the main energy transfer from cirrus level on to deep space. In the stratosphere horizontal convection could take place, but not vertical convection, so the energy transfer by radiation and conduction are the main conveyors of energy. Between cloud tops and the stratosphere frozen droplets could transfer energy by conduction, but it is just a hypothesis and it is not a whole explanation.
Pat, there a general rule of thumb that in 99% of practical situations, either radiation dominates or convection dominates. This has as much to do with temperature difference as fluid density (i.e. in an industrial furnace, where the tubes are hot enough to glow red, radiation dominates even in the presence of a fluid).
Correct. So which do you think dominates at 25 C?
I was listening to the climate “debate” that was promoted by the “sciguy”, I realized something: Tombstones are the leading cause of death. I know this because one can nearly always find a tombstone near a dead body. I learned that the whole arrow of time thing is nonsense from AIT, and the correlation between bodies and tombstones is sky high. If we can just shut down the tombstone industry, we will all live forever. I have a plan, send me money and I will use part of it to pay tombstone makers to sit idle.
Actually, I should have asked which one dominates at 25 C – (6.5 C/km)(5 km) = -7.5 C, since that’s where the net radiation flow is split between up and down in the “radiative-convective” models.
# 14
Jae,
Up to the limits the warm air can rise by floating… 🙂 Well, up to the tropopause because the cooler air sinks displacing warm air upwards. Convection is the main heat transfer mechanism in fluids. If you heat up an iron bar to get it glowing red, the heat transfer from that bar will be predominantly by radiation only because the surrounding air has not enough capacity to absorb all the heat emitted by the bar. However, when the energy has been grasped (absorbed) by the air, the heat transfer by convection becomes the predominant mechanism of heat transfer between the air volumes… 😉
So how about the weather affecting a major portion of the US right now. Only the Gulf states are being spared … for now. We have storm after storm lined up on the West coast. These are coming further south, snow cover will be from the Sierra foothills to DC soon if this keeps up.
My tomatoes are teleconnected to Global Temperature, and I lost them a good 3 weeks early this year.
11 Laarry
I don’t disagree with your hot-tube example. However, the convection/radiation balance depends more on absolute temperature than temperature difference, because of the strong T^4 dependence of radiation intensity.
I’m still not sure of the issue of radiation vs convection for the region between cloud tops and tropopause. Because of the low temperatures, I suspect convection may still dominate, tho’ falling as pressure drops, but I don’t know.
Have any views on that?
RE 17. Good thing I stayed home.. chains on Hwy 36 from mineral to Morgan Summit ( eg Lassen park)
“Thats why real science is done with trends, not differences.
Youre so funny.”
Real science is done with algorithms
Real science fiction is done with AlGore_ithms
19, That, I think, is one of things that they can’t model very well. It’s very tempting to create a model that says that the tropopause is at 10 km, and there’s never any convection above that, but anyone who’s ever been on a bumpity airplane ride knows better.
Re #21: AlGoreRhythms! Just watch that boy move!!
Re: 17
Steve: I don’t believe I’ve seen this site, the National Operational Hydrolic Remote Sensing Center, linked here.
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/
Snow’s almost there.
Hey UC… have a look at this stuff. Yet another new method.
I’ve played with it a bit. kinda like a cat with a shiny ball string.
http://www.beringclimate.noaa.gov/regimes/
nice excell plug ins..
Pat Keating says:
December 18th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I’d expect there would be some sort of gradient as the density reduces the convective effect reduces and radiative effect gradually takes over. Would be an interesting excercise to quantify it but it will take someone cleverer than I am.
Isn’t convection just moving heat around the system, it is circuitous? What goes up is just replacing what comes down. Surely the atmospheric net gain/loss must take place at the atmospheric boundary, and must be by radiation?
# 19
Pat Keating,
IHIYAG…
I’m always afraid of answering posts that were not addressed to me, but I didn’t fight back the lure, so I will try to elucidate the issue or to entangle it a bit more. Warm air rises because the cold air sinks and displaces the warm air upwards. As it goes up, it loses energy adiabatically, not by the known mechanisms of heat transfer. Im suspicious about my last assertion because if air touches cold volumes of air it is a law that the energy is transmitted from the warm air bubble toward more microstates in the adjacent volumes of colder air. The tropopause is at ~10 Km at the poles and at ~18 Km at the equator, although its altitude changes seasonally. The lapse rate in the troposphere is about 6 °C Km^-1. However, the tropopause is the region of the atmosphere where the temperature begins to increase instead decreasing, specifically at the level of neutral buoyancy. At the tropopause the lapse rate decreases from 6 °C Km^-1 to 2 °C^-1. The last means that the convection still is effective (or dominant) at the tropopause as a mechanism of heat transmission. The air at that level freezes and dries, and the energy stored by water vapor and dry air is radiated to the cold space.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple, but overall that’s the effect. The radiation loss starts happening at some level, like the AGW crowd postulates, but it’s at a much higer level than they posit, and there is no “back-radiation” effect on the Planet.
27 Mark
You are correct. Since the atmosphere is surrounded by an almost-vacuum, the only possible way for thermal energy to leave the earth and its atmosphere is by radiation.
The question is: how much of a role does CO2 play in impeding the ascent of thermal energy up to the altitude where radiative heat-transfer is to the stratosphere?
In the lower levels (up to cloud-tops), it can’t hurt much because vertical heat transfer by both convection and water latent-heat dominate, short-circuiting any CO2 blocking.
25 Jan
Or I.
27 Nasif
I agree with your analysis. While it is true that a parcel of air cools down approximately adiabatically as it rises, it will still transfer heat.
The parcel is bouyant because it is at a higher temperature (and thus less dense) than most of the air at that level. The excess heat in this parcel will eventually transfer to the other air around it via the edges of the parcel.
Sometimes you can see rows of clouds with gaps between them. This is an illustration of the convective patterns underneath. Regions of rising warm air (which is cooling) alternate with regions of falling cool air displaced by the former. These parallel structures have a name, ‘somebody’s roads’, but I can’t remember it.
How much of a role does HOH play? Why do all the models ignore water vapor, the strongest of all GHGs? There is less GHGs over deserts and high latitudes, but a lot in the tropics, yet the deserts are hotter. The theory sucks, that’s why.
Re #31
von Karman street perhaps?
32 jae
The short-circuiting in the troposphere by convection and WV-borne latent heat is just as effective on WV greenhouse gas as on CO2 greenhouse gas. Perhaps more so, because there is very little water-vapor above the cloud-tops, because of freeze-out, whereas the CO2 is still present above the clouds.
I think the temperature/humidity correlation you talk about is due primarily to cloud albedo and the cooling from precipitation of rain from cold altitudes.
33 Phil
I don’t think it’s von Karman, but you remind me that it is “somebody’s street“, not ‘road’ as I said in my earlier post.
The von Karman streets are not the nice regular parallel lines, but come from vortices and give a Paisley pattern. The name I’m trying to remember is an older name than vonK, like Faraday or similar.
34: Maybe ? we are saying about the same thing. The molecules in the atmosphere store heat in the day and lose it at night through radiation to space. It is that simple. There is no need to posit some “opacity” at some “layer” about 5 km in height where there is a radiation balance, as in the climate models. If that “layer” existed, there would be an aburpt break in the lapse rate, wouldn’t there be? It’s a continuum of convection up to the tropopause, with radiation going to space all along that continuum. Water vapor stores twice as much as dry air, so we have somewhat less of a diurnal variation in humid areas, but we don’t get excess heat from all that terrible GHG-producing water vapor.
#32 jae:
Why do you think the models ignore water vapour? Every discussion I’ve ever seen about models explicitly includes it.
Have you looked at weather balloon data for dry vs humid areas yet? I’m quite confident that your hotter-in-dry-areas correlation is a ground-effect only. The albedo difference is enough to overwhelm the H2O GHG difference. And isn’t the water vapour content higher in the atmosphere (where convection does not dominate) what really matters?
#36 jae:
The models do not include a distinct layer where the radiation abruptly switches directions.
Do you have a reference?
Actually I suspect that the phase changes of H2O are the most important heat transfer mechanisms in the troposphere and atmosphere in general.
The only exception would be in arid locations where there is no water. That makes up what, 3 to 5% of the planet’s surface?
I think that this explains anomalies like that 1998 temperature el Nino spike where all that heat energy suddenly “appeared” in the atmosphere and then just as suddenly “disappeared”.
It also demonstrates how low down on the learning curve we actually are.
Steven
thanks for the link. Interesting stuff, specially this article
Click to access Prewhitening2006GL025904.pdf
MBH99 reconstruction shows astronomical cooling, or regime shift at 1400, or maybe its just the hand-made adjustment.
# 39
Jeff Norman,
Yes, I was thinking in water vapor but didn’t express it in my post.
# 31
Pat Keating,
I either remember the name of those columns of rising warm air. Von Karman Vortex is a different phenomenon. I know those roads are the same than “thermals” and remember the experiment with a stove and some feathers, but I don’t recall the name.
Re#39, Jeff Norman:
Very rough estimation:
Assume water evaporation globally equals precipitation. Average over Earth surface precipitation is 1 meter per year, which is 2.74 kg of water per square meter per day. Evaporation of 1 kg of water at room temperature requires 2260 kJ/kg.
2.74kg/m2/day * 2260 000 J/kg / 24h/day / 3600s/h = 72 J/s/m2 = 72 W/m2
72W/m2 of solar radiation reaching Earth surface (averaged night and day over all surface) is used to evaporate water, and this energy is lifted by convection to upper troposphere where energy is released by condensation and emitted into space by LW radiation, by-passing CO2 blanket.
This calculation does not include higher energy required for ice sublimation, or additional energy lost into space when precipitation is snow. Convective heat transfer by dry air is also not included (could be reverse calculated knowing average humidity of rising air). Compare to about 170 W/m2 of solar radiation reaching Earth surface.
P.S. Heating of air by 1 degree C roughly increases absolute humidity into the air by 10%. It means that for whatever CO2 increase to drive atmosphere temperature higher by 1 degree, 7.2W/m2 forcing should be reserved to evaporate 10% more water (other vice 1 degree heating will not be achieved).
So much for WV positive feedback.
re
Nice program. I think it is useful in detecting methodological flaws or changes in error behavior. Had to try it with MBH99 😉
I discovered an interesting thing: NOAA data proves AGW, UAH data proves natural warming.
NOAA ground data show a +0.12°C trend since 1960, and mid troposphere radiosonde network a trend of +0.15°C since 1960: simply what models suggested.
UAH low troposphere data show a +0.14°C trend since 1979, mid-trop +0.09°C since 1979.
What I cannot understand, is why we have to compare a rigorous measurement (all atmospheric layer from ground to stratosphere in UAH), with a “broken” one (surface vs. mid troposphere: and between them?): but this is science…
I would be glad to read your opinion, or more facts.
43, Andre: Right on, sir!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/sci/tech/7148137.stm
Hmm
This is priceless: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
From the GISS website itself an admission that Surface Air Temperature measurements are mostly guesswork and essentially useless. I quote:
“Q. What SAT do the local media report ?
A. The media report the reading of 1 particular thermometer of a nearby weather station. This temperature may be very different from the true SAT even at that location and has certainly nothing to do with the true regional SAT. To measure the true regional SAT, we would have to use many 50 ft stacks of thermometers distributed evenly over the whole region, an obvious practical impossibility.
Q. If the reported SATs are not the true SATs, why are they still useful ?
A. The reported temperature is truly meaningful only to a person who happens to visit the weather station at the precise moment when the reported temperature is measured, in other words, to nobody.”
Note the name of the responsible individual at the bottom of the webpage, none other than Dr. James Hansen.
This is really a swindle, no other word:
Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created ?
A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a ‘climatology’) hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.
Q. What do I do if I need absolute SATs, not anomalies ?
A. In 99.9% of the cases you’ll find that anomalies are exactly what you need, not absolute temperatures. In the remaining cases, you have to pick one of the available climatologies and add the anomalies (with respect to the proper base period) to it. For the global mean, the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 14 Celsius, i.e. 57.2 F, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58 F and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse.
Should I trust this, should I worry for 0.1°C more or less when we cannot measure by less than 1°F?
C. J. Pennycuick?
=========
re 44. UC yes it’s a interesting piece of work, I’ve been playing with the Hadcru temp series.
Also, I was thinking Anthony could use it on individual station data to identify shifts.. and check
for changes..
Pat Keating #29. Dr Heinz Hug did an experiment whereby CO2 was seen to have absorbed the maximum possible radiated energy at CO2 wavelengths, within 10 mtrs. There was quite a debate. If CO2 doubled it was 5 mtrs
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
Here tha last paper by Christy et al. on models and measures, the last ones which do not fit predictions:
Click to access climatemodel.pdf
52 Mark
That is in part a useful experiment. However, it applies only to the lower atmosphere, which is not the issue.
If he had done the experiment at the pressures seen at the tropopause, it would be much more useful. In that case, because of the much lower number of molecules in the chamber, the transmission would have increased very significantly.
39:
I consider any area as arid it the absolute humidity is not somewhere near the equilibrium for the temperature. That includes not only deserts, but also steppes and other areas which have long dry seasons. That’s a high percentage of the land masses.
I’ve conveyed the next message that I had posted at thread “Water Vapor Feedback”, but that no one there has measured it. It partially supports Andrey Levin assertion at his # 43:
There are climate changes not attributable to any known forcing, external or internal, but to the existence of a free stochastic internal variability. Climate is always unstable; we can never talk about climatic equilibrium.
Jae proposes a negative feedback of water vapor and I think we have misunderstood him. I believe that Jae is right at least in a 49.99%. Why he is right at least in a 49.99%? Because water vapor forming clouds reflects 29.99% of the Solar Radiation incoming to Earth, and diffuse water vapor in the tropospheric lower, middle and upper layers absorbs 20% of the incoming solar radiation; thus, only 50.01% of the incident solar radiation upon Earth is absorbed by her surface. It is a cooling effect unquestionably. Those 20% of solar radiation absorbed by diffuse water vapor is transformed into potential and kinetic energy that is dispersed by radiation toward the cold outer space when water vapor condenses. The same occurs with the latent heat of phase change of water; 24% of the energy absorbed by the sea surface is transferred to the water phase change in form of latent heat of evaporation, which is released by radiation to the cold relative void when water vapor condenses and solidifies at the upper layers of the atmosphere. Thus, adding 12% of the latent heat to 49.99%, we obtain a cooling effect of ~62% from water vapor.
Yes, yes, yes, I know Water vapor absorbs more energy than carbon dioxide Thus the state of things, water vapor steals energy from his companion the carbon dioxide and from the dry atmosphere and releases it to the cold deep void. 🙂
RE19 Mosh, if you do get up this way give me a holler and I’ll show you the shop.
Travel in Ncal mtns not recommended the next couple of days…got three people (adult and 2 teens) lost here in snow after xmas tree cutting adventure gone awry. Outlook is not good.
RE: #56 – The exact places where latent heat is actually released, and the time function of release – it is a very important thing. The condensation of H2O is depicted a certain way via parameterizations. How close to reality are such parameterizations? Meld together processes of ideal air parcels rising and falling via idea global scale convection loops, processes inherent to both mid latitude and tropical synoptic dynamics and processes inherent to the smaller scale of convective mesoscale cells and supercells. For example, a parameterization may depict heat flow in some idealized manner, distributed across the large vertical column, in accordance with ideal gas and adiabatic cooling laws. But in reality, the heat flow may be less ideal. What if condensation is more violent or chaotic? How about precipitation accretion and circulation within clouds? What about H2O that gets shot in finely divided (or even larger) solid forms above the tropopause? Etc.
RE 57. YA, I just heard about the folks around Paradise getting lost. Agreed it doesnt look
good. Gone since sunday. We usually go up in winter time, don’t know about this year.
# 58
Steve Sadlov,
Yes, it does; I mean it may portray relativistic processes. There is a powerful free internal variability that is not dependant of astronomical influences or by now determined forcings. Anyway, despite violent or stochastic variability, the energy follows the same trajectories.
With respect to the lack of access to the archived data which has been paid for by the government, has anyone tried to fill out a FOIA request for the data? From today’s AP,
This could be a way to force the release of data. It also would generate a paper trail if the authors and recipients of the grants refuse to open up the archives. I’ve heard it’s a nightmare to do these, but it may be a way to force the issue.
Steve: the agency has to be in possession of the data. They’ll just say they they don’t have the data.
Info on the atmospheric layers
Chemical composition of the atmosphere
————————
Larry; It depends on if the airplane is actually in the tropopause boundry or moving between it and the troposphere (or it and the stratosphere). At 30,000 feet (9KM) in a plane, you’d have to be near the poles (23,000 feet, 8KM) to get up to the tropopause, near the equator it doesn’t start until around 60,000 feet (18KM). (52,000 feet is about the service level limit for a jet.) If I’ve got everything straight….
———————–
For those asking about airflow in the troposphere
Depending on the weather conditions, one may find that the environmental lapse rate (the actual rate at which temperature drops with height) is not equal to the adiabatic lapse rate. If the upper air is warmer than predicted by the adiabatic lapse rate, then when a parcel of air rises and expands, it will arrive at the new height at a lower temperature than its surroundings. In this case, the air parcel is denser than its surroundings, so it sinks back to its original height, and the air is stable against being stirred. Such a situation is called temperature inversion, and can lead to the trapping of air pollution in basins such as that of Los Angeles. If, on the contrary, the upper air is cooler than predicted by the adiabatic lapse rate, then when the air parcel rises to its new height it will have a higher temperature and a lower density than its surroundings, and will float. Such a process can happen spontaneously, and under such conditions, the air will be stirred by spontaneous convection currents.
————————–
The temperature inversion (change in sign of the lapse rate) in the tropospause should insulate the troposphere from the stratosphere almost perfectly as far as mixing between the two. (What happens in the stratosphere stays in the stratosphere)
Which is funny because that’s the name of a hotel in Vegas…
————————————–
Charles, Filippo; You have to read that entire page about SAT; The point of the page is the “Absolute Surface Air Temperature” isn’t meaningful 99.9% of the time. (Of course, he’s saying it with a page when a sentence or two would do, but, hey, it’s climate science.)
The other .1%, should you need it, is from the “most trusted models” and is “….roughly 14 Celsius, i.e. 57.2 F, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58 F and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse.” (I agree, although I don’t know if the -1.2 to +.8 range for the region is from something or just for the sake of illustration. The “even worse” means a wider range than that.)
He also writes there they track “…whether the current temperature is unusually high or unusually low, how much it differs from the normal temperature, and that information (the anomaly) is meaningful for the whole region.” (I don’t share his degree of certainty nor how meaningful it is on a global scale; that’s a different issue though.)
But the concept of creating an anomaly by tracking day to day differences in tMean at various locations to see how they’re changing is certainly a valid one.
The “finer resolution” is simply a byproduct of getting the means of these anomalies over the month and combining them with other stations over time. For example if 3 stations covering an area are -1 +10 and -2 for their the monthly anomaly average, the anomaly for that area is +2.3333 degrees.
That’s how we get that for the world air and water figures, November 1992 was .0027C “colder” than the 1901-2000 mean value and December 1992 was .2360 “warmer”. Means of means of means of means etc over time.
Take 3 stations for their values for 3 months, where one came up with a 30 day average of .5 each time, and the other two with only whole numbers:
Station 1 is 1 1 0 would be .6666
Station 2 is -2 3 3 would be 1.3333
Station 3 is .5 .5 .5 would be .5
Combine those, .6666 1.3333 and .5000 is .8333
And so on. It’s just boiling down to more decimals from the process of gathering the means over and over.
56, I don’t get it about CO2, infrared radiation (short wave) and the so called greenhouse effect. The only time I see a “greenhouse” effect is at night time when there is cloud cover. During the daytime, any heat from sunlight that is absorbed by the surface is convected (some said 99%) away by air thermal columns to the upper atmosphere or radiated back (some said 1%) to space directly. During the night time, when there is no sunlight, unless there is cloud cover, the temp drops because there is nothing to counter the loss of heat via convection and radiation. Actually, the amount of radiation is probably way more than 1%, since there is an obvious observable temperature difference betweeen a cloudy night versus a clear night, that difference should be easily estimated by comparing such nights.
It is also fairly obvious that during the daytime, if there is a cloud cover, the temperature drops! Why? Some of the sunlight is reflected back to space, so why doesn’t the CO2 at cloud level warm that air and maintain the temperature? I know you can get a sunburn through cloud cover, there UV rays penetrate cloud cover to some extent. If this is the case, then why doesn’t the cloud hold the heat in like at night time???? That’s what really doesn’t make sense in this so called greenhouse effect.
Or even more importantly, why doesn’t the temperature of the cloud itself increase to the point of radiating heat to the ground? We are told that when long wave radiation hits an object, such as the ground or water, it gives up some heat and then is changed to short wave radiation.
Hey, Sam… The content of the article at this link contains some errors.
63:
Because I don’t think the cloud is exactly “holding heat in.” I think it is blocking convection and holding the warm air in (which is similar, but there’s a subtle difference). When that air contains a lot of water vapor (Jackson, MS, e.g.), it stays nice and “balmy,” because water vapor stores twice as much heat as dry air does. It also stays warmer at night under clouds in Denver, but it’s not so balmy and doesn’t feel as warm, due to the low humidity.
62 Sam
The ‘insulation’ is far from complete. Larger thunderstorms climb through the tropopause and inject hailstones into the stratosphere. These substantial perturbations of the tropopause propagate hor1zontally outward to other places like the ripples of a pool-cover in the wind.
63 dscott
First of all, the top of the cloud is very white with a very high albedo, so it doesn’t warm up much anyway. Secondly, that heat has to be transferred through a cold, damp mist (the cloud) to get to the bottom of the cloud to radiate heat downward. Third, the heat is probably used up as latent heat in evaporation of the water droplets in the cloud (and thereby thins it, in the way the sun ‘burns off’ a fog).
Re #44
I tried it out by applying it to Loehle’s data, using the same parameters as UC used above it found 7 shifts at: 176, 256, 366, 510, 1394, 1723, 1972.
65, but wait a minute Jae, when we have a cloudy day, less sunlight reaches the surface which in turn allows less warming of the adjacent air to be convected away. At the same time any radiation from the surface to the cloud should be trapped heating the air below the cloud. The amount of heat allowed to pass through a cloud from convection should be the same in the day as at night, the physical properties of a cloud don’t change dependent on the time of day. Now in the desert, at night time, temperatures drop to near freezing even though the daytime temps are in the 100s F. Are you saying then by implication that the reason why the night time desert temps drop so rapidly is due to (lack of) humidity to store this heat of raditation?
68: ??
Less sunlite reaches the surface, check.
Which in turn allows less warming of the adjacent air, check.
“to be convected away,” ??
dScott, there’s less convection, but also less warming due to blockage of the sun. There is little radiation from the surface, because of sun blockage. And you can’t “trap” radiation.
69, but isn’t this what we were told about the greenhouse effect? the short wave radiation coming from the ground or CO2 in the air is reheating the air that it missed the first time around. So the cloud cover at night is the short wave radiation from the ground “trapped” or rather bouncing off the cloud back to the surface and warming the air as it bounces back.
dscott; Clouds are complicated but basically they mostly (depending on the type and altitude) reflect sunlight back on top without warming much and hold in water vapor retaining energy (which release it at night, keeping it warmer than it would be if the clouds were not there. That’s one of the reasons deserts are hotter; “nothing” to block the sun in the day, and no energy holding water vapor. (which wouldn’t have clouds to hold them in if they were there 🙂 )
Since the clouds are water (well, ice melting and refreezing on dust, basically) it would be quite a trick to see them getting to the point they were actually radiating heat. It usually rains first…. 🙂
As far as not letting in as much sun, don’t forget the weather system(s) moving air heated one place without clouds to someplace with them, and that the clouds often themselves move just a tad….
Nasif, I didn’t read the entire thing but rather bits of them (and wikipedia stuff) along with what I already knew. But everything has errors. Wikipedia can’t decide where planes fly! 🙂 (they have some conflicting information on the articles on individual levels and between those articles and each other and between those articles and the main one….)
Pat, yes, I am aware that at times storms (I believe tropical ones mostly) do make it into the stratosphere, I’m mainly (only?) talking about the temps/materials and in a general manner, and included the links to the topics. I probably should have said “fairly well” considering the inversion between strat and trop.
RE: Now in the desert, at night time, temperatures drop to near freezing even though the daytime temps are in the 100s F.
Not true in the North American subtropical desert areas. The parts of the year where it can get above 100F, it will not freeze. Many confuse mid latitude deserts (Nevada, Utah, parts of E. California, parts of N. Ariz, various pockets elsewhere at these and more northerly latitudes) with subtropical ones (SE Calif, S. Ariz, SW NM, S. TX, N. Mexico).
A very typical late fall day in Calexico, CA, 92231:
http://www.weather.com/weather/local/92231?
Subtract 10 degrees from the high and low and you’ve got the San Francisco burbs. Latitude accounts for the difference. Come back and look at highs and lows for this zip code in mid July during any time when there is not a strong Monsoon. Lows will be almost as high as lows for Huntsville or even Mobile. Highs will be downright oppressive.
72, so what distinguishes subtropical from mid latitude deserts from one another? What are their characteristics? We are not talking a great distance between South (subtropical) and North (mid-latitude)Arizona given your examples.
Having grown up in so. Nevada I can say that The early morning temp. is in the 80’s when the temp for the day will reach 105 to 110. The only place I have observed that kind of swing and them only into the 70,s is in Death Valley.
70: The radiation you are describing is long-wave radiation (infrared). That’s kinda what we are told, but it doesn’t really work that way, IMHO. As I see it, the visible radiation (short-wave) is absorbed by the surface, which re-emits it as longwave radiation or imparts it to air and water through conduction. The longwave (and some short-wave) radiation is quickly absorbed by water. This gives some of the water molecules enough energy to evaporate (but that takes a lot of available energy away in the form of latent heat of vaporization, and that heat is not measured by thermometers). Additional longwave energy is absorbed by this water vapor to heat it up to the ambient temperature. This warmed water vapor “shares” some of this energy by impacting surrounding N2 and O2 molecules, raising their temperature to ambient (thermalization). The water vapor absorbs more IR to make up for what it lost by “sharing.” The warmer air and water vapor gradually rise due to their lower density (convection), carrying away energy from the surface. The water vapor condenses at some point (clouds), losing the energy it took to evaporate it somewhere in the mid troposphere. This energy causes further convective forces (rising cloud heights, e.g.). When the air rises, it cools due to expansion. When it gets cooler than it’s surroundings, it gets more dense and sinks to replace the rising air. It continues to sink, until it’s density is the same as the surrounding air. Rising heated air and convective forces continue to move warmer and warmer air farther and farther upward during the day. Some of the energy is constantly irradiated to space in the upper troposphere. At night, about all the energy gained the day before is lost to space, and the whole process is repeated the next day. Something like that, anyway.
I personally don’t think radiation has much to do with what’s happening in the lower atmosphere; I believe convection is the dominant way heat is exchanged. I also believe that the “greenhouse effect” amounts to nothing more than the amount of heat stored in the air and water vapor column every day. Hope this helps.
Another example, much in the news these days:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/40650.html
I’d liken the weather and climate in this location to Palm Springs or Needles.
RE: #74 – Unlike mid latitude deserts, subtropicals have few nights annually that go below freezing, no snow to speak of, and just the most fierce sun you can imagine. When you cross 36 or 35 latitude, there is a notable change. Also, elevation plays a role in the more northerly deserts in the US – they tend to be high desert, unlike the Imperial/Coachella Valley, lower Colorodo Valley, Sonoran desert and Lower Rio Grande Valley.
I was just browsing a NOAA link from solarcycle24.com, which included:
“Many forecasters believe Solar Cycle 24 will be big and intense. Peaking in 2011 or 2012, the cycle to come could have significant impacts on telecommunications, air traffic, power grids and GPS systems. (And don’t forget the Northern Lights!) In this age of satellites and cell phones, the next solar cycle could make itself felt as never before.”
This sounds to me like AGW-speak for “oh-my-god-cycle-24-had-better-be-strong-or-there-is-no-chance-for-the-Hadley-prediction-of-0.3C-increase-by-2015”.
And anyway, when was the last time that there was a big and intense cycle following a 13-year cycle? Come to that, when was the last 13 year cycle? Oh yes, 1798.3 to 1810.6. Will it be 13 years this time? Well, the first spot of cycle 24 was almost seen last week, except it was just a magnetic disturbance of the correct polarity and latitude, but no spot. Still, there may be one real soon now. It would then need 18 months from that spot to the minimum in order to make 13 years, but that is by no means out of the question for a long cycle.
David Archibald will no doubt tell us more.
Finally, I’d like to see one resignation from an organization for each incorrect prognostication with no error bars. Thus, given that it usually takes 4 years to get from minimum to maximum, we should see a resignation following the prediction that cycle 24 will peak in 2011 or 2012. I’m not that picky about who, as long as it isn’t one of the cleaners…
Rich.
p
“High desert” is considered to be anything above 2000 ft.
In other words Cycle 24 would have to be a pretty short cycle to peak 5 years from now. And that’s assuming it starts now. We’ll see.
Check the elevation for Las Vegas and Boulder City Both above 2600. The only desert I know that might come close is Black Rock But that is in Northern Nev.
John V: Unthreaded #27: 1081
I looked at these definitions, and then the definition at RealClimate (6 easy steps) and the linked IPCC 4AR definition from RC. All of these definitions explain that the absorption of LWR by CO2 will warm the surface: either by back radiation; or because the surface must get warmer to compensate for the increased opacity of the atmosphere to LWR. The trouble is both explanations break the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This was noted in comments at RC; the rebuttals: doesn’t matter as long as net energy flow is outwards; closed system so doesn’t apply; extra work required provided by sun. etc. were unconvincing.
I’ve thought a lot about this and simply see no way round; CO2 by absorbing LWR could warm the atmosphere hence diminishing heat loss; but it seems physically impossible to warm the surface.
Thoughts?
Yeah SteveS, I’m talkin’ like a “real” desert. Sand dunes and stuff. No water. No vegetation. (But I did exagerate a “tad” with 150 to 30.) 🙂 Although I’ve been in a desert where it was like 80 in the day in Dec and fell to 30ish at night.
Cities in the desert have concrete, asphalt, cars, trees, buildings. So it’s not really the same. I did find a day in Las Vegas, July 13 1972, that dropped from 119 to 48 tho 🙂
Phoenix Today 45-65 July 81L-104H average. Jan 43L-65H average.
Jouf, A city in northern Saudi Arabia I picked at random: July 3rd 2002 went from 107 down to 74
I can’t find the low of the day for July 10th 1913 for Furnace Creek Death Valley from the high of 134 sadly enough.
Check the Huachuca mountains in Arizona/Mexico for an area of high desert, about 50 miles from Tucson.
82 Gary
A couple of points:
1. Exactly how does it violate the Second Law?
2. ‘Diminishing the heat loss’ is equivalent to ‘warming’ in the Global Warming discussion.
Coachella / Imperial Valley was wall to wall dunes and playa prior to being developed. Go to the area near Hadley’s Date Orchards, and you’ll find temps not far off from what is experienced in Calexico. (Note also, the mere fact of date orchards – just like Mesopotamia).
@78, hmm, for SC24 here a bunch of predictions, collected by Jan Janssens:
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html
… and more about, evolution of SC23-SC24
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution
Me, personally, I guess-timating, we will have the beginning of SC24 not
before Dec 2008 and the peak of SC24 not before late in 2012/somewhere in 2013
annd , too, SC24 may be the weakest since SC16..
We will see it when it happens.
Re #80 Steve S:
More to the point is that solar minimum (smoothed minimum sunspots, measured in various ways) is unlikely to occur before at least 12 months after the first verifiable spot of the new cycle. So early 2009 seems the earliest for sunspot minimum, and David Archibald gave a graph a while back on cumulative spotless days which fits a 19th century slow fall to minimum, suggesting even later. Then after minimum, it generally takes a good 4 years to maximum, though cycle 23 apparently did it in 3.6 years. So pay your money, take your choice, place your bets.
Rich.
Sam:
We had a cold front come thru that day and the temp dropped about 40f in 5 min. and kept dropping. It was a very wet day after the rain came.
#82 Gary Moran:
There is no violation of the 2nd law.
For the sake of a simplified discussion, consider the solar heating to be constant. The earth will reach a steady state temperature such that the outgoing radiation matches the incoming radiation. (If they do not balance then, by definition, the temperature will increase or decrease).
If GHGs are added, there is instantaneously less outgoing LW radiation. This results in an imbalance of radiation for the earth system — same solar coming in, less LW going out. The power imbalance heats the atmosphere, the surface, and the oceans. (The atmosphere quickly approaches a new steady state temperature, the land takes longer, and the oceans take longer still).
If you accept that the atmosphere is warmer, then you have to accept that the surface and oceans will also warm. The atmosphere is being held at the warmer temperature so it will heat the surface and ocean so that a steady state is reached.
Somebody might tell you that there is not enough heat capacity in the atmosphere. That would be true for a closed system (no energy in or out), but the earth is obviously not a closed system. Heat capacity is irrelevant. The solar radiation holds the atmospheric temperature higher. Since the atmosphere is now warmer than the surface and ocean (and being held warmer) the surface and ocean will warm.
Going back to my lightbulb analogy, the tiny mass of a lightbulb filament is capable of heating much larger masses because of the electrical power that it harnesses as heat. Similarly, the atmosphere is capable of heating the surface and ocean because of the solar power that it harnesses as heat.
What do we do for entertainment On the Great Plains? Watch the mercury plummet.
And look for places to ask idjit questions that have probably been asked and answered somewhere already.
Here is my contribution for today: In http://icecap.us/ there is an article talking about the glaciers in the Himalayas and how the layers of radioactive fallout from the 1950s and 1960s are missing and it seems, offers that as evidence of melting due to global warming. I just went back and checked and maybe it does not say that, but it sure seems to infer it.
So two questions: Am I reading into the piece something that is not there? And if it is there, is it not more likely that the absence of the glow-in-the-dark stuff is more evidence of lack of precipitation?
I mean, if the stuff fell out, it would still be there, wouldn’t it? Maybe with less ice around it than you think proper, but it (the gitd stuff) doesn’t evaporate does it? (It didn’t when I was a lab gofer in hot labs back in the day–scrub that s*&_ up and put it in bags and haul it away or else it would still be there. And don’t get me started on the hassles of people tracking Yucca Flats in from the parking lot right before an AEC inspection.)
89: John V:
Just when does that happen? For one second each day, over a given location, perhaps. There is never a STEADY state on Planet Earth, because it is spinning and revolving around the sun, and it is tilted. That’s another complete fallacy in AGW-type thinking. They have to talk about average conditions, when there is really no such thing.
John V:
Please find me one place where the atmosphere is warmer than the surface, and prove it with measurements.
“Please find me one place where the atmosphere is warmer than the surface”
Left off the part about measurements because I’m not going to do it, but I do have a mind game for you.
Current Air Temperature is 34 degrees F … the ground is covered with snow which at this altitude implies a temperature of 32 degrees, more or less.
Does that count?
Yes that counts, and you got me there. But that’s a brief non-equilibrium situation and not what is being proposed by AGW theory. Under normal circumstances the thin layer of the surface is in equilibrium with the temperature of the air, if liquid moisture is present. If moisture is not present and there is any solar radiation going on, the surface is always hotter.
Re: HOH and the calculations based on the amount in the system, evap. vs. precip. With a recent concern noted in inducing more CO2 into the atmosphere via pumping HOH out of the earth from a recent SciNews article. It seems to me more significant making more HOH available to the atmosphere via evap. Any correlations to irrigation volume vs. temperature in time? I live at 6600 ft in western Colorado. The daily temp. swing is 30-40 degrees F without a pressure front, exceeding 50 deg. at times in the summer. Clouds cut the nightly loss to the 10-20 deg. range. But we think it’s warm because it is dry, less mass to conduct heat away.(jae #65)
Not meaning to be argumentative, jae, but it seems like somebody that knew what they were talking about (and I am certainly not one of those–and I make no implication about jae, one way or the other) would think there were different thermal masses, or different conductivities, or some other big word involved that would argue that the temperature on the sink side of an interface will always lag the source side, if the source side is changing.
Or something.
jae:
Of course the system is not in a constant steady state, but you are (intentionally?) missing the point, and following that up with vague insults about “AGW-type” thinking. If I was talking about solar forcing, I strongly suspect you would not feel the need to confuse the issue with talk about daily and early cycles.
More GHG’s in the atmosphere will increase temperatures. The BIG question has always been “But by how much?”
The history of the planet’s temperature and the atmospheric content of CO2 indicates the sensitivity is 1.0C to 1.5C for every doubling of CO2.
The warming we have had in the last 130 years seems to match that sensitivity figure pretty well. It certainly does not match the doom-and-gloom 4.5C sensitivity figure drummed into everyone’s heads on a daily basis.
And the more-realistic sensitivity measure of 1.0C to 1.5C indicates that global warming will not be problem at all. Some time in the next century we will reach the first doubling plateau (and a 1.0C increase in temperatures) and sometime in the next millenium, we will reach the next 1.0C-doubling plateau (if we don’t run out of oil and coal in those 1,100 years of course.)
Big deal. Those kind of numbers should be considered a good thing considering how many people live in cold climates.
And the oceans are NOT warming. The latest sea surface temperature maps shows a Massive La Nina cold pool and colder-than-average ocean temperatures across most of the globe.
The latest satellite temperature measurements of the atmosphere show that there has been a very pronounced COOLING in 2007. Lower atmosphere temperatures have declined by 0.4C so far this year (compared to the supposed increase in temperatures of 0.7C in the past 100 years up to 2007.)
So minor warming – 0.3C. Nicer planet (especially for us snow-bound people.) Out-of-control global warming group-think paranoia evident.
Re #94
So what about the other half of the time?
John V or anybody
The air will warm the ocean verrrry slooowly. One reason, the warm water will stay near the interface and the warm air will rise away from it, over large areas anyway, were there is not a lot of mixing going on at a particular time, I think of the Indian Ocean at the beginning of Lord Jim as a huge place where not a lot of mixing is going on. Some of the heat will be carried away as water vapor. Heating the ocean by conduction is not an efficient process.
On the other hand, the Sun can heat the ocean efficiently all the way through the photosphere.
Certainly there is a microscopic heating of a mm thick skin where downward re-radiation of longwave IR can have an effect. But this is also a very slow process centuries.
Loss of ice sheets is a very slow solar forcing on accoun of the angle of incidence of the sunlight (I learned that from Gavin)
Can anybody explain why GHG will heat the ocean quickly? I guess if clouds reduce.
#89, John V. RE 2nd law. The question is where the atmosphere is supposed to get warmer. If you look at Figure 1 of the recent paper by Douglas et. al. you will see that the models predict that the warming will be largest at about 10 km. The temperature there is -40 C to -50 C versus an average surface temperature of 15 C. How does the extra trapped heat get from 10 km down to the surface? Unless the air at 10 km warms to greater than 15 C it can’t happen by radiation or conduction, that would violate the 2nd law.
My point is not that GHG could not heat the oceans eventually, just that other forcings which modulate clouds would swamp it.
re 92. jae you will love this book
http://books.google.com/books?id=KaJHBv9FbYIC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=gieger+climate+surface&source=web&ots=2uXrklJXi3&sig=Alm4ihrM86a0DFJfDxhnU22-f2o
You guys will also find updates the some nice greenhouse experiments on page
135
http://books.google.com/books?id=KaJHBv9FbYIC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=gieger+climate+surface&source=web&ots=2uXrklJXi3&sig=Alm4ihrM86a0DFJfDxhnU22-f2o
It’s in near equilibrium with the air temperature. When the sun goes down, or a cloud comes, the surface temperature decreases, until it is equal to the air temperature. Why can’t folks just compare the greenhouse effect to what happens when you warm your house at night. You light the fire (sun) and the air in the house warms up (and the presence of GHGs don’t help you there, either). When you put the fire out (night), the temperature gradually goes down. That is all there is to the greenhouse effect, IMHO. The atmosphere heats up and stores energy, like the air and walls (water vapor) in your house, and it cools down when the sun-fire is gone. The AGW crowd has obfuscated basic commonsense with “scientific” nonsense. The oceans absorb tremendous amounts of energy and cause all kinds of weather patterns that “distort” and cause chaos to this basic mechanism, but the mechanism applies overall.
Jae,
I would add, “And there is not a frigorific (an internal torque that may cut the stream) above the lower troposphere”. 😉
A frigorific? Is that a technical term? 🙂
re Paul #101- I agree with you that the warming trend is predicted to be largest at about 10 km altitude, where the actual temperature is -40 or -50 C. Radiation energy transfer from a region at -50 C to a region at +15 C isn’t going to happen.
I look at it in a different way. The blackbody or greybody radiation at the surface of an atmosphere-free planetoid like the Moon is emitting into a radiation sink at infinity at 4K. The temperature difference between the surface and infinity determines the radiation energy transfer from the surface, and therefore the equilibrium temperature of the surface. Put gaseous layers in the way and the surface is now emitting into a volume that will be at a higher temperature than 4K if it absorbs any radiation from the surface or the sun. That increases the temperature that the surface is emitting into, resulting in the need for a higher surface temperature to restore energy balance. Put CO2, methane, water vapor, freon, ozone, etc. into the atmosphere, and it will have some effect on surface temperature.
Speaking of forcing and modulation – does any GCM accurately reflect how the great sub tropical deserts actually affect the global energy budget? Furthermore, do the GCMs accurately reflect how much heat is moved poleward versus how much heat is wrapped back around to the east sides of the great persistent Horse Latitudes Highs (where it would then subside and compress)? I think at least a few of you can appreciate why such questions matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudes
Theory – Hadley Cells transfer lots of heat to Ferrel Cells at the Western sides of Horse Latitudes Highs. Therefore, the Polar Front incurs a greater heat exchange under an increased CO2 regime than it other wise would. This in turn slowly erodes the sea ice cycle and causes loss of high latitude continental ice mass. The polar regions warm, cold fronts don’t make it as far south, warm fronts make it further north. The Horse Latitudes Highs start to encompass a greater proportion of air and grow in size. The system tends toward runaway.
And reality?
RE 24, 44, etc. (mosh),
That add-in is password protected! I thought I could maybe use it to look at GHCN data. I previously wrote a VB routine to get all ghcn monthly data into a large matrix with each station as a column. I thought it would’ve been nice to be able to copy and paste that VBA into the program use it for some analysis.
The GHCN data goes through a similar routine in “the code”, doesn’t it?
RE: #108 – The theory, in a nut shell
What sorts of experiments could prove or disprove it? Ideas:
– Release and track some highly specific radioactive isotopes.
– Release and track a balloon capable of reliably following a given “parcel” of air for thousands of nautical miles
– Take thousands of heat flux measurements over time in the NW octant of the Earth’s atmosphere
– Some combination of the above.
Hey, about that first one, maybe some of the data already exist. Something about a Bikini.
lucia would be interested in this paper being cited by the author, R. Pielke Sr, over at RC.
Click to access R-247.pdf
Those darn oceans.
106 paminator
It will in the following general sense: the 15C region is going to radiate, anyway. If the -50C region isn’t radiating, you get one answer. If it is radiating effectively (no barriers), you get another. The second answer is warmer. That means that there is a warming relative to the first case.
However, I put in the word ‘effectively’. In the atmosphere case, the density of the air in the troposphere will block any radiation from getting through to the surface.
109 Steve S
Can you explain the steps in your argument that support the ‘Therefore’? I don’t see that — it’s a jump too far for me.
RE: #113 – It’s not my argument. Rather, it is the current “conventional wisdom” in Climate Science. If I had the time, I would lay out my own argument that is nearly the opposite. Back onto my main train of thought. So, if you Google on Ian Held, you will find a large part of the reason that the conventional wisdom is what it is. One of the pieces of “evidence” is a claim that the 20th century Sahel climate matches what the GCMs call out. But here is a problem. What happened in the Sahel (based on geological evidence) during the most recent glacial?
Sorry, that’s Issac Held, not Ian Held.
There appears to be two schools of thought among solar physicists as to SC24. One school is looking for a peak of 140 in about 4.5 years, the other is looking for a peak of 80 in an indeterminate time period.
Take your pick.
Currently, the first solar plage to show a reversial in the magnetic dipole has just shown up and is fading now as it moves eastward along the 27th° N solar Lat. Although the change in the magnetic field of a system at high latitudes would presume to belong to the new cycle, this is quite a bit farther south than one would expect for the first episodes of the new cycle. Also, this system did not produce a sunspot although I thought I saw evidence of a very small and weak sunspot on pictures of the solar disc two days ago. Meanwhile, a healthy cluster of sunspots along the solar equator just moved past the west limb yesterday and was a member of SC23.
New topic re HOH:
As for the HOH discussion above, HOH is the only chemical compound in the atmosphere that is widespread globally and exists naturally in all of its three phases. The combination of evaporation at the surface and condensation aloft with the upward vertical motion driven by convection is a real-world example of the carnot cycle and the most efficent way of transporting heat from the surface into the troposphere. The latent heat of WV effectively removes heat from the ocean surface, lakes and wet land areas with plants providing an addition source through evapotranspiration. Condensation aloft returns this heat directly into the atmosphere at the level of condensation. When the solid state, ice, is involved, even greater quantities of heat are returned to the atmosphere during sublimation. Deserts, [those representing dry areas) are bereft of suffcient liquid HOH to support this process, hence there is no significant evaporational cooling at the surface, nor condensed water vapor aloft (clouds) in the troposphere that are derived from local convective activity.
As for the numbers for HOH:
Heat of condensation (or vaporization) = 2500 Joules/gram.
Heat of fusion (ice to liquid water or vice versa) = 333 Joules/gram.
Heat of sublimation (ice to vapor or vice versa) = 2833 Joules/gram
This is no small potatoes and dwarfs the radiative effects within the atmosphere of CO2 and other GHGs. The kinetic energy of hurricanes comes principally from the release of latent heat through condensation and sublimation. Latent heat energy is ultimately converted into kinetic energy.
(IMHO) Since a minuscule percent of atmospheric water vapor is man-generated, AGW proponents are not interested in this mechanism as there is no way to bureaucratically control it. However, I’ve heard some recent noise about the additional need to control CO2 production since water vapor is also a product of combustion. A more interesting concern of water vapor effects arose some 30-40 years ago when jet contrails were hypothesized as ultimately producing sufficent cirriform clouds to alter the climate. Such contrails were especially prevalent along the east side of the Rockies extending eastward over the High Plains. This caught the attention of atmospheric scientists at NCAR in Boulder CO and at CU where there was no lack of researxchers looking for a theory.
In reality, persistent contrails usually occur in airmasses where the flight level temperature/dewpoint spread was fairly narrow, otherwise the contrails would evaporate rather quickly. One rule for earthbound weather forecasters is that when you see persistent contrails in an otherwise clear sky, natural occurring cirrostratus can’t be far behind.
re Pat #112- I agree that the surface temperature should be higher when the atmosphere is present. But I do not agree with the usual explanation that the atmosphere re-radiates and transfers energy back to the surface. The transport of energy via thermal radiation requires a temperature difference between the source and sink, with the sink at a lower temperature than the source.
Re #101
Certainly can happen by radiation, you appear to have a misconception about the 2nd Law, suggest you check out a good text on transfer, e.g. Holman.
114 Steve S
Ok, thanks. I wondered about that…
I’ll chase down Isaac.
Sort of related, sort of not, another problem:
http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0640282
This energy does not even make it out of the tropics:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/09/14_weather.shtml
117 paminator
We differ on the reason, but agree on the result. I don’t think it does, because the atmosphere itself blocks the upper radiation from reaching the surface, not for your reason:
We/they are not talking about actual transport of energy from cold to hot, but a reduction in the net transport of energy from hot to cold, which is considered to be a ‘warming’ of the hot body. That’s just semantics, but the reality is that the hot-body temperature is higher. The only problem is that it assumes no barrier between the bodies.
Re #103
And why does it stop there?
Re #122:
About 40 years ago I did some work in thunderstorm research led by people a lot more brilliant and knowledgable than I was. The idea was to understand how thunderstorms separate charge so as to create lightning. There were many theories and some of them utilized the voltage differences between the ionoshphre, an electrically conductive region, and the lower troposhere, a pretty effective electric insulator
The potential difference between the ionosphere and the Earth’s surface is about 300KV. One can calculate the leakage through the atmospherte to ground which works out to be a current of about 1800 Amps. At this rate, the 300KV potential difference would be reduced to zero in short order. The leakage is not uniform and is much greater in some areas than others, especially in high mountain ranges where the 300KV PD between the mesosphere and the ground is separated by less distance and a more conductive portion of the atmosphere. This is because the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere decreases with altitude. Thus, the ionosphere/earth current would be much greater over mountain ranges than at sea level. Indeed this can be observed visibly on moonless nights in view of the Andes where the mountain tops are persistently in coronal discharge. The blueish discharge is generally referred to as Andes glow.
One of the main problems back in the 60s was to determine how the ionosphere was recharged. The prevailing solution stems from a theory proposed by C T R Wilson about the end of the 19th Century(!) that the principal mechanism for recharge were thunderstorms, mainly in the Tropics. Doing the math one concludes that it would take about 700-800 thunderstorms constantly in progress somewhere in the World to accomplish this. In recent years other theories have been proposed which include extra-terrestial radiation and interactions between the magnetosphere and the upper atmosphere.
I go through all of this to ask if there have been any connections made between the auororal bands cited in the article you posted and the maintenance of the large PD between the mesosphre and the ground.
Correction to my #124: The reference should have been to post #121, not #122.
Cryosphere Today is playing ‘publish or perish’ again:
Do these guys ever have a look at their own web site?
Pat Keating,
There may be many causes for a given effect. Your explanation is technical and reliable because it is based on heat transfer science, but there could be a bit of truth on Paminator’s cause. Correct me if I’m wrong: the molecule of gas absorbs the photon, an interchange of energy between the photon and the molecule occurs; the molecule is excited and then releases another photon, different from the prior incident photon, but with lesser or higher energy density, depending on the microstate (Ent…py) of the molecule. After all, there is not a re-radiation of heat because the photons are not the same.
Pat Keating, #124- You said
Agreed.
Jon V #89
Sorry that’s not how it works. The ground is heating the atmosphere, if GHG’s are trapping more heat in the atmosphere then the atmosphere will get warmer; but that cannot warm the ground. What you suggest is a violation of the second law.
Sorry, but this is unphysical; you’ve thrown the term closed about as though it explains something it doesn’t . How can the surface warm the atmosphere greater than itself? Where is your evidence that the atmosphere warms by being warmer than the surface? You are plainly winging it here.
Sorry your analogy really is massively broken here. Does the gas in a lightbulb heat the element? I’ve also noted your comments on radiative balance; all well and good over a period of time, I too would expect incoming and outgoing to roughly agree; however this is of itself not a mechanism for change; it is surely a measurement or symptom of change?
#131
p.s. a closed system is one in which there is no change in mass; so effectively I’d expect the earth can be treated as a closed system, as it doesn’t exchange significant amounts of mass with other systems? Not that that changes the nature of the argument, it was always irrelevant.
Re: #131 Gary Moran said:
Actually if greenhouse gases result in an increased heat content in the troposphere, then this will increase the “temperature” of the gases in the troposphere. This then would reduce the temperature differential (delta T the driver for all heat transfer) between the surface and the troposphere thereby slowing down the heat transfer from the surface and thereby increasing the temperature of the surface.
This is how the greenhouse hypothesis of global warming works.
Unfortunately the troposphere has not read the script and is warming slower than the surface which suggests that it is warming in response to a warming of the surface. The surface warms and the heat energy eventually goes to the big heat sink in the sky (my thermo prof always said Mars but I did not really believe him). The temperature of the big heat sink did not change so the delta T increases and all the bits in between responds to the increased heat flux.
The NH and SH differences are tricky too.
#133
Yes, that sounds fine
Sorry that last bit looks like a violation of 2nd law. I’m happy that GHG’s can raise average temperature, raise night time minima’s etc.; but not actually raise the surface temperature.
The second law is pretty well sacrosanct; if we appear to break it, then the explanation should be bullet proof; and I haven’t seen anything approaching this yet despite hunting through real climate and IPCC stuff. It’s almost as though they transgressed without realizing it, and now the mechanisms are enshrined in publication and accepted as is? Some professional insight would be appreciated.
I remember reading a study years ago that concluded that it was almost impossible to heat ocean waters above about 90F. The reason for this was evaporation. As the water warmed, evaporation rates increased. Which directly cooled the water. Additionally, as evaporation rates increased, so did the number and size of clouds, and the it started raining. All of which cooled the oceans.
Paul, in 101 wrote:
Note that to refute Douglas et. al., RealClimate has pointed out that the range of predictions from the models include predictions of as little as .01 – .02 degC/dec warming at altitudes up to 200mb with actual cooling above that. So the models are simultaneously cited as proof of catastrophic AGW yet defended as not being inconsistent with a lack of tropospheric heating.
That, at least, is my interpretation of the revised +/- 2sigma bars shown on the chart in this article: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/#comment-77507
If my interpretation is wrong, I’d appreciate it if someone here would set me straight.
Re#133, Jeff Norman:
As if!
Everybody (not only Gary Morgan) is fine with this. Thermal LWR from Earth surface is adsorbed by WV, CO2, and other GHG in lower part of troposphere, and because time between molecules collisions in dense portion of troposphere is much smaller than time between LW photon adsorption and re-emission, the energy is thermalized, heating the mass of air. Smallish portion of this heat is returned back to the surface, bulk of heated air rises to less dense upper troposphere where radiative transfer dominates and heat is emitted into space. No problems.
The problem appears when GHG theory assumes that half of adsorbed outgoing LWR is returned back to surface, surface heats-up and emit more LRW, from which half is again returned, and so on, to the moment when surface is heated to the degree when small portion of radiation escaping to space through radiative window equals solar radiation adsorbed by surface. THIS is clear violation of the Second Law.
Why AGW theory insist on such ridiculous model?
Read my #43. Without massive CO2-indused heating of surface, amount of W/m2 required to increase WV content in atmosphere will be less than GHG effect of such WV increase. Hence, no water vapour positive feedback and no catastrophic AGW.
135:
Yes, and the empirical data bear this out. Check out the high temperatures near the oceans in the tropics.
re 111. write the author. explain what you are doing see if he can free the code!
now, ushcn is doing something ‘similiar’ but i dont have access to the papers.
v2 now uses Chnage point analysis
JohnV,
This is off-topic (I know, hard to do in Unthreaded!) but:
Why does the GHG radiant barrier only act in one direction?
129 Nasif
I think that’s the AGW view. I assume by “molecule” you mean a GHG molecule, since O2 and N2 have no vibrational dipole moment.
However, in the troposphere, the probability of the CO2 molecule emitting another photon is a lot less than the probability that it transfers that energy to the other molecules by collision. The energy is thus thermalized. There are other photons but locally and at longer wavelength, where absorption by excitation of translational modes occur for all molecules.
If you have a CO2 molecule in the stratosphere, the mechanism you describe could could occur with higher probability.
Does that sound right?
104, excellent Steve, pg 135 answers my question about the greenhouse effect. So it seems cloud cover during night may act to block or reflect Long wave radiation where as glass does not. It is really facinating that a greenhouse is actually cooler at night than the ambient temperatures due to this passing of long wave radiation. So the glass at night actually acts as a radiator instead of an insulator. Interesting implications for construction of houses. Now that’s what I call science, someone actually made observations.
This means that if a greenhouse acts to store up heat to get hotter only during the daytime and lose heat faster at night, on a planetary scale, if the atmosphere acts as a “greenhouse”, then we would expect to see a greater differential of temp extremes from day to night, higher highs and lower lows. The atmosphere does not behave this way compared to the moon with no atmosphere, so the entire AGW argument of greehouse effect is bogus. If there was a greenhouse effect, then why are surface temps on the moon higher during the day and lower at night with no atmosphere than earth with an atmosphere? In fact, even on satellites and space capsules NASA has this problem of temperature differential so they have to shield or rotate the vehicle to minimize the temperature differential.
The better view is the atmosphere acts as a thermal storage medium (via specific heat) that causes a delay of temperature change (increase or decrease) through convection. An example of this effect would be daytime temps at Noon and 2 p.m., the sun’s highest position is around noon but it is not the hotest part of the day, around 2 p.m. is approx the hotest part of the day. The delay is caused by the surface heating the air (or rather air cooling the surface) via convection, it takes time to heat the air and cool the surface.
Now, did anyone do the same thing with a CO2 filled greenhouse???
Phil.
Fascinating.
I got less shifts,
Mann needs to CO2-adjust more to match with this.
re 142. gieger is a classic filled with wonderful observations. It’s on my Xmas list
Re #131 – The ocean or deep water cannot be significantly heated by contact with the air above. Oceans are primarily heated by SWR from the sun.
Interesting post at RP sr.. Another paper and authors that will very likely get a very unprofessional audit from RC.
Michael Smith #136
Interesting that we now have an ensemble of models such that we can find one that says anything we want, then make catastrophic predictions based on the others.
In January UK Met Office gave out a press release, which was reported all over the world:
The confidence was boosted by a statement
The forecast was given with the following details:
Assuming a normal distribution for the forecast (which they likely did), the above gives that the forecasted anomaly was distributed as N(0.54,0.0063). Now the current anomaly (based on 11 months) is 0.414 and the probalility for the forecasted annual anomaly to be 0.415 or less is less than 6%. So one could say, using the IPCC 4AR terminology, that it seems that this year was very unlikely to happen according to the UK Met Office models.
UK readers may want to remind their Met Office about this before Met Office is out with another “remarkably accurate” forecast for 2008.
pochas, 147:
I’m surprised their response to Douglas et. al. isn’t generating more talk. Perhaps those more familiar with the models have always known that the model outputs spanned such a large range, but it was certainly news to me. I don’t see how they can argue that the “science is settled” with that kind of variation in outputs.
(#148 cotd) I didn’t notice before, but they also give 95% confidence range of 0.38..0.70 in notes. That gives N(0.54,0.0095), and the Pr(T
142,dScott:
Yes. Just plain common sense, isn’t it? It can easily be shown that the amount of energy received in, say, Jackson, MS is just enough to heat a column of air about 6 Km tall. Then that heat is lost at night, and the cycle repeats. Of course, this assumes no wind, ocean influences, etc., which cause all the chaos that we define as weather.
#150… the Pr(T less than 0.415) is less than 10% so “very unlikely” still qualifies. I suppose the 60% probability is with respected to the unrounded record (0.515).
142 151
I think an even better view is that the ground is acting as the main thermal storage medium. First of all, it is the ground which absorbs most of the sun’s energy, not the air. Secondly, there is a lot more heat capacity in the ground. Thirdly, in the early morning, the surface is often cooler than the air and must be warmed by the sun before it can start the convection process.
Steve and Jae, I just thought of something. If the true greenhouse effect at night lowers air temperature by preventing convection in the greenhouse below ambient via long wave radiation, then couldn’t this be used to cool a house at night time? Let’s say you build a solarium on the house, during the daytime, you close off the room and crack the windows to prevent a heat gain, then at night you close the windows and ventilate the room using it as a long wave radiator? During the winter you reverse the process to gain heat, ventilate during the daytime and close off the room during the night.
# 141
Pat Keating,
Well, I’m not AGWist and, yes, in the middle and lower troposphere the possibility that the CO2 molecule emits another photon is lesser than the probability of transfer energy by convection. The mode I described above is the Raman scattering, which is more descriptive on the absorption and subsequent emission of a photon via a transitional electron state. As you say, there are other ways of energy transfer from photons to matter.
We can find vibrational motion that is infrared (IR) active, though the dipole moment of the molecule must change by rule. The asymmetric elongation is IR active due to a change in dipole moment. The symmetric elongation in carbon dioxide is not IR active because there is not change in the dipole moment; thus, the carbon dioxide is transparent to the IR incoming from the Sun, but not to the photons emitted by the surface because the wavelength of the ER is longer than that of the incident IR upon the surface. The things change for water vapor because it is not transparent to SIR, so it absorbs photons directly as they enter the atmosphere.
Thus, you’ve obtained A.(Im joking, ok?) 😉
153, true, the ground does act also as a storage medium to a certain extent. I was trying to over simplify the analogy to understand the issue of heat storage and greenhouse effect for the air.
Sorry, I neglected the next text:
It must say:
As you say, there are other trajectories…
Pat: I don’t think so, if the soil is wet (or over water). In that case the soil/water must always be in thermal equilibrium with the air temperature in the layer just above the soil. For example, if the soil/moisture is at 25 C and you want to raise it to 26 C, you have to increase the humidity in the air just above the surface by evaporating about 1 gram/m^3. This keeps the soil/moisture temperature down. Because of the need for vapor pressure equilibrium, the soil never feels “hot” in moist areas. In deserts, it gets very hot, because there’s no moisture to take the heat away.
When you get up around 90 F (32 C), the vapor pressure curve gets extremely steep. So if you want to go to 33 C, you have to evaporate about 2 g/m^3 water, and the absolute humidity goes to about 35 g/m^3 (it’s only 22 g/m^3 at 25 C). This is why the temperature doesn’t go much above 93 F (34 C) over water, including near the equator. It takes a great deal of energy (5,000 joules/m^3) to evaporate this much water, and the air starts getting so saturated that it condenses.
RE: #126 – The troposphere as a dielectric (capacitor) that is, by design, meant to selectively break down under certain circumstances, followed by self healing ala certain plastic caps. Ion / plasma transport of energy between circuit nodes. The Sun (and other nuclear driven bodies elsewhere in space) as major power sources. The Earth, overall, as a complex ASIC, which has electronic, chemical and biological dissipative elements, and nuclear and biological minor energy sources. Yes, the GCMs are like stone age men, scratching sticks on the soil to make star maps.
RE: #159 – forgot to mention, in addition to straight up electrical coupling between circuit elements, there is photonic coupling as well.
>> and thereby increasing the temperature of the surface Sorry that last bit looks like a violation of 2nd law. Im happy that GHGs can raise average temperature, raise night time minimas etc.; but not actually raise the surface temperature.
Gary, of course, you are absolutely correct. They seem to want to apply Kirchoff circuit law to this. Not cooling as quickly is not the same thing as heating up. Not only is “not cooling” != “heating”, but the first has a time dimension. IOW, it probably wouldn’t even affect night time minumums, just the time it takes to reach that minimum.
>> The second law is pretty well sacrosanct
It’s thermodynamic amateur hour again…
LOL
#162. Agreed.
Gunnar, how many times do I have to ask you not to promote your own theories here. If you want to analyze a text by someone else, fine. But no more of this please.
In my last posting, I was going to predict that Larry would come in with some insubstantial statement implying that the laws of thermodynamics have been repealed by some detailed nuance. I scoff in your general direction. 🙂
Hey Steve, tell that to Gary Moran as well. So, now, the 2nd law is my theory. Thanks!
Is the AGW tide changing?
Steve M, I’m kinda surprised at your apparent unfairness here. These guys go for a 1000 messages in the last unthreaded, and 167 in this one just in the last two days, talking about the same general topic, with everyone pushing their own theories, and not a squeak out of you. One comment from me, agreeing with Gary Moran, and all of a sudden, you imply that I’m the cause of all of this discussion?
Lots of interesting stuff on the link I just posted. Concerning GCMs, I particularly like this one:
Gunner, I’ll tell you what I told jae: if you really, really believe that you’re on to something, take it to RC. That’s what they’re there for. Telling a bunch of people here what they generally want to hear, even if the message itself is somewhat flawed, is shooting fish in a barrel. The theme here is that ideas need to be vetted by a hostile audience. Your hostile audience is Gavin et al. Lay it all out there, and let them start firing away. That’s the way science should be done, no?
Another good one:
Larry: Despite appearances to the contrary, RC is not a scientific site. It is an advocacy site. I have found it to be a total waste of time to post there, especially since many posts never see the light of day. I learn plenty by posting here. The audience is plenty “hostile.”
If the question never sees the light of day, that tells you something too. The problem is, it might tell you that you’re on to something, and they can’t answer it, or it might tell you that they’re just too lazy to lay everything out and deal with it. And you’ll never know.
You can also try tamino or the bunny. They’re usually more spoiling for a fight.
BTW, Larry, I’m trying to stay away from “theory,” and am trying to stick to facts. I’m definitely staying away from thermo unless Steve starts a thread on that.
#101 Paul Linsay:
Ah, I see the source of the confusion now.
The heat from 10km does not need to come down to the surface. What happens is the rate of heat going up from the surface decreases.
If I run a radiant heater in my backyard shed in the middle of winter (-30C at night, -20C during the day), the temperature inside the shed might fluctuate from -15C to -5C. Heat is flowing from the shed to the cold outside air, as it must.
If I do the same thing on a spring day (+10C at night, +20C during the day), the temperature inside the shed might fluctuate from +25C to +35C. Heat is still flowing from the shed to the outside, but the warmer outside air causes the shed to be warmer as well.
JohnV: What puzzles me is how CO2 can cause this warming, but water vapor cannot (unless it’s that portion of water vapor that is a feedback from Co2). And you know exactly where I’m going, by now…
#140 Clayton B:
The incoming radiation from the sun is in a certain range of frequencies (primarily visible). The “radiant barrier” acts on those frequencies on the way in. The outgoing radiation is in a different range of frequencies (infrared). So the “radiant barrier” acts on those frequencies on the way out.
=====
#148 Jean S:
Out of curiousity, where did the sd of 0.0063 come from? Should that be 0.063?
=====
jae, etc:
The atmosphere, ground, and ocean all store and release heat on a daily cycle. There’s no mystery there. It’s completely unrelated to the greenhous effect though.
=====
#162 Larry:
🙂
No doubt in my mind that it IS the GHE.
#175, JohnV. That’s correct, the net upward energy flux is decreased. By my calculation a warming of the 10km temperature from -45C to -44C would reduce the net upward flux by 1%.
#120, Phil,
I suggest that you return the book and get a refund.
The incoming energy has to always equal the outgoing energy. A decrease or increase in the outward energy flux is always just a transient state. What a CO2 increase supposedly does is results in a greater temperature gradient being necessary to transmit the same amount of heat and as a consequence the surface must be warming to get the same heat transfer.
155 Nasif
I wasn’t implying that you were an AGWist — I consider you to be someone searching earnestly for the truth, and not particularly beating any drum.
However, I was told that Raman scattering had too low a cross-section to be important, I think by Phil…..
?? With a planet that is tilted, spinning, and orbiting its heat source, I doubt that there is ever a second when there is a balance. Maybe this whole thing has been GREATLY simplified by the AGW folks.
– jae
Re #154
I think you’d find the cost of the window material which will transmit 10 micron radiation rather expensive!
(noting that you folks can discuss this without lightning striking)
#175, JohnV, but is the temperature of the heating element inside the radiant heater different in winter versus spring?
better example: a pot of water is boiling on the stove, so it’s exactly 100 deg C. You turn the light on above the stove, which heats the air slightly a few feet above the stove. Does the water boil faster?
>> The incoming energy has to always equal the outgoing energy.
Completely false. Only as you integrate over time, as time approaches infinity. There is no law of science that wants to keep internal energy constant. At any one moment in time, there can be a huge imbalance. That’s what makes something heat up, or cool down. And radiation is not the only source of heat. Several of our neighboring planets are not in radiative balance, because gravity is causing heat. If a gas giant is massive enough, gravity will cause so much heat, that it may start a nuclear reaction. Alone in space, it had no incoming radiation, yet it’s high temp radiated out, in non radiative balance, yet it did not cool significantly. After becoming a star, it is still out of balance.
>> A decrease or increase in the outward energy flux is always just a transient state.
Right, but it’s always in a transient state. You can’t just think because you know OUT(time), that you know IN(time).
Re #179
I suggest that you return the book and get a refund.
Why because you don’t understand thermodynamics or heat transfer?
Re #161
The Eddington quote is accurate however just saying something breaks the 2nd Law doesn’t make it so, after all we can observe entropy increasing on this planet every day. Many who invoke the 2nd Law don’t understand it.
Re #128
Yes which is why they have the following in very large type:
“NOTE: The timeseries graphs on this site are currently incorrect. We had a hardware problem corrupt the data and are currently recreating the timeseries from original data sources. Expect the correct data in 5-7 days. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Right below the graph you copied, I don’t know how you missed it!
JohnV
Half is visible. Half isn’t. Its not “primarily” visible.
My understanding of “unthreaded” was that it was for otherwise OT stuff. Seemed like Gunnar was singled out. As far as RC goes, mathematics are rarely discussed, and dissenting opinions are not refuted, they are mocked.
Gunnar, I didn’t like the other thread either.
#189. The problem with the thermodynamic discussions is not that they are dissenting “opinions” but that they tend to be “opinions”. I’ve said endlessly that I prefer that people discuss mainstream publications and identifiable papers. It makes the discussion more pointed.
“Carbon neutral” college http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/20/college.carbon.neutral.ap/index.html
$25k over 15 months and 300 students comes out to be…$5 per student per month, and that’s not including visiting students (which they claim to cover) or profs (12:1 student-to-teacher ration). Yeah, sure!
Interestingly enough, according to wiki, “College of the Atlantic does not have departments and all faculty members consider themselves human ecologists in addition to their formal specialization. Currently, there are professors of anthropology, English, political science and peace studies, economics, ecology, biology, botany, environmental science, law, environmental studies, languages, philosophy, history, education, and music.”
If we all adopted that sort of philosophy, we could all consider ourselves “climate scientists” no matter our “formal specialization.” Even “I am not a statistician” Mann could call himself one, rather than just play one in publications.
185 I said nothing wrong in my post. You were only picking on the wording. What is your point?
184, Phil, are you refering to the type of glass typically used in greenhouses that are of the low iron type? If I understand correctly, looking at the edge of a piece of glass, if the tint is green, it’s standard high iron glass. If the tint is blue, it’s low iron glass. http://www.pictureframingmagazine.com/pdfs/Tips/SEP04_LowIron.pdf It was introduced 30 years ago, according to this article.
>> I prefer that people discuss mainstream publications and identifiable papers. It makes the discussion more pointed.
I understand your point of view on this. I think your view is based on:
premise a) that there are no misunderstandings of basic science,
premise b) that there are no errors resulting from not applying the laws of basic science
premise c) that published papers are something more than mere opinions
I would gently suggest that these premises are incorrect. Nevertheless, I’ll refrain from bringing it up myself.
>> 185 I said nothing wrong in my post. You were only picking on the wording. What is your point?
John, the incoming energy does not have to equal the outgoing energy. Since you said the opposite, I don’t think I’m just being semantic, I’m trying to make the point that it’s not correct. There is no law of science that says that this is generally true. If it were, no object would be cooling down or heating up.
Larry #162
To reiterate, I’ve noticed that the atmospheric greenhouse effect explanations at Wikipedia, RC, IPCC 4AR all seem to involve a violation of 2nd law TD. I’ve also seen rebuttals from Eli, Atmoz and at RC and they weren’t convincing (like John V’s above).
These appear to be the possibilities:
1. IPCC and mainstream climate science have missed something.
2. It’s semantics.
3. Complexity: appears to violate 2nd law, but doesn’t for technical reasons not obvious to laity.
An informed and succinct explanation would be appreciated.
Bender, thanks for the paper. I looked at the one time constant model this week. I’m going to see if I can now get any brilliant insights using a two time constant model.
There is such a thing as unhealthy skepticism, you know. The sort of stuff that’s fuelled by junk science and goofball speculation? Know what I’m talkin’ about? As much as I dislike RC’s attitude, what they do is not junk science. Pseudoscience, maybe. If CA was my island, I would not hesitate to vote off the bottom half dozen of junk posters. I concur completely with Larry’s #196. Free-for-all jawboning is worthless junk. It gives informed skeptics a bad name through guilt by association. I for one wish CA thermo hour would fall off the face of the web. It’s ugly.
Nonsense. Steve M has asked repeatedly that thermo be avoided. While he was away at AGU he let us get away with a free-for-all. With his return we should prepare to step it up a notch. There are many places to spew on about things one knows nothing about. CA shouldn’t be one of them.
Happy Holidays, Auditors!
Seriously, I know sometimes I’m kind of a smart ass, but have a good one and enjoy your family and friends.
210 Boris
And the same, Merry Christmas, to you. I for one welcome your comments — what would life be like without the cut and thrust?
Борис –
С Рождеством Христовым и С наступающим Новым Годом!
# 212
Is it Chinese? Well, your message was addressed to Boris. Anyway, I’m a Mizrahi, so if your message was addressed to me I would only answer thank you…
jae #92
Here’s a nice example for you KT 79 LEVI
For lots more where that came from see FinnRA
Over at RC, the thread on tropical troposphere temps is very entertaining. I actually generally agree with the take-down in the main post at RC. The amusing part is how Gavin concedes a high degree of uncertainty to the model output to the extent that the GCM output is “not falsifiable” (I should make it clear that Gavin is referring to the specific issue of tropical troposphere temp, not global temp.)
I thought it was quite funny for RC to suddenly have bucketloads of uncertainty, while the crickets chirp on the uncertainties associated with the paleo-reconstructions.
# 181
Pat Keating,
Yes, I’m sorry for misunderstanding your message.
Yes, 2Δ0/kBTc decreases with increasing alteration of conductivity, so Raman scattering cross section depends on the substance and its concentration.
Re#215, Gavin has admitted that GCM’s aren’t accurate on scales smaller than “continental.” But he thinks they do fine globally. So admitting a problem with the LT in the tropics probably doesn’t matter, since he believes the GCM’s have the “global” part right.
#218
What I said, perhaps expressed more clearly.
214, Philip: See #94.
RE: #215 – Who knows, maybe it could actually prompt him to go down the hall and speak with the solar plasma rope folks.
jae, do as Larry suggests and take your ideas over to RC. They’re quite good at that sort of thing. Steve M has asked you to restrict your commenting to published literature. There’s a reason for that. It’s because your error-laden musings are a major distraction. The reason you don’t get the feedback you are seeking is because it’s not worthy of anyone’s time. I apologize for sounding harsh. But you know how science works. I didn’t make the rules; I merely play by them.
You get same game, and I’ll give you some facts. Last post to you.
jae, do as Larry suggests and take your ideas over to RC. Suggestion.
Theyre quite good at that sort of thing. Fact Steve M has asked you to restrict your commenting to published literature. Fact
Theres a reason for that. Fact
Its because your error-laden musings are a major distraction. Fact.
The reason you dont get the feedback you are seeking is because its not worthy of anyones time. Hard fact.
I apologize for sounding harsh. Apology
But you know how science works. Debatable.
I didnt make the rules; I merely play by them.
Fact.
RE 201 Boris, happy holidays to you as well. Hat tips to you for keeping a good sense of humour.
217: Thanks for your input, but I don’t see many FACTS. (1) RC is NOT good at anything that threatens the status quo. Try interacting with that bunch of PR “scientists,” and you will soon see what I’m sayin’. (2) I do restrict my comments to the published literature, although I do not often provide specific citations. I’ll try to do better here. If my “error-laden musings” are a major distraction, please tell me why and quit arm-waving. (3) Please tell me what’s wrong with this empirical information; not one person has refuted one of these findings, yet. (4) What RULES are there here in science? (5) If all the “experts” are so sure of themselves, then what about the discussion on another thread about Popper? We have a perfect example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis here.
Steve: jae, your thoughts on water vapor feedbacks may or may not be right, but they are your thoughts and opinions; they are not a commentary on mainstream literature. It would be far more helpful and germane if you can locate how such issues are treated in standard texts and articles and try to isolate the differences. The other reason why I discourage people volunteering their own opinions and theories is that I don’t have time to engage and debate everyone’s theories, I’m trying to do my own work. I realize that people are bursting to discuss their own bright ideas but all too often both the blog and me personally end up getting tagged with whatever’s posted here. Sometimes I prune things, sometimes I’m too tired or busy. I’d be far more interestied in people wading through Trenberth and locating some highly specific issue on paragraph 6 on page 546 or whatever than in bright ideas unconnected to the literature. Pretty much everything that I do is grounded as commentary on mainstream literature and that keeps it connected. I think that others would do well to follow my example.
re 148. what possessed them to do this. I noticed tamino did the same thing, trying to “forecast” the anomaly
a month out from the end. Where is the upside in that bet? Tiny upside if you’re right, HUGE downside if you’re
wrong.
There is always the ignore option. Besides I do not think that CA would be fairly judged by those that would single out those who might come here motivated by an agenda and those that would chose to so judge would probably do so for much lesser reasons.
The short-lived nerd thread I think pointed to a difference between RC and CA in that more here at CA take themselves sufficiently less seriously to invoke some humor into the conversations and show an ability to make fun of themselves on occasion. Someone pointed to the fact that the people at RC are probably just as attractive as the people here and would no more eat their children then we at CA would. I certainly know that my being considered eye candy to the opposite sex even at an advanced age has nothing to do with my failure to post at RC.
RE 218. Kenneth we agree. some while ago I posted on the phenomena of naughty marginalia in midieval holy texts. the point of the
post was this. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. don’t judge a book by the doodles in the margin. We are
driven to make sense of things. to simplify. to generalize. Resist that urge. I like that CA is rich thick and creamy. I like
that it has sprinkles and nuts, and the odd twisted worm. I like that SteveMc puts up with some frivolity.. and then
gets back to business.
Somebody make sense of STAFFAN. go ahead. I double dog dare you.
Steve Mc:
Steve Mc, I understand you completely, but would like to make a couple of observations. I think my empirical information contradicts a great deal of the mainstream literature, although I have not cited individual publications. I present raw empirical data with some possible implications. They apply to the whole gamut of AGW publications, not just one. This is original research and empirical data, not “opinions.” But, I will respect your wishes. I don’t see the necessity to pick some individual publication to “pick on,” but I will do so if you wish.
Steve: Just my view. Unless you can show exactly where the standard texts are wrong, nobody is really going to spend too much time trying to figure out what’s wrong with your views. They’ll assume that there’s probably some catch somewhere but not have the energy to try to locate it. If your views are correct, then you should be able to identify where major texts go astray – and I’d encourage very tight reading of the texts, totally resisting any temptation to refer to or justify your own empiricism.
@Larry–
Darn! I missed it! 🙂
I missed the comments on the Ferrari thread too. I have empirical evidence that suggests Ferraris are not chick magnets. This blows that British guys theory out of the water.
Re: #220
I would not know where to begin since quite frankly I find his posts clear as a bell and most insightful about the people who post here. Am I wrong? Am I transposing?
RE: #221 – Check out Pielke Sr’s body of work, jae.
Lucia; you might have missed the Ferrari chick magnet thread, but here is the article that spawned it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/16/ncar116.xml
The comments below the Daily Telegraph article are nearly as good as the ones that were posted here.
Re: #222
The word is often handed down by parable and in this case it is not the literal effect of the Ferrari on chicks but that those chicks should, no, must know their responsibilities as environmentally aware chicks. Though not yet written in stone it well may soon become a commandment and we do not need any nitpicking of a potential commandment.
Wow! What a hammering on AGW proponents:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport
“Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.
…
This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new “consensus busters” report is poised to redefine the debate. ”
Steve: It is my belief that there is a very strong majority among climate scientists in IPCC conclusions; even if there is a minority opinion, the majority is not in disarray. If I were a policy-maker, I would be guided by the views of IPCC and like institutions, however imperfect the processes were leading up to the reports – notwithstanding the fact that I’m one of the people quoted in the release. This is not inconsistent with my belief that much more thorough and truly independent due diligence is long overdue; time has a habit of marching on and such a review commissioned today might aid policy 18 months from now.
Since we are on unthreaded, can someone point me to the “official” temperature record? I understand that there is more than one, e.g. GISS, HadCRUT, etc. Just simple month by month data points would be ideal. I visited the Hadley site, tried to pull in a file and couldn’t use it. Imported it to Excel and it looked like gibberish. It is remarkably difficult for one to begin to educate oneself on these issues, almost to the point where some of the opaqueness is what began making me suspect some jiggery pokery.
Thanks to Davis Doherty on Tim Lambert’s blog:
Justin Kruger; David Dunning (1999). “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 112134. PMID 10626367.
Click to access psp7761121.pdf
Re#180, John Creighton:
This is exactly what is used in halogen infrared lamp with dichroic glass coating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_lamp
In Earth surface/atmosphere system (oceans aside) this mechanism is of secondary importance. The reason is thermalization of adsorbed by GHG molecules LWR from the surface.
Re #229 Must-read. My favorite phrase: “domain-general incompetence”. Great TV show: DGI Guys.
Steve McI:
You fiercely opposed discussion on problems with CO2 measurements and antropogenic emissions, etc., only to learn from quite civil and informative discussion on CO2 thread that your fear of profanation was overblown.
Get used that thermodynamic discussion is not going to fade. It is just too important. No fear, make a thread, and repeat it monthly. Nothing wrong will happen.
P.S. Eventually, you will be forced to allow discussion on alternative energy and alike. Intellectual might of posters on your blog is too valuable to be muted on such important topics.
Due diligence, accountability, transparency, archiving, disclosure. “Audit”. NOT junk thermo. Snippity-snip. Get it?
Bender:
Wake up. CA overgrew simple Climate Audit long time ago.
re 231: and also:
😉
#234 And now, Andrey Levin, it’s time to prune back that ugly parasitic growth. Hold still, this won’t hurt a bit.
#229
Ahem…isn’t the recent education explicitly focused on self-esteem enhancement, favoring skills over knowledge and leaving aside “drilling of facts”?
The article title just characterizes the predictable outcome of such approach.
Re 228 (Peter Thompson). Official temperature record? Its whichever gives the highest temperatures. While CRU is used in IPCC, which as we are always told represents the ‘scientific concensus’, Gore chose not to use it in his film. He used GISS. Why? Because CRU shows 1998 as the hottest year on record, while GISS shows 2005 sslightly higher. This allowed Gore to say in his film (made in 2006), that “last year was the hottest on record”.
I’ve downloaded CRU data from the Hadley website, so I don’t know why you having problems. I think I had to download it as text (which comes in blocks of data, not easily chartable), and then play around with it in Excel before I could plot it.
Re 228, Peter Thompson
Try this link: http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html
Just scroll down the page to see UAH MSU, RSS MSU, NCDC, GISTEMP, Hadley CET, Armagh, Hadley CRUG, Radiosonde, SIDC SSN and various combinations thereof.
re: 182
Ding ding ding ding! That’s the truth jae. There are many more “wobbles” then just Milankovitch’s too. And they matter. And don’t forget all the cosmic crazy stuff going on above (or outside) the atmosphere scientists are still trying figure out, and… mountains are growing, mountains are shrinking, winds are blowing, the earth bulges, plates move…the dynamics of the Earth/Moon relationship, 1,ooos of above and undersea vents unexplored …look how long we’ve been talking about this stuff, (and a piddly time span of 50 years does not the Earth make, so they’ve got to get rid of the lag, the MWP & LIA ) and every “evidence” for this alarming revelation they have is not just a little bit flawed.
Anyway in other news…word is Al Gore’s been up at the North Pole hassling Rudolf and Santa about their carbon footprints. Hanson is collecting ice core samples next to Santa’s workshop (as historical temp proxy for the whole region)
Happy Holidays Everyone at CA! You too Boris 🙂
Re #221/#224
In addition to Trenberth (#221) and Pielke (#224), consider RC staples, such as:
Click to access ClimateVol1.pdf
If their thermo is wrong, point to the page, paragraph, equation. THEN show us your improvements.
A question for Nasif Nahle:
What is your assessment of the following statement?
Larry 194, “Its egotistical to think that the leading lights of AGW, the Hansens and Manns of the world, are such idiots that someone with only an undergrad course in thermo can spot a hole big enough to drive a truck through.”
Hm. How about an undergrad course in basic statistics? 😉
(Or in one case Steve has noted here, a junior High School course on basic geography!)
You want ego? Here’s an inline comment from about a year ago by Gavin directed to a comment I made there (very near the first days the RC blog started, around when “State of Fear” came out) and I commented on their networking with “The Daily Kos” (It was very much like the S of F plot) the topic was about their Daily Kos interview. Also keep in mind he held my power to reply back while the rest of his fan club attacked me, even calling me names like “SUv Mom”:
Gavin’s words:
“Solely to combat Michael Crichton? Hardly. The low level of understanding on this issue in much of what passes for public discourse is a much bigger target than just his (admittedly egregious) example. Weve been interviewed my many different media organisations – of which DKos is just one – and if anyone else asks well talk to them too. (Oh, and just to show good will, I even corrected your spelling). – gavin]”
You know why he had to say that right?-about my spelling? Take a look at his spelling. (he allowed the snark to continue too-comments about my IQ and so on continued while I couldn’t reply.)
I didn’t say anything about combating Michael Crichton , I said seems like RC was created to obstruct the valid questions about the Hockey Stick and the science behind it all pointed out by Crichton (and M & M too) and asked why in the heck were they associating with such a radical/political blog like that.
Nothing much has changed. And the “interviewed by many different media organizations” …that “different” part is debatable as well.
Bender, please exlain why I would be ingtrigued. I’m still trying to figure out all the players here. I don’t ken.
Parsel-tongued Anglo sibilants slither not in Eire.
==============================
er, uh, ‘I ken not’.
=========
Today, Susann, I’m the language constable.
===========================
jae, I think it is interesting that if you try to find papers on water vapor, there are tons of them leading up to the late 90’s and all state how important it is to understand it and its role in the climate but then boom the IPCC comes to the forefront and the papers after that are hard to find.
see here for great points:http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/mockler.html
and here in the news Wonder where the follow-ups on these papers are?
253: Yeah, it’s funny that the climate science experts agree that they have serious problems with water vapor and clouds, but I guess they feel that these serious problems can’t possibly alter their conclusions.
In 256, my bad, I should have said “Many climate scientists…Some, like Lindzen, are addressing the water/cloud issue head-on.
230,
I’d love to have an intelligent discussion on that, but I’ve seen ample evidence that all that would do is bring all the crackpots out of the woodwork hawking theories from cold fusion to abiotic oil, and the intelligent conversation would be impossible. Sadly, Steve’s right.
re 243. you don’t ken? do you barbie?
Must agree with you Larry, the noise level would become intolerable. I have tried to read threads at RC, and I see 20 posts of invective, insults and opinion stated as fact, for every one with citations and numbers. “Because it is” if you bold it and capitalize it is a valid argument there. What drew me to this site was the mathematics, and the fact that with some ability and a lot of patience you can follow and educate yourself on the issues.
Long ago when I was a poster on Slate’s “the fray” a couple of poster’s ” the ghost of a-z”
and “ender” had an intriquing idea for comment moderation. Turn it into an economy. I’ll steal their
idea and suggest a wordpress add-on.
To engage in the comment economy you must register ( email and moniker (IP) ).
You are given 100 quatloos every week.
If you make a comment you pay quatloos to make the comment. ( say 10 quatloos)
If people like your comment, then they
can “pay” you in quatloos.
So a Lurker, who only reads and doesnt comment, gets 100 qualoos a week, and he “pays” to
read UC or JeanS or Hu or Bender or RichardT..
If people don’t like posts about Thermo or C02, if they wont pay in Quatloos to fund it,
then the number of those posts is limited.
If people don’t like frivolity it dies on the vine.
This is different than “digg” . digging a post costs you nothing.
When posts cost nothing you get a delta effect.. simply you get a wide diverenge of
behavior
230 250
We discussed this issue last week, and lucia graciously opened her new blog at http://rankexploits.com/musings/2007/new-climate-blog/#comments
for the discussion of topics outside of those acceptable to Steve M here at CA.
To all elitists who want to snipety snip jae and others:
You would probably really hate one of my Sigma team sessions. You’d want to snip other team members’ brainstorming / multivoting / Ishikawa Diagram components.
Well, I guess everyone can now see where I am coming from – I’ve shown my hand. I think even Steve Mc may disagree with my approach. Oh well, I know it’s right. As always, the two camps, pro and con Sigma.
# 240
Jim C.,
The molecule of CO2, like the molecule of H2O and O3, has three vibrational modes. Vibrational modes determine the bands where that molecule has its maxima of absorption. The frequency 667 cm^-1 would be an exclusive window for CO2 if water vapor and ozone had null absorption at that band, but both water vapor and ozone play a role at that frequency also. The maximum limit of absorption for CO2 at a frequency 667 cm^-1 is 30 W m^-2, which would be almost 100% from the total IR emitted by the surface. Concerning to wavelengths, the limitations in its vibrational modes reduces the bands at which the carbon dioxide absorbs energy, which are in the 2-4 micrometers and 13-17 micrometers regions. In the symmetric band elongation mode the CO2 doesnt absorb energy. The exclusive hole or window for CO2 is a fallacy for now.
Correction:
It must say:
“which would be almost 100% of energy the CO2 can absorb from the total IR emitted by the surface.”
Re #256
Care to explain how you derive this number?
Steve Sadlov, even free wheeling brainstorming sessions need to have some guidelines and limitations, i.e. you need to handle the one and ten sigma guys in a six sigma discussion.
I have read and participated in discussions (few as they may be) here at CA where I am looking for Steve M to pop in and stop the craziness. Steve M, as owner of the site, has to set limits in these discussions and even evolving limits in order for him to accomplish his objectives for all the efforts that he puts into it. Ownership alone gives him that authority and responsibility, but the efforts he puts into introducing threads – that far exceeds any other participants efforts here should certainly provide him some slack from how and where he decides to snip.
RE: #259 – Agreed, Facilitation 101. My comment was directed at those who do not want brainstorming, multivoting, etc at all. Sure, reviewing papers is a productive activity (as is writing them). But if that is all we end up doing here, we’ll be underutilizing what’s truly available. (/Hyde Park corner off) 😆
Moshpit has fun at RC.. on the thread covering Ross’s paper on economics.
The theory is to Test Ross’s approach against GCM
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=507#comment-77274
Moshpit welcomes them to the world of Audit: WOA
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=507#comment-77317
Gavins hipchecks the pitster
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=507#comment-77358
Ray in the second “man” in and cheapshots me with a sheep joke.
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=507#comment-77371
I have three comments pending. The last, of course is best.
After chastising me for wanting to check the data. I actually draged my sorry butt to the site
were the GCM data is entombed.
Here is my post to RC. See if hits. Boris, you’ll admit this is not out of line.
Gavin and Ray I apologize.
I know it seemed a bit tedious to insist on checking the data, you know checking that the model actually put out the data in the repository. And Ray I loved that story about the sheep. That secretary of the interior was one sharp fella.
So, As I get ready to slog through this, I’m going to ask Ross if he’s interested, as I get ready to do this, I’m reminded of the advice on the site gavin directed me to. You remember, then I said, I would want to check that the data actually came from the models and was good. and then ray told a funny story about sheep. So,
I spied these sheep.
“Check errata page
In some cases data contributed to the database have been found to contain errors of various sorts. Certain files are then withdrawn or replaced and an entry is logged on the errata page: https://esg.llnl.gov:8443/about/errata.do
The errata page should be checked frequently to avoid analyzing “garbage”, and to determine whether any of the files you have downloaded from the PCMDI site need to be updated or removed. If any of you find undetected errors in the data you are analyzing, please contact the responsible modeling group and copy taylor13@llnl.gov. ”
Lookit them sheep.
RE: #261 – RE: Errata – the ones that are the worst are the ones meant solely for CYA and not to help the customer. Published in the dead of night to an obscure web page, with no additional notification.
I’ve always wondered about the climate effect of Zodiac dust (ring of dust in the solar system) as the Earth passes above and below the plane of the solar system as it orbits the sun. Certainly there is some variation in the amount of solar radiation received when the Earth is in the midst of the dust vs. slightly above or below it.
Then a google search revealed this:
Click to access ecrs06-s1-72.pdf
… which deals with the cloud-forming, and albedo changes due to the dust. They seem pretty sure of things. From their conclusion:
“It is shown that the variations of interplanetary dust concentration
are responsible for the changes of the Earths climate that
occurred in the nearby past and in the far past.”
But I don’t see where this paper was published. Perhaps it didn’t get past peer review?
263 nanny
Interesting article. I like the fact that it is falsifiable, via the nice clear prediction made in Fig. 5.
RE: #263 – it’s probably getting time to modify the paradigm of “the atmosphere” as a set piece, bounded item. Try this. There are stars, gas giants, rock worlds, nebulae, dust, gas and dark matter. Some rock worlds, and perhaps others, have both water and a biosphere / Gaia like structure. Such a rock world exerts forces on the matter around it and some of that matter is retained for long periods or outright accreted. There are gravity, nuclear forces, electromotive forces, etc in play. There is a certain layout of matter at a given time. The layout is dynamic and its inherent forces constantly interact and change. Now, reexamine the “climate” in light of all this. There is energy across a broad spectrum incident upon a living rock world some of which is photonic, some of which is ionic, some of which is electronic/magnetic, some nuclear, etc. There is a response function characteristic of a rock world, to incident energy, that is a function of many parameters which are inherent to aspects of the world, aspects of its near space, aspects of its host star and aspects of deep space.
Well looks like I’m blocked again. Gavin told me to go get the GCM data.
I told him that I’d have to check the data ( see 261) anyway..
I’m told that checking IPCC data is DELUSIONAL.
So I go to get the data and stumble on the errata
Check out all the NASA errors
STUNNING:
https://esg.llnl.gov:8443/about/errata.do
For you guys who are not banned see my post in 261 and go have some fun with the sheeple
This is the best science blog on the net. Don’t mess with success. Have some threads that you introduce and moderate. Have others that you leave alone except to segment them like unthreaded. In other words, don’t change anything. Don’t worry about trying to control that herd of cats in unthreaded.
Water vapor related:
Pielke Sr. comments on Held and Sodden, 2000
RE: #266 – RC are also consoring me again as well.
RE: #266 – RC are also censoring me again as well.
RE 266 I’ll wait and see before rendering my verdict. But they tell me that I’m delusiional
for wanting to CHECK GCM data, and then I go to download GCM data and find an errata sheet as long as my
…arm and then when I see how many entries gavin has on this sheet ” opps our data is bad”
and when I point this out my post doesnt hit the site? It’s the holidays, so I will be generous.
BENDER, SADLOV, DAN HUGHES.. others you guys have to read through this errata.
https://esg.llnl.gov:8443/about/errata.do
This is the repository of IPCC GCM runs..
Ok ….
Hmm, that is quite the array of problems. A bit surprising given how much of this you would figure would be automated. Units wrong, observations missing. “Data was erroneous”!? That sounds, ummm, vaguely problematic.
Maybe this is why they don’t understand when we ask about “propagation of error”. They think we’re talking about data processing errors (as opposed to statistical imprecision)?!
bender– Are you asking about statistical imprecision in one run of a GCM? I’m not sure this is a meaningful question. The output of the GCM is, quite precisely, the output of that run. It isn’t even like a lab experiment where something happened in the lab but it was measured imprecisely. Whatever the models spits out is the model output.
Are you asking something else?
#274
Nope. That’s *exactly* what I’m asking. Each parameter is estimated with imprecision, and those uncertainties propagate. Not through time, but across functions. Sure, the propagation is not always additive or multiplicative, as many errors are non-independent and will cancel. But this is one aspect of GCM that AFAICT is completely ignored. Notably, that kind of error is going to propagate through time and will also affect the precision among ensemble runs. Leading to biases and inaccuracies in both kinds of series.
274. Why would you assume that the model output it’s data?
Now, if you lock down the system. remove all other code. Turn off all other processes.
erase all output files, then run the model, you have a high probability that the model
output its data.
RE: #272 – What a bunch of buggy rubbish. I get the impression that bugs from over 3 years ago are still unresolved.
In a thread about James Hansen on AccuWeather’s global warming blog, an AGW anti-skeptic asserted as established fact that the cooling of the 1970’s was a result of land-use changes and aerosols. I’ve read claims that GCMs are able to match the average surface temperature record by including greenhouse warming to produce the general warming, and aerosol cooling to produce the period of cooling. Obviously these models must include an estimate of the level of atmospheric aerosols over the last century or so. What’s the basis for this estimate? A bit of Googling failed find any useful information, and it strikes me as a difficult problem, given what I would assume is an uneven distribution of man-made aerosols. Does anyone know where the estimate comes from or how accurate it is?
Question about GCM’s:
I was debating global warming with somebody who claimed that it’s impossible to come up with a model that is consistent with recent temperature increases without including AGW/CO2 in the model; and that therefore AGW is necessary to explain recent temperature increases.
This strikes me as likely BS. Do you have an argument, or better yet, a reference that speaks to this claim?
This is a test. This is only a test. If this were a real comment it wouldn’t be gibberish.
Sigma? σ
Mean in brackets:
delta δ
re 279. you are refering to attribution studies. you can find references in th ipcc reports.
without c02 as a factor the models diverge from “reality” in hindcast mode.
Before Unthreaded goes away, we say real fast:
Southern California at this time : Temp outside is 1° C on our thermometer. We are freezing. Second year in a row now. Normal? Not for us. (we are over 40 born and raised) Trend? Hope not! Brrrr.
Thanks for listening.:)
Re: 272, mosher, model errata
Two points:
* Most of the errors relate to bad data of some kind, not programming errors.
* And yet the models still uniformly show AGW both before and after the fixes, presumably.
Seems suspicious.
On the topic of thermodynamics in climate, this is really a hugely important issue. Unfortunately, the level of thermo discussion on CA that I’ve come across is pretty much in la-la land. At some point, when I revisit some of the broader thermo/climate topics in my personal research, I will try to do some posting here . I think that some of the engineers and physicists that post to this site could provoke some interesting discussions and insights, and statistics is certainly critical to the subject
For your reference, I’ve written a textbook entitled “Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans” which is targeted at climate issues
The book is unfortunately stupidly expensive, with publishers raising the price by 50% since it was published in 1999.
Much info from the book can be found from the web site for my thermodynamics course
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/index.html
Note the errata sheet for the book. Also of interest are the worksheets, which serve as sort of a tutorial. The figures in the text are in .ppt files under “lectures”.
The thermo issues that I think are most important are (not necessarily in order) are listed below, and many of these lie at the interface of thermo with fluid dynamics:
Role of the phase transition between liquid and ice cloud particles in the combined cloud/water vapor feedback
Interplay of the multi-scale fluid dynamics associated with convection with the thermodynamics of the phase change (I have tried with only minimal success to bring entropy explicitly into this analysis
How to understand and quantify thermodynamic feedbacks in a nonlinear climate model with millions to billions of degrees of freedom (note: it makes little sense to separate the water vapor and cloud feedbacks, other than in the simplest of 1 D energy balance climate models)
A better thermodynamic theory of maximum potential intensity of hurricanes
A more complete treatment of sea ice and snow thermodynamics/optics in climate models (the basic knowledge base on this is much better than what has made it into climate models)
Use of global entropy as an integral constraint for irreversible processes in the atmosphere and for understanding global climate change
Note: I do not have time now to discuss any of these topics, I am writing this message in the hopes of discouraging fruitless and pointless discussions on the topic. I may have time to respond to any requests for suggested journal articles to look at on any of these broad topics, if anyone is interested. And I would be happy to answer any specific questions about my textbook
#284 Judith. It is actually cheap for a good engineering book. If you do come back to discuss these issues, will you be posting what page in your book and/or lesson in your course that should be reviewed before commenting?
Sunshine duration accounts for 93% of all warming since 1951 (in Australia)
http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/12/sunshine-duration-accounts-for-93-of.html
Which speaks to the influence of cloud cover affecting temperature and climate. You can’t have a greenhouse effect without the sun. Very interesting.
Since this is an open thread, could I post on a totally different subject?
Polar Bears 22 Dec. 2007
After a spirited discussion with a friend last night I decided to investigate for myself the GW risk to polar bears. Googling polar bears,population, I came up with a very large number of hits, almost all sounding doom, and some of those from what should be reputable organizations. A fairly typical one was from the WWF.
From http://www.panda.org/news_facts/newsroom/index.cfm?uNewsID=89940
WWF press release:
Polar Bear Populations on the decline
16 Dec 2006
The number of polar bear populations in decline has increased from one in 2001 to five in 2006, WWF warned today. There are only 19 polar bear populations in the world, so this decline represents more then a quarter of the species populations.
Declining populations of polar bears indicate that the entire Arctic is under immense stress as a result of climate change. With the Arctic warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world, and sea ice over the Arctic projected to disappear in summer before the end of this century, polar bears face serious trouble, especially as they depend on sea ice to live, hunt and breed.
Happily the WWF site also referenced the following url: http://assets.panda.org/downloads/polar_bear.pdf
Proceedings of IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group 20-24 June 2005
Perusal of the report shows that polar bear populations are unknown, period. They are estimated from various model runs based on reports, hunter sightings, and attempts to count bears from flyovers. However, assuming the resulting estimates are good, there are 19 reasonably distinct populations, with the following data, summarized from the table on pages 41/42
4 populations declining, with total population of approx 4150, and annual removals of 331 or 8%
1 population reduced but trend increasing, total population 284, removals 3 or 1.1%
1 population increasing, population 215, annual removals 4 or 1.9%
6 populations stable or not reduced, total population 6450, removals 293 or 4.5%
4 populations with total population of 6000, status unknown or insufficient data, no estimate of risk or removals, or risk stated as lower in 1 case.
3 populations, numbers unknown, status unknown, no estimate of risk or removals.
Total known population 17,000 out of estimated total polar bear population of 20,000 to 25,000. Those last 3 unknown populations then should total about 5000 bears. There are only 4 populations estimated to be in decline, representing less than 20% of the population, not 5 and more than a quarter. Stretching the long bow, one could include the reduced population group in declining, for 5, and use only the quantified populations to get to more than one quarter. My guess is that the best population estimates are best for high removal populations, which would render the WWF statistic questionable at best, and downright dishonest as most likely.
Removals are defined as human caused mortality. For at least one of the declining populations (west Hudson Bay) there have been recommendations to reduce quotas, which had not yet been authorized at the time of the report. West Hudson Bay (Churchill), is where the tours to see the bears go. They have frequent visits of bears into town and the garbage dump, and not infrequently have to tranquilize and remove, or in extreme cases, kill the visitors. My wife personally witnessed both.
Population is estimated to be in decline only for populations with human caused annual mortality well above 5%. There is no link to global warming. This is probably the most outrageous spin I have seen yet from the AGW community.
in #82 I asked for clarification regarding explanations of the atmospheric greenhouse effect that appeared to contravene the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Unfortunately there were no reasonable explanations in the thread, which then turned somewhat pear shaped. Larry suggested in #170 that this should be taken to RC. Well I took it to another forum first where it was pretty well confirmed that the issue is one of semantics: the raising of surface temperature is a change to the mean average over time, not a direct heating. Emboldened by this, I contributed to a thread at RC, where some unfortunate was going through the same treadmill, unfortunately the RC guys were not merciful. The responses to my post generally in agreement, one being more negative (but in essence saying the same thing). I find the responses of the RC guys throughout on this subject intriguing, it seems very confrontational. I suspect this is because the radiative balance “model” of looking at the subject is sympathetic to their language. Here is the thread: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/convenient-untruths/?comments_popup=483#comment-79000
Also Eli Rabett and Atmoz in their rebuttal of the T&G paper, and John V in a response to me in this thread, use the argument that the 2nd law doesn’t apply because the earth is not a closed system. In classical thermodynamics, where entropy is being considered, it does indeed matter whether a system is open or closed, but not for the statistical mechanics which are applicable in the greenhouse effect. I’m not sure whether the earth would be considered open or closed: it does share matter, but probably not meaningfully; it’s irrelevant anyway.
This post is intended to close the thread arc I originated in #82, and not to further debate thermo 2nd law; my curiosity on this at least is satisfied. And if it brings closure to any other confused souls out there, all the better.
RE 284. Thanks Dr. Curry. you know Dr. Browning runs a ‘exponetial growth in physical systems’ thread here and
he keeps the level of conversation pretty high and doesnt suffer fools. I was thinking that Thermo could
use a similiar approach. visiting professor.
MJW No. 278
You ask
Despite the fact that this is presented by some as “settled science”, I think you will have trouble finding a definitive study wherein the aerosol forcings during the seventies are known with any certainty. To get a feel for how this argument goes, you can start here and here.
In the first link, you can get a pretty clear opinion from Willis Eschenbach on how he thinks the aerosol modeling forcings came about. In the second link, Steve Mc more diplomatically refers to the use of aerosols in the models as “opportunistic.”
It is clear that aerosols and land use need to be consdered. You can use the search feature on the right side of the page to search CA for aerosols + GCMs to get a feel for such discussions, or you can search Roger Pielke Sr’s site for aerosols.
The term “settled” will probably not be the first thing that comes to mind.
288, the problem is that we don’t have any modeling ‘experts’ who know just enough to be dangerous. Not so for thermo (and transport).
Even Browning’s threads got a fair amount of noise over the weather v.s. climate thing, and other tangentially topical side issues.
@Larry– The simplified descriptions of the 2nd law just brings out the worst in people. When my husband taught ME thermo back in ’89 or so, he about midyear he hit the 2nd law of thermo. Naturally after the class, a student came up to ask him if it was true that evolution violated the 2nd law of thermo. Jim had never heard this idea, and was flabergasted. He later told me about the event, and I told him, “Oh, yeah… that one…”. Discussion ensued.
People want to use the 2nd law of thermo without defining systems, accounting for heat transfer, doing any math, looking up a single property, actually understanding what entropy really means or writing anything down, much less doing any math. These same people would never do the same with any other law of the universe, but they want to do it with thermo.
Why they wish to do this is a mystery, but there is plenty of empirical evidence that they want to do this.
Lucia, 291, the second law is like relativity. People just plain don’t want to accept the limitations that it places on their sci fi fantasies. To make matters worse, serious physicists have trouble reconciling it with the reversibility of the time arrow. When there’s a desire to make something go away, people will find a way.
As far as evolution’s relationship to the 2nd law, that gives rise to a whole theory of self-organizing systems, which goes well beyond biology. Interesting stuff, but I think it should be obvious why it doesn’t violate the 2nd law. Again, there are certain people who want evolution to violate the 2nd law, not to falsify the 2nd law, but to falsify evolution. Beware the person who wants a certain outcome.
Yes, we’re well into snipping territory.
re 290, I’m trying to trick Judith into running a thermo thread here Larry. Sheesh.
If any of the thermo clowns abound after she started a thread, I’d feel no compunction
whatsoever about yanking a jersey over their heads. Wait, I feel that way now..
( psst your thermo amature hour comment slayed me.. dont let it go to your head.)
#284 Thanks for the reference and the comment Dr. Curry.
#287 No polar bear poplations in N.Amer are in any decline that can be attributable to loss of sea ice/warming. Populations ARE becoming increasingly at risk due to slightly lower body fat (tougher hunting without sea ice), ASSUMING that the additional fat is actually needed in a warmer world. You want refs? They’re not hard to find. Grizzlies are far, far more at risk than polar bears, and it’s not AGW.
@steven mosher
If Judy decided to take the time to do this, it would educational.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it would solve “the problem”. Judy wants to discuss problems that really are important both go AWG generally, and to transport more broadly. The people bringing up idiosyncratic theories they try to support using thermo never discuss any topic on her list of important questions. Not… even…. close….
What would happen is this: Judy would post very interesting threads on thermodynamics feedback or similar topics. Meanwhile, we would still read theories explaining how CO2 can’t lead to any changes in the steady state (or even stationary) GMST because the CO2 doesn’t have enough heat capacity!
The real question is: Does SteveM want to permit these sorts of discussions given that he’d prefer to keep noise noise down? Or should he just let these sorts of things go hogwild? Given the priorities I think SteveM has, if I were him, I just might put “thermodynamics” in my spam filter list. I’d add 2nd law etc. OTOH, when I get my blog rolling, I’m going not going to filter because I want to read what questions people have. Crackpot, not crackpot? I don’t care. I want to read them, and I don’t want to have to hunt them down.
Dr. Curry would be sooooo welcome on thermo. It wouldn’t take much. She wouldn’t need to shut down all the noise. Merely point out to the rest of us once in a while where they’re going dead wrong. IMO seeing junk “science” in action is very useful, if you can be sure it’s making it to the curb.
You thermojunk folks are in for it now!
If someone gets something wrong, it’s easy to correct. When someone gets things not even wrong (hat tip: W. Pauli), it’s a lot harder to point out the error, because it’s not even clear what is being claimed. It isn’t the wrong things that fluster me, it’s the N.E.W. things.
dreamin:#279 – The response to this claim is to point out that it is impossible to create a model that replicates recent temperatures. Period.
re 296. Yes lucia, but How long do the crack pots last? Witness Dr. Brownings thread and Leifs solar thread.
After a while most of the crackpots lose steam,suffer heat death,and prove the case they are trying to defeat
And when an INVITED guest is speaking then we have a much bigger HAMMER to hit them with, socially that is.
Its Steves house, he invites a guest speaker, you better damn well behave.
re 296. Yes lucia, but How long do the crack pots last? Witness Dr. Brownings thread and Leifs solar thread.
After a while most of the crackpots lose steam,suffer heat death,and prove the case they are trying to defeat
And when an INVITED guest is speaking then we have a much bigger HAMMER to hit them with, socially that is.
Its Steves house, he invites a guest speaker, you better damn well behave.
#298 Agreed, as usual, Larry. How do you argue with someone who says there’s no real difference between, say, watts and watts per metre squared. There’s really not a major problem with thermotalk. It’s just a few individuals that need to be cracked hard a couple of times. Take ’em out behind the woodshed …
Hmm. interesting Tamino post:
To test for statistical significance of the 1998-present trend I applied an F-test to
monthly global temperature anomaly from GISS, compensating for red noise by modelling the data as an AR1 process,
using the Yule-Walker estimate of autocorrelation, and applying the complete formula for the impact of
autoregression on linear regression (Lee & Lund 2004, Revisiting simple linear regression with autocorrelated errors, Biometrika, 91, 240245).
Rabett suggests exactly what I suggested: why not write to Wegamn and ask him how he concluded what he did?
Tamino is asking the right question, not “has there been any warming since 1998?” but “are observations past 1998 consistent with the forecast trend of increasing temperature?”. Kudos there. But herein lies a problem. What *is* that forecast trend and what is the uncertainty on it? If, as G. Shmidt suggests, the expected trend from GCMs is hard to estimate with precision, then almost ANY set of obervations could be “consistent” with an increasing trend. i.e. The data – as usual – are insuffficient to draw the conclusion that each side tries to claim for itself.
bender #302
I am still wondering why this issue was not closed down by the simple expedient of definitions.
The Watt is an IS unit of Power equal to one Joule per Second, its Quality is Power, its Property is Rate of Production of Energy, its Dimensions are ML^2T^-3 and its units are Watts.
The property Watts per square metre is a Quality of Illumination, its Dimensions are MT^-3, its Units are Brillance, where Brilliance times Area equals Power.
#305 The answer, I believe, is in the paper I cited an hour or so ago. Kruger & Dunning (1999) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 6:1121-34.
RE 304.. Here is the problem I have…When you believe that the underlying physical model
suggests that temps should go up as C02 goes up, then you dont get to simply do a linear
regression. Well, you can of course..I understand that you can run a linear regression on the
data. and I understand that the temps can be said to be “increasing”, but I think what
Wegman meant may be something different than ” a linear regression will show no increase”
So, One should ask him as you ably noted
re 283 Hi Frost! I should have made my point more clearly. I was at RC. Gavin suggested a silly test
for Ross’ analysis of the temperature record. He pointed me at the IPCC data. I said I would like to
verifiy that the DATA in the archive actually comes from the models.
Now, why would I do this? Because I’m pretty certain they have no quality control in updating the code.
They responded that I was delusional for wanting to double check that the data came from the models
( ie rerun the model to get fresh data)
So, I went to get the data. I found the errata. You look at that errata. Does it give you confidence?
Imagine if you downloaded the data today, spent 6 months working on it and then when you publish you find
out that the data is BAD.
In their world you have to “check back frequently” to see if the data you downloaded is garbage.
WTF? “Hey united airlines, make sure you check back frequently for updates to the flight control software”
your truely Boeing.
I don’t expect them to have perfect code. I don’t expect it to be error free. I do expect it
to conform to industry standards. I do expect them to tell users when the data changes.
Not some silent phase in on an obscure site.
Jae, can you turn your argument into a simple a few brief points. I’m not bashing
just curious. I give an example.
1. AWG claims that the globe is warming.
2. The data should be checked.
3. We should start with the land record.
Something that simple.
people been taking some hard hits today
and fundamentally I don’t like to see people excluded . Kinda why bender and
I would argue for a separate place here for these discussions to take place.
That doesnt mean they get a free pass. on the contrary.
311, one of these days, I’d like to see Gavin on the witness stand trying to explain to some savage plaintiff’s attorney that that’s how the big boys do it.
no talk about darwin and religion or I will unlease Dr Gene on you:
312: mosh, I’m curious, which argument? Regardless, I will not discuss any of my arguments here, until I can somehow conform with Steve’s requirements, which I guess will be explained soon. I hate to be a persona non grata and will not be one. But I really resent the taunting that’s going on here.
RE 316. You are not persona non grata. On the other thread you’ll see me and bender
and sadlov lobbying to find a place for thermo/c02 etc etc. I’m just struggling with
a simple version of what your argument/position is.
Don’t sweat the teasing, sometimes folks do that just cause they are bored. If folks didnt like
you they would ignore your butt.
jae: what mosh said.
I don’t want you censored. I only want you to do what Steve M and Larry ask: (1) tie it to the mainstream literature; (2) take it to RC once in a while. If you don’t like the sight of your own blood then you may want to reconsider publishing in the science blog business (or else drastically improve your game). Myself, I have learned quite a bit from the exchanges you have precipitated. That’s not the problem. You read what Judith Curry wrote. And you can’t tar her with your anti-RC brush. So go read her book. Point to where her ideas and yours are at odds. Page numbers. Line numbers. Stick it to her. This is the new science. Go nuts.
Mosher says:
1. AWG claims
We now have proof perfect that your arguments are incorrectly wired. 🙂
Or possibly it is something else.
I actually brought up a point to Lubos that since the universe is filled with things that like to clump together the proposed heat death of the universe might not consist of an even distribution of matter.
He agreed.
Biots “violate” the 2nd law because of energy flows and clumpiness. i.e. biots are the equivalent of eddies in a river. You can have small sectors of upsteam flow in a generally down stream flow due to local energy patterns. The average entropy is increasing. However, you can have local situations where the entropy is decreasing. That very fact is how we get iron out of iron ore. The entropy of the iron ore/coal system is increasing. However the resultant iron is a local decrease of entropy vs. the ore. Caused by the energy flow.
The 2nd law is absolute relative to the system. It need not be absolute relative to components of the system.
I hope we can put that one to rest and focus on climate.
BTW I think the best way to derail a bad argument is to present a better argument.
To just say you don’t know this and are missing that (even from people I agree with) is inadequate. Grossly inadequate.
We are all dummies about something or other. Give the ignorant and/or misinformed the benefit of the doubt. Teach.
#287 Murray,
Re: polar bear “declines”.
The confounding question to ask is if the “decline” isn’t just part of predator/prey oscillations. Has that been checked?
jae, for what its worth we are in your camp.
Thermodynamics is a theory of macroscopic systems at equilibrium and therefore the second law applies only to macroscopic systems with well-defined temperatures (wikipedia says)
mr.welikerocks likes your perspective and says you are what science is all about. You are in good company because most science begins with a “crackpot” perspective. And crackpot is in the eye of the beholder so to speak, see: 315
Earth isn’t that simple like you said. Neither is water! And mr. welikerocks, the Earth scientist notices AGW theorists don’t like to talk about or look at any micro-climate either ; they like things to be “global” – so like your “interesting observations regarding arid and humid places in the subtropical band” it gets squirmy for them At the same time, other or even bigger perspectives such as Sadlov has poked at get pooed on too, perhaps because it is complicated-beyond the “macro” of Earthbound perspective.
It’s SteveM’s call about the topics allowed here in regards to GW of course. We look forward to what he decides. And we respect him.
Re #299: Do you have a cite for that? Thanks.
Sorry, the wine makes me whine. Mosh, since you asked, I am struggling with the “convective-radiative” explanation for the greenhouse effect. Water is a greenhouse gas which is present in amounts of 50 or more times that of OCO in humid areas. It is present at only about 1/4 that amount in very dry areas. All I am trying to figure out is this: If the ghg theory is correct, then why aren’t humid areas hotter than very dry areas, due to that ghg effect? I’ve asked this at RC and elsewhere, and all I get back are explanations that water decreases diurnal variation, that it’s half-life in the atmosphere is short, that it gets cold at night in the desert, that it rains more in humid areas, that the dry areas are high-pressure areas, yada, yada, yada. Maybe I’m not asking the question clearly enough, or maybe I’m just missing something simple that everyone else knows. The fact is, though, that it is much hotter in dry areas than in humid areas, at a given latitude and elevation. The LOWS in low-lying cities in Iraq are nearly as high as the HIGHS anywhere in the humid tropics. If the greenhouse effect works, why isn’t it the other way around? I am not disputing the theory directly, I’m trying to understand it better.
Jae let me see if I can explain. Lets take a reaaly simple version of AGW. brutally simple.
1. The world is getting warmer
2. It’s never been warmer in the past 2000 years.
3. The increase in C02 explains this.
Now, for number 1, we have a whole host of papers that we can pass around and read. hansen, jones.
we have data we can go look at. stations to photograph. Look at the discussions that happen from
this. Look at what Mac found in Giss. Good stuff. and look at how many people can add insights:
from many different fields.
Now for number 2, we have the proxy war. Lots of papers, data, and now people with an interest in biology
join.. again good discussions.
Now number 3. how long has MAC been asking for that doubling c02 paper? Thepoint is the conversation
would be improved by a governing text or set of texts..
Re: 321 and 322
it’s just too crazy complicated
just look at all these papers from googling “doubling co2”: list here
Reading through the abstracts is enough to make your head explode, however a few use the IPCC model as “a given” and input local/regional data to see how the model runs, and the conclusions are interesting-( how this helps here I have no idea. lol)
One more time…
Everyone who thinks that an “open mind” is an unmitigated good thing, and that scientific thought shouldn’t shouldn’t be constrained by rules, read this masterpiece by Richard Feynman:
http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html
You can have you “open minded” science if you wish, but don’t complain when nothing works, and the airplanes don’t land.
Umm, that’s why we do science. To disentangle that which is complex. That’s why computer models are built: to keep track of numerous variables as they interact. If it’s too crazy and complex for you, maybe you’re just going to have to leave it alone and let someone more skilled take over? And relinquish your skepticism.
Flying airplanes is “crazy and complicated”. But it works!
jae, did you look of ceterus paribus yet, as Larry asked you to?
326, it doesn’t prove or disprove anything, but it criticizes both the “team” and the “open mind” crowd here, for doing essentially the same thing.
[snip]
Sorry SteveM. Happy Holidays and all that.
We sure appreciate this space. More then you know!
I suspect that the reason no explanation has come forward on this is kinda what Rocks is saying. If you look at papers such as Held and Soden, 2000, you find that output from one computer model is treated as data for input into another one. The whole thing is almost unapproachable, unless you are an expert in computer modeling. I’m not, so I’m kinda at the end of the road, I guess.
Merry Christmas to Steve M and Ross M, and all at CA. I think that famous Catholic crumudgeon Hillaire Belloc captuhe spirit of this site with this light hearted Christmas sent- Drink Audit Ale with Me:
I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I pray detestable drink to them
That give no honour to Bethlehem.
May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me,
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!
If I were a thermofeistian I would post this and say. Hey look. larry and moshpit
on letterman.
(I tried to post this earlier but it got caught in the spam filter, so I’m trying again with slight modifications – apologies if it double posts)
I hope you have all seen the 1990 Channel 4 documentary ‘The Greenhouse Conspiracy’.
Much better than the Great Global Warming Swindle IMHO – a documentary for less populist times.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5949034802461518010
It certainly puts the development of the whole sordid saga into context – it seems that the debate has not changed appreciably in 17 years.
An interesting read written by a pioneer in research on climate sciences; Garth Paltridge. From October 2004, so might have been noted here before.
Re #295 and #318
Well, I did a lot more digging on body fat loss, pup mortality, and seal population, and could fing nothing definitive. I can sunnarize my findings as follows. This summary kind of reads like I’m trying a bit hard to disprove the polar bear threat, but that is not the case. I have been trying to be impartial. It’s just that, given the other stresses the declining populations face, and given the surface instrument record at Churchill (the only local site with records to 2005), and given some evidence of adaptive behavior, I conclude that there is no threat to polar bears other than people/tourism, and in the Churchill case no solid evidence of global warming.
Further research turned up a 2000 article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FRO/is_4_133/ai_63713858) describing the threat to western Hudson Bay polar bears from loss of body fat due to less successful spring seal hunt because of early ice break up, worded to make a fairly dire impression. ( eg The increase in ice free days is overstated by more than 20% for 2000).
From http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/polar_bears/pbear_sea_ice.html Studies reveal that break up was earlier by 3 weeks in 2004 than 1987. Some decrease in juvenile and senescent bears has been noted over this period, while the prime adult population has been stable. There is a belief that the total population has declined by up to 260 bears (22%) but it is noted that the data is not good very good. (Removals could have totaled >700 adult bears during this period). Also tourism in the fall to the bear congregation area near Churchill (now up to 6000 tourists and 15 large vehicles per day) has added to stress on the west Hudson Bay population. In addition bear handling both for research and to protect the human population has increased dramatically. NB Considering CWS-related research activities and the PBA Pactivities between 1977 and 1995, a total of 3558 bears (not including university-research handled bears) have been handled (last column in Table 1). This is about three times greater than the actual estimated WH population of 1100(Derocher and Stirling, 1992), indicating that all bears are, average, subject to repeated handling. Moreover, these activities occur when bears are either fasting or leaving their dens and are already energetically stressed. It is plausible that these repeated bearhuman interactions have adversely stressed the bears over the past 30 years. There is also evidence that behavioral adaptation is taking place, bears have learned to hunt seals during the ice-free period along the shores in tidal flats. This phenomenon has been observed for several years at Churchill in the polar bear viewing area. Models predicting zero late summer ice in the Arctic Ocean do not predict zero spring ice in Hudson Bay. If ice break up gets early enough to threaten seal populations, it is likely that seals will changes their behavior too, to have more pups on shore, once again making them more accessable to bears. It could be that carrying capacity has declined, but there is no evidence of imperiled population survival, and global warming is not the only factor affecting the bear population.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=403719130006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Apart from 3 warm years (1999, 2000, 2002) there is no evidence of a trend in the warmest years in Churchill. Since 2002 there is no GW evident. Could the early sea ice break up be due to increased insolation?
In the area of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas (western Alaska) denning on sea ice has declined from 62% to 37%, with on shore denning rising proportionately. Three cases of bear predation on bears have been noted recently, which has not been seen previously. On the other hand, the population is under much more intense scrutiny. Again there is some evidence of declining population (15% from 1985 to 2004??), but data are not good enough to be statistically significant. Decrease in cub survival and male skull size has been noted. Removals have been ca 100 bears per year during this period. The change in denning, at least, is another indication of adaptive behavior change.
Oops – up to 600 tourists per day.
re: #266, 272.
I’ve already been there before steven. Plus on a few blogs whenever the olde radians vs. degrees issue is cited anew, I make a post that points to that page to indicate that there are more than enough errors to go around in Big Science Research.
But I have stopped responding. While the radians vs. degrees problem was corrected quite some time ago, the ‘errata’ list there will continue to grow and those responsible for the models/codes/calculations seem to be totally immune to suggestions that they might have a problem. They are equally immune to the known facts that Software Verification, Validation, and Quality Assurance methodologies are successfully applied every day to software that is very much more complex than their 100K LOC toys.
Errata must be newspeak for wrong.
#333 Like I said. The bears, yes, are “at risk” – whatever that means – but the relative risk of ‘A’ probably far outweighs ‘GW’, let alone ‘AGW’. Most importantly, the ability to make inferences is severely limited by the quality of the data. If you thought climate science was rough, welcome to animal ecology. Well done, Murray.
Jae, could the answer to the humid vs dry areas problem be something to do with the specific heat capacity of the soil?
I have these figures from an old text book (The Physics of Agriculture, F.H.King, Fifth Edition, 1910):
One hundred heat units (which would raise 100Lb of water 1 degree F) would raise
One cubic foot of dry Sand 9.92 F
One cubic foot of half saturated sand 5 F
One cubic foot of Fully ‘capillarily’ saturated sand 3.4 F
(For clay loam the numbers are 6.02,4.49,2.98 )
The background assumptions are that a cubic foot of loosely packed dry sandy soil weighs 106Lb and holds 33% water and 16% water at full and half capillarily saturation. The specific heat capacities (per 100Lb) of the materials (water 100: Dry sand 10.08) King attributes to ‘Oemler’ but gives no exact reference.
Just to complete the fest of Non-SI physics: He says that to remove a pound of water from a cubic foot of clay soil (by evaporation) would require 966.6 heat units, which would cool it by 10.3 F.
Chas
– the temperature drop (10.3 F) due to evaporation is for a clay soil at saturation.
RE 335. I know dan, I’m just dumbfounded.
jae (321) wrote:
Moist air convection?
Jae, I was watching the program called “Venus Unveiled” on the Science Channel taking about the ESA probe. In discussing the atmosphere of Venus being primarily CO2, they did an interesting demonstration of the greenhouse effect as they claimed using a plastic drinking bottles. One had air and the other was 100% CO2. When sat out in the sun, the CO2 filled bottle gained 3 or 4 more C than the bottle with air. Now given your comments on humidity in the air, I wonder if this experiment was demonstrated again with dry air, i.e. 0% humidity, if the amount of increase would be the same? Someone needs to demonstrate this since it is deceptive to make such a demonstration without accounting for humidity.
#341 – I thought closed greenhouses have no relationship to the earth which loses heat to space? If closed greenhouses are relevant then why do climate scientists ignore the experience of greenhouse farmers who routinely grow plants in greenhouses with CO2 levels at 4-5 times current levels?
Re #341
Since they were talking about the Venusian atmosphere which contains virtually no water I don’t know what the relevance of humidity is?
I’d really like to respond to some of the above comments, but I’m afraid Steve Mc and some others are tired of this discussion. I quit until we see what the blog management decisions are.
343, because they (ESA) were claiming this was the reason why Venus was hotter than Earth due to the concentration of CO2. As discussed, any humidity in the air retards the temperature rise because, the water vapor must also absorb heat at the same time the air does. So for a proper comparison, dry air must be used not the air we breathe since that air will increase in temperature faster. Hence the desert analogy that has been talked about.
jae–
Well, clearly, it’s a puzzle~
Why are low lying cities hot? Why aren’t cities in the mountains hot? And why does it tend to rain in the mountains? (Recall, you rejected the whole “some desserts are hot because air traveling up over mountains and then back down gets hot and dry idea.”)
And why aren’t cities in the Southern hemisphere hot in june-aug? (After all, you previously waved away the “there are more hours of sun in the north during the summer and the sun is over the tropic of cancer in June” bit with a “forget about latitude” issue.)
And of course, why do deserts even exist? And why are there so many at ±30 degrees latitude? (After all, the Hadley cell is known to exist, and the down coming leg happens to dump hot dry air on Iraq, which is near 30 degrees. But, evidently, you’ve rejected this as a contributing factor to the hot weather in Iraq in summer. )
People have been describing mechanisms to you over and over. Yet, somehow you wave every possibility without even considering whether it might be true.
Here’s my question for you Jae: You keep saying this “mystery” of hot summers days in low lying areas in Iraq is a problem for the theory of AGW.
Now, I’ve got to ask this: If the greenhouse does NOT work, why are low lying cities in Iraq hotter than the equator in summer?
To make sure we truly understand why this happens if water does not act as a GHG please explain the other linked mysteries things.
For example sure to explain
1) why are cities in the mountains cooler than low lying cities at similar latitudes on the dry side of mountains?
2) why does it rain a lot in the tropics?
3) why do deserts tend to form at ±30degrees latitude? (That is: near Iraq.)
4) Why is Iraq hotter in jun-aug than in dec-feb. (And why it’s low-lying areas hotter than the equator only in the summer, but not in the winter. )
After you’ve explained each separate thing– the high/low, the 30 degrees, the summer/winter issues, then explain
1) why low lying cities in Iraq are warmer than the equator in summer without any effect of GHG’s.
2) And then why the action of GHG’s would change all this.
Since SteveM, doesn’t want you to discuss your own theories here, I think you should:
* create a blog. (Free ones available at WordPress.org)
* document your explanation in some detail (figures showing effects of heat flux, convection etc.) Math. Equations.
* when you are finished, drop the link to the explanation so we can read it.
I got an idea. Why don’t we take this over to lucia’s unfettered climate blog?
Good idea jae! You can discuss it all you like there. 🙂
re 347:
Re #345
Well the logic is flawed on several levels: for a proper comparison of the Venusian and Earth atmospheres the fact that the CO2 was only 1 atm as opposed to 92 atm is much more important than the humidity (or otherwise) of the air sample. Secondly the radiant heating of the Earth’s atmosphere is mostly due to IR not visible light.
jae,
Why is it hotter in the desert?
Lack of water to evaporate. Evaporating water takes a lot of energy. With less water to evaporate the energy can go into raising the temperature.
Let me add that the lack of water also means fewer clouds allowing more energy in.
Steve: You have had a number of posts pointing out the hypocrisy of some of the folks at realclimate, however, a lot of people treat these guys as the ‘authoritative’ source on all matters climate related and simply ignore any criticism directed at them. I realize that there is not much that can be done about the general masses but is there any sign that your call for higher standards is being heard among the halls of universities or journal review panels?
For example, what would it take to get the existing 20th century SST measurements tossed out and replaced with measurements that have some statistical merit?
@Raven–
We can’t go back and remeasure, throwing out the existing measurements isn’t possible.
The measurements we have are the measurments we have. The most that can be asked for is open access to data, and public disclosure of methods used to come up with computed metrics like “Global Mean Surface Temperatures.”
lucia – I can’t get a posting through to ‘save my life’ for the spam filter over yonder; it says to “contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him [her]” …
Lucia – I think I mispoke. I am talking about developing an adjusted dataset that uses techniques that are considered to be statistically valid (which is what I thought steve was looking for). It would not be perfect but it would be better than what we have now. It makes no sense to justify trillions in spending based on data that has known problems.
I agree that disclosure is the first step, however, I am not sure it would do any good to produce an alternate dataset if the people producing the ‘IPCC-approved’ research refuse to use it. Does the government need to step in with regulations like it already has for drug research?
# 351 and # 352
And albedo? Sand has a high albedo.
re 357. sand albedo as a function of wavelength and wetness
http://books.google.com/books?id=KaJHBv9FbYIC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=gieger+climate+ground+albedo&source=web&ots=2uXrokHWo3&sig=w8vbNUc-SYR6U02zJCI4lewtvs4
Ahhh! I’ll turn off bad-behavior.
# 358
Steven Mosher,
Yes, we had those conditions when some patches of ground were wet and other were dry. The condition was detected easily by IR thermometers.
Using Unthreaded for social purposes:
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all CA people!
Changing albedo can explain imminent cooling, and may even contribute.
===========================================
Ron Cram #360, this is an excellent suggestion … if CA can muster the expertise. (My understanding is that Dr. McIntyre’s expertise is more in the area of paleoclimatology, so I am somewhat doubtful. On the other hand, my recent experience at RC – on the topic of ocean thermodynamics – has been, shall we say, less than positive.) Is there something in particular you are wishing to discuss in the Schwartz paper? To compile a list of questions for future discussion would do no harm.
#360 Id like to see the paper discussed. It sounds like good science coming out of someone from the AGW camp. I find it interesting that while he finds a much smaller CO2 sensitivity the IPCC he blames the smaller CO2 sensitivity on aerosols. We can disagree with the conclusion but I think we can all appreciate the science.
Don’t mind me — just trying out the WordPress LaTeX feature:
Lucia – I am trying to understand the significance of your analysis.
This is my understanding so far:
1) The central issue in the AGW debate is the sensitivity of the climate to added CO2.
2) Most sceptics (including Lindzen) feel this sensivity is low.
3) Most AGW advocates believe the sensitivity is high.
4) Schwartz is not technically a sceptic but his paper seems to confirm Lindzen’s estimates.
5) Your analysis suggests that the sensitivity is much higher than what the AGW advocates are saying which implies major warming is ahead.
However, my understanding is the climate has not demonstrated the sensitivity shown in the AGW models so they are searching for offsets like aerosols. A much higher sensitivity would imply a bigger gap that would need to be offset with negative feedbacks to explain current observations. What is missing from the picture?
I posted this at another site but I think it is relevant to the current conversation:
My brainstorming on how we might get a better expression for the heat capacity:
I originally posted this here:
http://forums.canadiancontent.net/science-environment/69124-global-warming-greatest-scam-history-15.html?posted=1#post913145
Re#333, Murray Duffin:
Thanks for the summary! Quite interesting.
And I found this:
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/subcategory.php/315.html
It is from estimated 25 000 polar bears population.
I don’t know if this was covered here (did a quick search and didn’t find anything relevant as a post – some comments though).
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/new-study-increases-concerns-about-climate-model-reliability-15002.html
Bolding mine. I think that paragraph suggests that the “heat pipe” is doing a good job of equalizing temps in the lower atmosphere.
BTW the paper referenced in #372 was:
M. Simon, 373:
But M. Simon, the folks at RC have already addressed these “new concerns about the reliability of the models” — by pointing out that the range of model outputs is so large that it includes outputs that are “not inconsistent with the observations”. Now, doesn’t that make you feel better about the models?
It’s good enough for the skeptics, L, because we don’t know what the real time constant is(are). MS, isn’t it nice that there are enough models that some are at least partially correct. Who could ask for anything more, or if you do, be careful about it.
======================
And please, never forget that the truth is always good news to the skeptic. I know you don’t really need the reminder, but some may.
===========================================
There seem to be many different ways to estimate the sensitivity using various techniques.
This page compares some of them: http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/What_Watt.html
I am also not convinced that a longer time constant could explain the under estimation of the models since a long time constant should smooth out the high frequency variations. This would imply that the relatively stable temperatures of the last 10 years could not occur after 20 years of large CO2 forcings unless there was a large negative forcing since 1998 (and there don’t seem to be any candidates for that unless you want to assume solar).
Here is what Lubos had to say on the topic: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/stephen-schwartz-brookhaven-climate.html
His comment:
Is interesting.
Another comment: the observed temperature response after volcanic eruptions is also consistent with a low time constant.
A hypothesis on green lands:
When the grass withers it loses its green tinge and acquires a clearer coloration, almost whitish, that reflects more bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. It does not mean that the pale coloration is a guarantee that IR could be reflected in greater proportions, but we could expect reasonably that when the grass turns green again the Albedo decreases and the absorption of IR increases. Then, contrary to what many have expressed with respect to a direct relation between the destruction of green lands and the increase of the anomaly in the tropospheric temperature, it occurs exactly in the opposite way it happens in nature. At least on this, among other things that we have found here in CA, the models run incorrectly.
# 381
@ Myself,
We can expect the same anomaly of albedo in tropical and coniferous forests with very dense vegetation, as long as the floor is with a certain humidity relation and reflects more solar radiation than the trees frond. The phenomenon has been observed in coniferous forests in Canada.
Lynn Vincentnathan Says:
25 December 2007 at 9:09 AM
Ah, so the west is to blame! Now it’s all making sense.
Conclusion, to plant Christmas trees in winter-spring (destroying them the next autumn) could be the cause of increase of absorption of solar IR during the previous months to Christmas shopping time. If solar irradiance did not increase in 1998, then the driver of warming could have been an internal and human-induced driver by planting more and more pines each year in the whole world, given that Christmas is celebrated in more countries each year. 🙂
For those who don’t like that conclusion, I offer reforestation as a secondary option on the cause of anomalies in tropospheric temperature during 1998. 🙂
Perhaps Santa have something to do with polar ice retreat?
Seriously, some pines absorb more solar irradiance than other trees. Reforested areas have shown a marked decrease of albedo, thus the warming of the forests, considered like a portion of the biosphere, and the last like a fraction of the surface, could cause anomalies of the low troposphere temperatures. The thing is to complex as to be simplified in models.
Leaf me alone!
Ha.. all the heathens and pagans are online today. Nasif, have a look at Geigers
book.. WRT leaves
http://books.google.com/books?id=KaJHBv9FbYIC&pg=PA230&dq=geiger+climate+albedo+leaf&sig=rsiQvXTW_8cSszm7p6qMSqDHKxk
Has anyone looked at Endorheic lakes and basins as proxies of climate change? Some are very sensitive to changes in temperature and cloudcover.
@Ron Cram:
Schwartz used both Levitus L300, L799 and L3000 data and GISS surface temperature data to get “C” the heat content. (See section 3, page 7 of his manuscript.)
He used only GMST for the time constant based on his simplified modeland Markov process– see section 4. He mentions the use of GISS GMST over and over again wen getting the time constant τ See page 7, page 10.
I used the GISS GMST data, just as he did.
# 386
Yes… leaf me alone. A very good reference, Steve. So it’s not a hypothesis. Thank you for the correction. 😉
Yes, albedo can be both more manipulable and the science of it more controversial than for Carbon Dioxide.
=====================
http://patrissimo.livejournal.com/693455.html
The blog posting at the above URL discusses the issue of the sharing of data in science in general and in climate science in particular. Readers of this blog may find the comments from scientists about why they do not share data interesting and revealing.
# 386
Tom Gray,
Peer reviews were invented for promoting elitist and biased science. The real scientific work is valid if other scientists and all scientists, from the party of the author and from outside the author’s party, can review and repeat the processes/techniques used to get scientific theories. When the data and/or the processes are hidden by the author(s) we rightly can assure that that work is not science. The techniques, data, processes, experiments, etc. must be disclosed for other scientists, from any party, can evaluate the results and verify the veracity of the outcomes. Scientists must not hide any point of his work, be or not be a governmental work. If the researcher does not do it, then we can expect that his/her work is biased pseudoscience. The demand for a work to be peer reviewed by a partial group of scientists (that could not be scientists) for judging it as true is just a stratagem invented by AGWists for leaving out the works of other authors that have find the opposite results or that the work has been biased of flawed.
Biologists cannot do that. Perhaps physicists and chemists may do it when trying on weapons or something of the kind, but a scientific work that has to do with knowledge, it must not be done. Steve McIntyre and colleagues, intentionally or not, are trying of reinstall that lost sensitivity of real science.
Can give you an example. I publish an article on X topic/investigation. All the scientists from the whole world must be able of assessing my work and they have the privilege of asking from the methods, data, etc. that I used in my investigation. I have the responsibility of disclosing all my methods, procedures and data applied in my investigation so the scientists interested on my work can reproduce them and confirm and validate or falsify and reject my results. If I don’t disclose my methods, etc., they can conclude rightly that my work is pseudoscience, especially if they are not getting the same results from procedures different to the procedure I used in my research.
Steven Mosher,
Ha… It seems only heathens and pagans are still on line. Nobody is writting too much today here… 😉
RE 389
Halloween, my favorite holiday, should last a week!
Someday Nasif you should tell people your story. I suspect it is interesting.
I find it refreshing, and praiseworthy, that clearly capable scientists such as Lucia and Judith Curry, who, while apparently more in the AGW camp than that of the skeptics (correct me if I am wrong on that), engage here on the science.
In doing so, to the extent that the diverse range of skeptical views can be characterised, it becomes clear that most skeptics are not ‘atheists’ re AGW, but rather ‘agnostics’, in contrast to the ‘true believers’. The agnostic position is that the world is a complex place, and there is much that we don’t know about it. Very possibly the set of that which we don’t know contains the true drivers for climate. And the uncertainty ranges on what we do know are rather large.
Skeptics allow for the possibility that AGW may be happening, but seek sound, science based evidence in support rather than assertions that “the science is settled” and “a consensus of scientists agree” when such is demonstrably not the case. Skeptics ask that fundamental elements of sound science such as transparency with respect to sources, data, methods, models, prompt data archiving – all necessary for replication – be observed.
It seems evident that Lucia and Judith have much in common with the skeptics, as demonstrated by their participation here. A big thank you to both for your generosity of spirit.
Sorry for editorialising!
369 Simon
You haven’t taken into account the expectation that the divergences will shortly shrink, due to an “adjustment” of the satellite data.
Can anyone provide any insights on whether this satillite data adjustment to “fix” the AGW fingerprint problem is legitimate?
This “if the data does not match our theory then we will fix the data” approach to science is getting quite disturbing.
I also find it ironic that they are so focused on “fixing” the troposphere data when they could probably shore up their GCMs by admiting that the surface data probably overstates the warming to date.
#394
Um, I don’t think so. Suppose the US record accurately reflects the global temperature, some ups and downs, but no real warming for at least 70 years. What happens to AGW? What does that say about the models that “match” the temperature record as it exists now?
I read on RC that there are known problems with the instrument data on satillites and needs to be adjusteed to match our true surface data. Or some such nonsense when they were discusing the Christy et al paper
The satellite v.s. surface controversy illustrates the difference between accuracy and precision. The surface stations are neither precise nor accurate. The satellites are precise, but not accurate. The latter can be corrected. Gavin would disagree that the surface stations aren’t accurate, but would agree that they’re not precise.
GISS world temps do match GISS models. HUMMM!
@397
Since GISS models appear to be tuned to GISS temps that may not be as significant as it may seem. However, one has to question if all of the adjustments to the raw data resulting in the GISS temps have been also tuned to coincide with the models.
Test: Superscripts do work in preview. Will this show or did I screw up: r2
Steve:
Hehe, such a universal concept never existed, yet is it so misunderstood, lest you decide philosophers such as Hume are correct in their notions of causality.
Mark
…OT…BUT …Oscar Peterson…R.I.P.[WPRB the other minute (23/12)]
Steve: I just resort to html unicode not Latex. The normal superscript thing doesn’t work– which is ok. I just need to remember.
Re#34 (John Welt) I have just read Hansen’s letter to the UK’s PM and the Queen- it was embarrassing. In short, it was a plea not to develop coal powered power stations. It resembled the work of an idealistic, but politically driven, green campaigner.
I had previously regarded Hansen highly; he appeared genuine in his beliefs. Was I naive or is he starting to lose it in his old age?
Mark T said…
No, it always existed in classical physical systems as climate, etc. The only claim that this universal concept is not true, is the claim that the universe is non-local in quantum mechanics. This has not been experimentally verified, but it has only been inferred from results of experiments. Non-local interaction has no time delay (zero) between two events that are separated in space, it doesn’t matter how far apart they are, it could be between galaxies , etc. This was demonstrated in an experiment conducted in the late 1990s at Inssbruk University, Austria, by Prof. Anton Zellinger, et al. Their work (see following title) was published.
Violation of Bell’s Inequality under Strict Einstein Locality Conditions
The important thing to remember here, that this is still an inference and not concrete proof of the existence of non-local universe. There has been a number of theories that were proposed over the years to side-step this issue of wave-function collapse in quantum mechanics (instantaneity of events), such as multiple universes (MU), theory of elementary waves (TEW), etc,… They arrived at the same conclusions, but some of those proposed theories are more weird (philosophically), especially the MU , than the problem they were designed to solve (instantaneity of events) in the first place. Instantaneity of events are unphysical and one theory, the TEW was proposed to eliminate instantaneity , thereby re-establishing restoring causality. TEW proposed that waves are not propagated from source to detector, but the other way round (from detector to source). TEW says that waves are travelling in reverse, therefore there is no wavefunction collapse taking place. Every actions are local and not non-local. TEW restores causality and threw out spooky action at a distant in which something that Einstein abhored.There is time-delay between events and there is no such thing as instantaneity of events as proposed by quantum mechanics. TEW has explained a lot of current theories in quantum mechanics, but it is yet to be accepted by the majority. Facts are facts, but the debate amongst physicists today is about the philosophical interpretations of these competing theories, however they do arrive in the same experimental conclusions.
Here is an interesting interview with Prof. Zellinger:
Spooky action and beyond
Teleportation and lost of local properties? It sounds fiction.
It’s fiction.
71 Martin
It would appear that you were naive. Hansen was heavily involved in the preparation of AlGore’s ‘documentary’. That should tell you something.
Uh, you misinterpreted what I meant (though my fault for typing it as such). What I meant is “never has a more universal concept existed,” i.e. this is the one scientific concept that is universally assumed without question. Sorry about that… I thought it looked funny after I hit “enter”, just got busy and failed to correct it. 🙂
Mark
Oh, and I understand the issues with causality at the quantum level, but last time I checked, that’s not a concern with most systems that general science is attempting to understand. I’ll give your link a read, btw. I haven’t kept up with the latest and greatest quantum mechanics meets causality arguments. 🙂
Mark
martin Judge says:
It could be that Hansen, who has battled this dragon for so many years, is:
1. Sensing his own mortality and wants to leave a legacy,
2. Seeing others getting the “glory”, based on his work.
So far, his only “claim to fame” in the AGW is the Global Temp Measurement (GISSTemp). His refusal to archive data and programs, along with the questions about the accuracy of the surface stations, casts questions on his life’s work.
400 Staffan
What on earth are you talking about?
Who here at CA has the decoding ring?
He is lamenting the loss of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, who lived not far from Steve M, in Toronto, Canada.
(Only mosh has the decoder ring.)
@all-
Normally it’s “not done” to lure visitors over to other blogs, but I guess I’ll violate blog-etiquette, and beg for SteveM’s indulgence.
Larry noticed the zamboni took out all the discussion on sequestration. My blog is basically going to have “unthreaded” with much laxer conditions, and I’m setting things up to make that work a bit. So…. if you want to discuss that, visit .
Since the blog is still low traffic, feel free to fiddle and practice testing out some of the commenting features etc. But, the topic on that thread is sequestration, so try to stick with that.
Carbon Sequestration
Engineering is, ultimately, the most objective of all. 🙂
If you find the Staffan decoder ring, can you decode this?
#80 — Lucia wrote, “Engineering is, ultimately, the most objective of all.”
I see your point, Lucia, (either it works, or it does not) but it fails because many of engineering’s processes are necessarily ad hoc.
Dang… I made Swedish meatballs on Christmas….
(Yes, Lucia Liljegren, of Hibernean–Iberian extraction, made Swedish meatball following the recipe my father-in-law gave us. My husband, Jim, makes the corned beef on St. Pat’s day. I make the soda bread.)
Neither of share the accent of “The Swedish Chef”.
#80 lucia,
Your kindness overwhelms me. 😉
The late, great Oscar Peterson
#82 Pat,
Thermodynamics came out of steam engineering. Which I think is a great point. Empiricism is the heart of science.
Engineering is, ultimately, the most objective of all
No, Physics is. BTW, Engineering is the application of Physics.
Tell that to a ChE (or a CivE designing a sewage treatment plant using microbiology).
407 bender
Thanks. I got the Oscar Peterson bit, but what is WRPB?
I saw Oscar at Wolf Trap a few years back (an homage to Dizzy IIRC), and he could twiddle those keys….
Re #413
WPRB is a radio station in Princeton, NJ
Yes. But even the ad hoc stuff is only used if it works! “Does it work?” does impose empiricism whether one likes to argue about whether or not angels can dance on heads of pins.
In all honestly, I like to argue about whether or not angles dance on heads of pins, and can often see the value. But, still… there is that whole “does it work” issue.
(There is more to engineering than that. Good engineering also involves art & creation of “new things”. This is why engineers, as a whole, score high as “creative” types on the sociology personality tests. Strangely most people assume engineers must be “concrete” types– but no. I am, btw, ENTP. 🙂 )
AccuWeather’s global warming center has a video podcast on the McIntyre/Hansen controversy. I have no idea what is said or by whom, since unfortunately my internet connection is from the stone age (or perhaps, more aptly, the Pliocene), so by the time I downloaded it, the AGW issue would likely have been resolved.
Interesting link I stumbled across that rather describes the “team”:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/pratkanis.htm
Discuss…
#84 — M. Simon, you’re right, but the objective meaning of PVT comes from the falsifiable Thermodynamic theory of physics. Results without theory are objectively meaningless; theory without results is unbounded. It takes both to make science, and both to produce objective meaning.
re: the blog at 408 bender, jae’s post is gone from today. Can’t banter if censored? see page 9 #2 where it is referenced by Larry. ??
re 411. Lucia? do not tell us you are swedish or STAFFAN and I will be forced to
fight for your approval and I hate to see him LOSE!
re 412. DUKE..you made the old dog weep.. good video.
here you go if you like the jazz.. the way moshpit learned it sitting under the piano
as a kid.
funny how you remember every note.
we had this album an old transcription of a piano roller.. wonderful.
Somedays mom moshpit would come in and yell at me after listing to this for
hours straight: GO OUT AND PLAY.
I was playing, in my head.
# 411
I ate swedish meatballs today, heh! 😉
I hope this is not a duplicate post –
30-day global temperature anomaly showing a cool Southern Hemisphere and warm Arctic. Note that the map projection overstates the size of the polar regions.
Arctic ice area Growing rapidly but the ice is likely thin
Antarctic ice area It’s reluctant to melt this year (brrr). I wonder if it’s headed to a record summer maximum ice area. I wonder what the SH winter holds in store for South America and Australia.
Phil
Ah, thanks. I would never have expected a reference to a Princeton radio station from Staffan, who I’m sure lives in Lappland. Is that so, Staffan?
429 Pat F
Theory without results is Philosophy, I think. But you are dead on.
@Steven–
Having change my last name after marrying, I have the most deceptively Swedish name possible. However, I am of Hibernean-Iberian extraction, and mostly Hibernean at that.
I am forced to cook Swedish meatballs for Christmas. The alternative is to either a) drink Melort or b) smell & look at Luttefisk.
Luttefisk is sort of like Gefiltte fish, only much, much, much worse. There is nothing in the world as bad as Melort.
How about Glog? That’s pretty good…..
Raven, I’ll think about it overnight.
# 393
Raven,
Indeed, theirs is an obsession. They are obsessed with showing to the world that their scary predictions are science, thus they consider reality like uncertainty, and GCM into reality. If they find that real world do not match with their ideas, they think that the real world should be wrong, not their ideas. They will always find inaccuracies in the real world and will consider the observations of the real world like simple skeptics or deniers stuff. The worst thing is that they say that the scientists didn’t see what they see and that nature must work as they say. I think theirs is not a disturbing behavior, but a sickly conduct; unless they admitted that their point is political and that they have been handling the science for fitting in their ideas.
Let’s wait for Steve McIntyre think about it overnight… I expect he will see the same thing I have said.
# 435
Lucia,
I cooked and ate latkes few weeks ago. I’m afraid they are not from Swedish gastronomy. 😉
# 427
MJW,
The video has been erased from Accuweather’s website.
Nasif,
Really? As I mentioned, my connection is too slow to watch it, but when I press “Play” it does begin to download something, and plays a first few seconds of video, which seems to be a introductory advertisement or some such.
If anyone’s watched the video, perhaps you can post a brief summary.
MJW,
Really… It’s not your browser; perhaps you tried when they were erasing it. I’ve visited your link three times and the message on the small screen at left hand is:
“Oops
The video you requested cannot be found”
And… Yes, some eight squares appear at the begining of the video, that is, about one second.
@439, @440
It worked for me. Paraphrasing beginning about 2 minutes into the video clip:
Dr. Hansen: Media is partly to blame for confusing the public by saying there is one argument here but then there is a contrary argument so we don’t know for sure and therefore we shouldn’t do anything. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for disaster.
Announcer: And the ingredients to that recipe came together in September 2007 when a story surfaced linking Hansen to the infamous global cooling craze of the 70s.
Dr. Hansen: Never published a paper about global cooling. Paper was published by colleague in same building. Had nothing to do with paper other than to give colleague a program on scattering by small particles in computing the effect of aerosols which (program) was perfectly correct.
Announcer: But misunderstandings didn’t stop there. Controversy exploded earlier in Summer of 2007 when Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.org challenged Hansen on temperature data. (On screen a chart shows the “Top 5 Warmest Years Worldwide Since the 1890s:” 1) 2005, 2) 1998, 3) 2002, 4) 2003, 5) 2004.) McIntyre claimed NASA made an error in listing the warmest year on record.
Dr. Hansen: We did make a minor error in connecting 2 data sets and this affected global temperature by 3/1000 of one degree, which was entirely negligible.
Announcer: Still, the story came out that NASA and, specifically Hansen, were wrong and that 1934 was indeed the warmest year on record.
Dr. Hansen: Of course, this was completely false. The warmest years are all in the last 2 decades.
Announcer: At least as far as global temperatures go, but Hansen says McIntyre was referring to the contiguous 48: the US states that cover just 1.6% of the Earth’s surface and that analysis showed a near 3-way tie for the warmest year by an almost non-distinguishable 1/100 of a degree. (On screen a chart shows the “Warmest Year”: 1998, 2005, 1934, arranged in order from top to bottom of the screen.) Hansen said even though the error proved larger than the actual difference, McIntyre and Climate Audit kept hammering the issue.
Dr. Hansen: They confuse people by saying oh the warmest year was in the 1930s, but it always had been for this 1.6% of the world. And this minor error that we made was thus blown up as being a very big deal. And it was, in fact, a very minor thing.
Announcer: Hansen eventually gave in and changed the recorded data. (On screen a chart “GISS U.S. Temperatures (deg C) in New …”:
Year,Old,New;
1934,1.23,1.25;
1998,1.24,1.23;
1921,1.12,1.15;
2006,1.23,1.13;
1931,1.08,1.08;
1999,0.94,0.93;
1953,0.91,0.90;
1990,0.88,0.87;
1938,0.85,0.86…)
Announcer (cont.): The Scientist says his conclusions come from unbiased reliable science and, despite the urgency he senses, he won’t give in to alarmism.
Dr. Hansen: I think the contrary – that scientists tend to be conservative. Science by its nature is skeptical. Science thrives on skepticism. You always have to ask the question: are you sure?
Announcer: We’ll find out just how sure he is when we wrap up our series with Dr. Hansen. See you next time to hear the Scientist’s thoughts on tipping points in the earth’s climate and its relation to meteorology.
Looking through old posts from various sources which I have found significant in 2007, I was struck by an analysis by John Tofflemire on ‘Open Mind’ (Comment by John Tofflemire 15 August 2007 @ 7:02 AM). His points about the anomalies over the period of cooling after WWII are striking: has anyone seen something similar, a detailed exposition of the case for cooling, done with the uncorrected (i.e. no Folland and Parker correction) data set? I’m trying to get a handle on the significance in statistical terms of the hump from ’39 to ’46.
TIA
JF
I’ve gone to the NASA website and I am going to write a letter to the director of NASA or maybe the Deputy Admin, she has a blog.
(OT but re: NASA) while I was at the website I found an article re the Fall AGU “NASA Satellites Help Lift Cloud of Uncertainty on Climate Change”:
“A separate CloudSat study led by John Haynes at Colorado State University found it rains more often and in greater amounts over Earth’s oceans than previously estimated…
“These results suggest there is considerably more water falling from our skies, at least over Earth’s oceans, than we previously thought,” said Haynes. “The implications of these results are substantial and are still being examined, and suggest it may be necessary to reassess climate model estimates of Earth’s water cycle intensity. By improving our understanding of present rainfall patterns, scientists can also improve climate model projections of how rainfall will increase or decrease in the future around the world.”
link to CloudStat article
yet another thing to correct in the GCMs
It says less clouds contributed to the current sea ice thinning – (I thought there would be more clouds in an enhanced green house world, but what do I know, I am bad at keeping track of all things GW)
#107
Why don’t you take your theory on GHE cloudiness over to the thermo skeptic tank where it belongs and where it can be discussed more fully?
Yes, noticed. lol. Denialism as faux self-deprecating humor. lol. It’s ‘crazy complex’. lol. A trip to the tank might do you some good. lol.
Attn Bender:
your taunting of jae on lucia’s blog is uncalled for . I tried to tell you there but posts are not being let through and jae’s post yesterday dissappeared. see my 430 here. I saw his comment, and now its gone. Besides the fact jae might have a life. no offense to lucia, but censorship and stuff like this at this stage of a new blog? Come over and be taunted by bender, steve mo, and Larry, CA posters! No thanks. If there’s something wrong with your blog system lucia, I apologize. However, I still think the taunting of jae is low level behavior especially if something is wrong with the blog. What has jae ever done to you guys? (SteveM I hope you let this comment go through. Sorry if its inappropriate. And I understand if you delete this. Yet they are promoting the blog here, and some of us can’t post over there for some unknown reason (who knows how many can’t), and bender can and he is making fun of jae, RC type stuff!
413, lucia: I’m evidently in spam hell over at your site. Nothing goes through.
Bender, lol. Get a grip, everything I’ve read says increasing cloud cover is part of the AGW theory. example here: link
Sorry SteveM, I didn’t bring up the NASA article in the RC topic to start a thermo discussion at all, just wanted to show the science isn’t settled , and thank goodness NASA is working on the uncertainty in a better manner then RC promotes on their website. I really don’t care that much about Thermo, or any of this, and heck as bender implies, my “denialism” either. It all just very interesting to me, through the eyes of my husband especially, and especially the “soap opera” dynamics of it all online. 😉 I am going to write NASA, I don’t want scientists like the RC lot representing me, or my country or the science of anything under the sun and beyond.
To infinity, and beyond.
=============
reply to #446-#448 located at the source
I posted a link to my reply to #446-#448 (which is over at at lucia’s), but it didn’t take.
Here are a few graphs from Cryosphere Today, which appears to be back to normal. (For some reason the CA spam filter doesn’t like Crypsphere Today as a link, so the addresses below need to have the “http://” added at the start.)
Current Arctic ice area is at arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Current Antarctic ice area is at arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
The time series show the progression of ice area over the last twleve months.
Arctic ice area has recovered to 2006 levels this winter, at least at the moment, but much of this ice is likely thin. How much it thickens over the remaining winter is an important question.
Antarctic ice area remains anomalously high – the region has a cold summer underway. It looks like the main part of the SH melt season has about six weeks left.
There is a link that Larry posted in one of the other threads (Unthreaded?) that discusses the pseudo-science method. Good read, btw, Larry. That link ties in well with Popper.
Mark
RE 109. Susann You don’t post at RC because you think you will be censored?
I find that an oddly illogical defense.
I post here. Sometimes I get out of line. SteveM zambonees me (we made a new verb today mom).
I still post here.
I post at RC. mosttimes I get out of line. Gavin guts me. I still post there.
The only way to understand an editorial policy is to test it. You seem to assume
that RC will gut your critical comments. Test that! Why wouldn’t you test that? hmmmmm
Why would assume it? hmmm Why would you trust us that RC censors negative comments?
why? why would you trust us on that matter but not others? hmmmm.
One could speculate that you dont want to test the RC editorial policy.
One could speculate that you dont want a negative comment from you preserved on RC.
if you believe that RC censors negative comments how does that shape your opinion
of them? Since you have asserted that
RC would censor your critical comments ( even comments about snarkiness) does that
tell you something about them? Does it inspire confidence?
Now, I am not asking you to prove yourself by criticizing RC. You already did that. You asserted
that you would not post there because they would not post your criticism. I find that
a pretty damning indictment, especially since you havent tested it.
Here is a thought. Susann you write up a criticism of Ray P’s language. You post it here.
I will steal your words and post it to RC. We can test two things that way.
1. We can test your ability to read a RC text for snark.
2. We can test your thesis that they wouldnt post your criticism.
And I’ll preserve your good name.
Now, for people who think that you MIGHT BE protecting your political future
they will be disabused of this speculation.
So, amuse me. do your best critical analysis of Ray P.s rhetoric. I’m just trying
to get a sense of what is acceptable to Susann. This is not an AGW litmus test.
just humor me. explain the unprofessional aspects of Ray P’s article.
Failing that answer this.
If you believe RC will censor your critical posts, do you believe the people involved
in the endeavor are open minded like you?
That’s a yes or no question.
#119 Craig,
Popper’s position was itself “refuted” by Kuhn’s model of paradigms, so it’s a bit dangerous to use him to support your point of view, at least if you talk to a philosopher of science (but they’re a rare breed…). Kuhn showed that some facts may indeed be counter to what a paradigm would predict, but that in itself is not sufficient to overthrow the paradigm. The scientists often resort to “ad-hoc” explanations to account for such facts. A well-known example is the anomalies in Mercury’s orbit, that were well known, and could not be explained by Newtonian mechanics, yet were not sufficient to have physicists abandon it. So the same analysis can be used to understand why such ad-hoc hypothesis are also commonly used in climate science when some facts go counter to AGW (e.g. aerosols to explain the cooling of 1950-1975). But when a paradigm needs too many of such ad-hoc hypothesis, it is usually on the verge of being overthrown.
Lakatos later refined Kuhn’s model by talking about research programmes that degenerate.
But neither Kuhn nor Lakatos put much emphasis on sociological factors outside of science to account for the dynamics of the scientific endeavour, even though Kuhn was seen to open the doors to such analysis. I am personnally more inclined to use Bruno Latour’s actor network theory to analyze AGW. In Latour’s theory, scientific facts are “constructed” by building a strong network around them, a good example being the IPCC. This does not mean that the “facts” are false, or true. The social acceptance of the facts is what really counts, and the strength of the network. But for Latour, inanimate matter is also part of the network. Temperatures, for example, have to “cooperate” to strengthen the network around AGW. If they get cooler, the network will weaken. The same could be said about the Sun, the glaciers, etc.
but in the end, science is made of “litterary inscriptions”: papers, graphs, tables. the way we talk about facts is also very important. Facts can be qualified: one can say that temperature reconstructions are “plausible”, “possible”, “uncertain”, or “without any doubt”. You succeed in establishing a reconstruction as a “fact” when there are no more qualifiers, when it becomes textbook material.
In AGW, there are obviously two major “networks” competing. The proponents of AGW work very hard to establish it as a “fact”. They keep saying that “the science is settled”, etc, while opponents keep trying to weaken that network.
All in all, very fascinating.
re 126. Quine-Duhem.
A nice little exposition is on wiki of course.
You misunderstand my mandate. I am not out trying to tilt windmills. I am not trying to prove anything about RC or CA. I am here for personal enlightenment.
I don’t post at RC because 1. I am not a climate scientist and have nothing to contribute that might shed light on any climate science question. That’s also why I don’t post here much. I don’t have a good enough background in statistics or science to make a valuable contribution to the audit process. I know politics and I have a background in science but am not a scientist. I know about policy, having done it now for 5 years. I am mostly an observer who once in a while posts when I feel I have something to add. My posts may be completely a waste of time but one takes that risk. 2. Any critical comments or skeptical comments I might post have all likely been seen before and will likely either be deleted or ignored. I’ve read at RC frequently and admit I cringe a bit when I see the same posts from skeptics that have been dealt with before or in other threads. Why should I add to it? As a layperson, I’m not likely to offer anything beyond the same dumb questions and should be RTFR instead of getting someone else to do my work for me. As to censorship, I’ve read the comments from people who have been censored at RC and so I figure, why bother? I have no agenda with RC or CA other than to learn.
My goal is not to try to change anyone’s minds about global warming since my mind is not yet made up. My goal is personal enlightenment. I hope both sites steer clear of personal attacks, snark, and the like because it diminishes the force of the arguments. I happen to be a bit more on the agnostic side of the divide re global warming only because I have so little knowledge about climate science and all the issues. I feel I belong more here than at RC as a result. I may not be as much a skeptic as some here, but I am less a warmer than is the norm for RC.
I will submit to no litmus test. I am trying to protect my future and I don’t care who knows it. I’d be a fool otherwise. My not posting at RC has nothing to do with protecting my future. I could dream up some username and post there without anyone but the blog owners knowing my IP. I take that risk here as well.
That’s a rather DUH question, isn’t it? I don’t think RC is open-minded about AGW. I think they are supporters of AGW and see themseves as supporters of the “consensus”. That is clear to anyone who reads the website.
Re #126, Francois, I don’t believe that Kuhn and Popper are at such odds as commonly supposed. Popper explicitly neglected the “psychologic” element of scientific endeavour (central to Kuhn), which has nothing to do with the problem of “demarcation” mentioned by Craig (#199). I think they were both “right” in their respective treatments – and that Craig’s application of Popper to climate science, and yours of Kuhn, are both bang on the money.
Ah, Lucia gets me. 🙂 Thanks. I did not think Steve was particularly or even slightly snarky in this post and if I gave that impression, it was not my intent but rather a lack of clarity on my part. I was responding to a supporter who seemed to want to encourage Steve in snark. I don’t think Steve should allow himself to become snarky. I admire his ability to remain as neutral as possible in tone when raising issues — there have only been a few instances when I have detected anything approaching snark. I think he has large cojones to be willing to take on the established world of climate science as an outsider. From my time in science, I am under the impression that such a challenge from an outsider is viewed very dimly and that a circle-the-wagon response would be expected to any such incursion, however warranted. I am dismayed about the tone of posts at RC and when they occur, at CA. I want to lobby Steve McIntyre to resist the urge to sink to that level.
#127 Steve Mosher … Did you miss #59…Snarky??
10.000.000 USD suing case??
weilrocks– Thanks for letting me know. I cleared out SpamKarma’s list, and rejiggered the setting. Try to post now, and let me know if you have a problem.
I just tried it. Still no worky.
Lucia, it worked. 🙂
Jae — Yes. SpamKarma seriously misbehaved. I think I’ve fixed what I can fix, and you should be able to post.
I’m still getting spanked. Have I been banned?
Re: Francois Ouellette on Kuhn etc. What Popper was talking about was the logic of the process, what we should do, how to tell if something is scientific. It helps us see why, for example, many theories in psychology (e.g., Freud, and many others) were not very scientific, because they were rather immune to refutation (only “explained” phenomena post hoc, never made up-front predictions). The sociology of science is about what people actually do, and it can veer into sloppy, lazy, cliqueish, or even deviant. The latter are far more likely when experiments are difficult, impossible, or not conclusive (eg. anthropology, economics, psychology, and unfortunately climate science). We now see people claiming anything that can possibly happen (warmer or cooler, more or less rain, etc) as due to AGW, and who will not submit to demarcation — that is, will not admit that any set of failed predictions will disprove their theory.
101: Yet another area in which RC manages to get it wrong.
The council of Nicea did not create a consensus. It ratified the consensus that the churches themselves had already acheived. This isn’t a religious comment, but rather a historical one.
Oy vey. STAFFAN, sorry I missed your post but I was driving while posting.
Larry– you are not banned. If you look one comment was moderated and now appears. Email me at lucia @ thedietdiary.com and we’ll figure out what’s happenign with you specifically.
This is interesting. Denial is prohibited in Russia:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7161468.stm
Re #133
Sorry to disappoint you but the 4 posts on RC re the Council of Nicea (one a translation of the original which was in French) doesn’t mention ‘consensus’ at all. That was in a post by Steve McI on here, despite his original sarcasm about the reference on RC to the Council of Nicea there have now been rather more posts on that subject here (2 by Steve McI).
Yes, I think this is the distinction (em mine). It’s not about some facts being at odds with prediction. Rare is the theory that gets it all right. We have a situation here where every failure is dismissed, in spite of an abundance of failures. Nothing can ever be at odds with “the theory” as it is a foregone conclusion that it is correct.
Mark
re 128. Susann. don’t be tedious. I do tedious a whole lot better than you and
you will just lose the tedious game.
in post 109 you claim that you dont post there because you KNOW FULL WELL the post won’t get through.
now, you claim this:
“I dont post at RC because 1. I am not a climate scientist
and have nothing to contribute that might shed light on any climate science question.
Thats also why I dont post here much. ”
Have you read RC? Do you think Lynn V is a climate scientist? Doesnt stop her from posting.
why does it stop you? Doesnt stop eli from posting why does it stop you? Doesnt stop me
from posting there, why does it stop YOU. why does it stop YOU. Then you add, exposing yourself,
that you dont post here MUCH. Hmm. Lets eviserate that logic. you dont post THERE becuase you are
not a climate scientist, but you do post here, but not MUCH. And what do you post? you post
banal sociological observations and banal rhetorical observations. Why do you feel it is your
place to engage in those comments here when you are not a professional in either?
ANd why did you avoid the only thread here that dealt with policy– your supposed area of expertise?
“I dont post at RC because … 2. Any critical comments or skeptical comments I might post have
all likely been seen before and will likely either be deleted or ignored. ”
really, did you see any comments there about Ray P’s behavior? You obviously HAVENT read RC because
if you did you would see that gavin lets critcial comments through. Not always, but enough of the time.
You obviously havent read it because you would have seen my critical comments that got through.
I know the boundaries over there, having tested them. You dont. And why do you care if your comments are ingored
” I am here for personal enlightenment.”
” Ive read at RC frequently and admit I cringe a bit when I see the same posts from
skeptics that have been dealt with before or in other threads. Why should I add to it? ”
Nice diversion. I hope you learn to do this better. The issue is Ray P.s rhetoric. Own that
issue for a sentence. Go post something nice at RC. ” I appreciate the work you do, I thought some
of Ray’s criticism went over the line.” Go ahead. Double dog dare you.
“As a layperson, Im not likely to offer anything beyond the same dumb questions and
should be RTFR instead of getting someone else to do my work for me.
As to censorship, Ive read the comments from people who have been censored at RC and so I figure,
why bother? I have no agenda with RC or CA other than to learn.”
You believe what people post? Good jesus H christ. You want to learn? Go make a post. why believe
ME of all people when I say I was censored? why believe me? are you that distrusting of the folks at
RC? Do you really think they are that bad? Susann, I’m shocked. you go test it. see for yourself.
say hello over there. There is a reason why you won’t.
“My goal is not to try to change anyones minds about global warming
since my mind is not yet made up. climate science and all the issues.
I feel I belong more here than at RC as a result.
I may not be as much a skeptic as some here, but I am less a warmer than is the norm for RC.”
I don’t really care if you are a warmer or not. Ray P crossed the line. How do I know?
That’s my country partner.
I say ray is out of line.
I know, I’m a recovering snarkoholic. SteveMc says ray is out of line, you’ve trused SteveMc
before. So, comes the question to you…
Lets consider this a momemt of personal enlightenment. I think you would be personally enlightened
if you explained to everyone here how dispictable Ray P was.
Go ahead, we wont stop you. It will be good for personal enlightenment.
Ive read at RC frequently and admit I cringe a bit when I see the same posts from skeptics that have been dealt with before or in other threads. Why should I add to it? As a layperson, Im not likely to offer anything beyond the same dumb questions and should be RTFR instead of getting someone else to do my work for me. As to censorship, Ive read the comments from people who have been censored at RC and so I figure, why bother? I have no agenda with RC or CA other than to learn.
My goal is not to try to change anyones minds about global warming since my mind is not yet made up. My goal is personal enlightenment. I hope both sites steer clear of personal attacks, snark, and the like because it diminishes the force of the arguments. I happen to be a bit more on the agnostic side of the divide re global warming only because I have so little knowledge about climate science and all the issues. I feel I belong more here than at RC as a result. I may not be as much a skeptic as some here, but I am less a warmer than is the norm for RC.
I dont have a good enough background in statistics or science to make a
valuable contribution to the audit process. I know politics and I have a
background in science but am not a scientist.
I know about policy, having done it now for 5 years.
I am mostly an observer who once in a while posts when I feel I have something to add.
My posts may be completely a waste of time but one takes that risk. 2. Any critical comments or skeptical comments I might post have all likely been seen before and will likely either be deleted or ignored. Ive read at RC frequently and admit I cringe a bit when I see the same posts from skeptics that have been dealt with before or in other threads. Why should I add to it? As a layperson, Im not likely to offer anything beyond the same dumb questions and should be RTFR instead of getting someone else to do my work for me. As to censorship, Ive read the comments from people who have been censored at RC and so I figure, why bother? I have no agenda with RC or CA other than to learn.
My goal is not to try to change anyones minds about global warming since my mind is not yet made up. My goal is personal enlightenment. I hope both sites steer clear of personal attacks, snark, and the like because it diminishes the force of the arguments. I happen to be a bit more on the agnostic side of the divide re global warming only because I have so little knowledge about climate science and all the issues. I feel I belong more here than at RC as a result. I may not be as much a skeptic as some here, but I am less a warmer than is the norm for RC.
137, another thing to consider. At least formally, neither RC or CA are policy blogs. Policy comments here, even on unthreaded, are regularly thrown under the Zamboni*. Why would someone only interested in policy comment here and not there? Sumpin’ don’t add up.
*They’re welcome over at Lucia’s btw: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2007/new-climate-blog/#comments
39 UK John
jae, your cue!
You have a good point there — and isn’t the polar region where the biggest AGW effects are supposed to occur?
Same here. If you find something clearer than mud, please let me know. I think I’m going to have to give in, and study that German G&T paper…..
As soon as somebody can prove that going from X to X+Y makes the temperature do Z then it’s nothing but a hypothesis and circumstantial evidence.
It’ll all fall apart by the end of 2009 I’m fairly sure. Depending on what happens in November 2008 of course.
In the meantime, it’s all about land-use and particulates of course. Everybody knows that.
re 138. Well, she showed up when JEG came on board, so my wildly speculative hypothesis was that she was actually
in the public policy program at GT, maybe taking or auditing JEG’s class, or encouraged by folks to visit
the blog. The comments she made on the science threads were primarily on the JEG visited Loehle threads. I believe her very first
comment was an criticism leveled at me for using the Gendergenie on one of JEGs posts, which classified him
as european male. ( zambonified i believe) The listing of graduate students in that program is not current
last I checked it which was a while back when she first posted. The other hypothesis was that she was a journalist
since she didnt appear to have any expertise whatsoever. Based on the textual stats ( i finaly got a corpus big enough)
, I’m fairly certain that she is a she, also suspect that she has had some writing instruction.
Spam Karma needs to be trained. Its very twitchy at the beginning. Lucia needs to watch the SK panel for about a week.
Re #46
Yes you’re totally mixed up, usually the first chemistry class at high school (comprehensive in the UK) shows how to differentiate between a compound and a mixture. You mix oxygen and hydrogen together and you have a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen and you can deduce the physical properties of the mix from those of the individual components and you can separate them using simple physical processes, just as you can with air. Light the ‘blue touchpaper’ and you have a bang and a pool of water with quite different physical properties, this is a compound.
140, I’m just saying that when somebody shows up like a bull in a china shop, taking entire threads OT with policy discussions, and yet is certain of being censored at RC, what does that tell you?
@JohnA– Yep! For high converation blogs, the “snowball effect” portion needs to be reset too. That’s what was getting people, and once it got them…. It was a pain in the neck.
I cleared everything out in the database, reset and put their IP’s in the whitelist.
Admittedly, you do tedious better than me.
You are yelling again.
It is possible to not clearly express one’s self in a hasty post. That is my excuse for trying to clarify later what I meant. I don’t care if Lynn V is not a scientist and posts there. I do not post here on science threads because I don’t have the credentials and don’t think I can add anything. Perhaps you or others feel comfortable doing so but I don’t. I am here to learn the science and benefit from Steve Mc’s audit. Mostly I read. I trace down references and read them. I take notes like a good student. Occasionally, I post. Perhaps too often for many people’s tastes. Steve M can always delete any posts he feels are tedious and banal.
I post my comments here when I feel I have something to add. It’s up to you to decide if they are banal or not. It’s up to Steve to zamboni them if they go OT. My posts may be banal, for that reflects the level of my knowledge and expertise in this area. Besides, you don’t have to read them. Policy is my area of expertise, but not climate policy since I know next to nothing about it. Did I mention I started to read about climate policy only a few scant months ago when I came across a news article on the hockey stick debate? Until that time, I had not read anything on climate science or climate policy. My area of expertise is outside of climate policy and so I do not offer any insight into it. I hope to do so once I feel confident enough that I know the science and uncertainties well enough to judge what policy options are rational, but I see this as a several-year long process. You’ll have to wait for my brilliance and insight until then.
Rest assured that I read there frequently and I have seen your comments there. I have seen your comments here about your comments there.
The issue I addressed was whether snark is of any value in this debate. I say it has little value and want the owner of this blog to avoid it and keep above the fray.
.
Why would making a skeptical or critical post at RC help me to learn about climate science? I already understand the underlying politics of this whole matter quite well. I am interested in understanding the science. I learn from reading the posts and from watching the discussion. I learn about people from how they respond to posts and issues. Like you, for example: I learn a lot about you from how you respond to my posts.
Because Ray P was out of line (and he was) does not make it appropriate for Steve to respond in kind. That kind of playground one-upmanship should have been cast off in public school. Steve didn’t sink to that level on this post, but there was what I sensed to be encouragement of him to do so. I offered my view that snark demeans the content of a post. If that hits a nerve with you, so be it.
Cryosphere Today seems to have got its data problems fixed. SH sea ice anomaly continues to increase and is now at 2 million SqK, while NH sea ice anomaly continues to decrease and is now well under 1 million Sq K.
I am sure Tamino will want to revisit his analysis of the ‘exceptional’ NH sea ice decrease and the ‘unremarkable’ SH sea ice increase.
Chris, Like you, I came to this site to learn about global warming. I hope you don’t think of this site as skeptical of AGW. The serious readers of this site know that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide can cause warming. The skepticism is directed, as it should be, towards the published research and the claims being made. Steve Mc has provided ample evidence that many of the studies lack adequate “quality control” and many of the researchers are not forthcoming with data or methods. You’re getting arguments about the IPCC reason for truncating the Briffa series because the readers of this blog have learned to question the statements from the many of the climate researchers and in this case specifically, they don’t believe the IPCC has adequately explained why it truncated the series. Their statement could be reasonable, but without providing the info they alluded to, it is mere hand waving. In my opinion, there is no way to argue abstractly, as you have largely done, and resolve whether the IPCC was reasonable or not in truncating the series.
You guys are being a bit harsh I think. At RC skeptics may not learn a lot by posting (all depending on your tone; be sure to genuflect). But you learn a fair amount by reading and watching. At CA it’s the opposite – far more interactive. If Susann is working in the policy arena then she should be credited for keeping an open mind and looking to be informed by the science. Do NOT take the GCMs on faith. That is a fatal pseudo-scientific mistake.
Susann says she is reading other threads at CA, not just unthreaded. I believe her. Because her respect for Steve M appears genuine, and that respect can only come from reading substantial portions of the blog, not just the few highly critical threads on Team/RC double-standards.
Perhaps Susann senses that Steve M can have more influence by maintaining a more moderate tone. What is wrong with her encouraging him in that direction? Here in the US, in the UK and France it is said that the “train has left the station”. That does not seem to be the case in southeast Asia, Australia, China, India, even Canada. Is there nothing to be gained from a moderate voice coolly examining the auditable facts?
lol this is so very amusing. No, I have never corresponded with JEG, Mann, Schmidt, Hansen or any of the principles at RC. I am in a graduate public policy program elsewhere taking my first course in January. Your speculation sounds so much more interesting that my real life I almost wish I was your Mata Hari. The truth is, as you put it, far more banal.
No , actually my my first post commented on Loehle’s work. My first comment in response to you was criticsm that you assumed JEG was female, making fun of his name, etc., in a very snarky manner. It was clear to me that JEG was male but I am familiar with French names and the language. I asked why the gender of a poster was so important to you, IIRC.
I’ve done two degrees so far, one in science and one in social science. Does that count as writing instruction? I have also written for government for 5+ years. Mostly research papers, policy papers, briefing notes, etc. I suppose all I do is write for that matter and do secondary research. I am not a spy from any AGW group or forum. I represent only my own self. I know absolutely no one in either camp. I am agnostic although I lean to the A in GW but do not feel I know enough to say with any certainty what it means for the future. After reading CA, I agree with the need to rigorously audit any science used in the creation of public policy. This may be what I focus on in my PhD.
RE 141. I have multiple theories. None of them indicates a person in search of personal
enlightenment. But hey, I could be wrong.
In some sense I’m more tweaked about gavin’s antics than anything else, so I don’t want to be distracted
by her or her comments anymore. Last post from me.
Dang… I thought we were on unthreaded!!!! Sorry… OT.
I had a thought. Global warming causes sea levels to rise, right? So I wondered, has there been a time when temperatures declined, but sea levels rose? I asked clusty for sea levels and found a pretty picture here at wikipedia. Then I went over to gistemp and started looking for ripe cherries…
I located an annual trend map at gistemp (from 1941 to 1976) that went down by -0.06 C with just sea temperature or -0.11 C with GISS Analysis land included. Back to wikipedia and another look at the pretty picture seems to show that the sea level rose 2cm during that time (give or take a bit. It’s hard to eye-ball.). Interestingly, gistemp says most of the cooling happened in the arctic, where I imagine ice might have been freezing. So what caused sea level to rise if the temperature was going down? A lag? But sea levels kept going up after that too. They never got back to their 1941 levels.
Blatant cherry-picking? Yes, but a theory needs to account for all cases, including the cherry-picked ones. We see a 36 year period of time where sea surface temperature cooled (according to gistemp) and sea levels moved in opposition to the temperature change (according to wikipedia). So now I’m wondering if anyone has actually tested sea levels and global temperature for statistical correlation or if the idea that rising temperatures cause seas to rise is just intuitive? Anyone know? Just curious.
she loves me.
461, of course, those of us using DHCP or dial up (i.e. everybody that isn’t using a work computer) don’t always have the same IP.
I don’t have links but from what I have found it all depends on where you are and what you are trying to prove whether or not the sea levels have rise. There is also the land subsiding which gives looks like the sea level is rising.
Susann, if I could suggest a dissertation topic, it would be this:
The role of formalized uncertainty estimation in scientific consensus-building for the purpose of developing accountable science-based public policy.
The idea would be to do a historical analysis of science-based policy-making (a range of test cases) and compare the quality of consensus and speed and quality of policy-making when uncertainty was explicitly included vs. excluded from the science-policy framework. Does an explicit inclusion of uncertainty make the policy-maker’s consensus-building job any easier? Does it lead to more robust (i.e. durable) policies? You could compare policy questions within a jurisdiction, or compare science-policy frameworks among jusridictions.
If the spam filter permits, here is the Cryosphere Today Antarctic sea ice area anomaly (red line) and the 30-day global temperature anomaly .
Looks like a cool summer for the penguins.
>> There is also the land subsiding which gives looks like the sea level is rising.
At the spot where land is subsiding, it falsely looks like sea level rising. However, subsiding land actually raises the sea level, without any addition of water. Similarly, rising land, like Norway, Iceland, Hawaian islands, etc, etc all serve to actually lower sea levels, without any removal of water. IOW, sea level is pretty complex.
Re: 57
Lucia
AGW “probable”? Possible? Possibly Probable? I wonder.
The question remains: where’s the data to support the contention, and in particular the “G” in AGW? We’ve recently seen several papers [McIntrick/Michaels, Christy and a few others come to mind] that strongly question even the “W”. Pielke Sr’s argument that we should be thinking regionally rather than globally to verify any actual fingerprints is plausible. But if that is the case, how come that for the region for which we arguably have the best temperature data [such as they are], i.e. North America, NASA after much prodding from SteveM, revised their data set last summer, which now shows no extraordinary warming for this region?
You mean to say, tetris, that you believe the warming is anthropogenic, but it might not be global and might not exist?
@tetris: I didn’t say certain, or beyond all reasonable doubt. Think more like civil court: if a judgment is required, you decide which case seems more likely.
People can think things are probable when they are not proven. The can also think they are improbable when they are not disproven. I’m saying how I read the cards on the table. There are still a lot of hidden cards.
I don’t understand why using Briffa but truncating it makes any sense. Either you that analyses based on those “instruments” works, or you don’t. It doesn’t make sense to say they work only during part of the calibration periods, but we think it must somehow be perfect during periods when we have no real measurements.
tetris, lucia is intellectually honest. She will go where the evidence leads. However, she has explained that she has a hunch that AGW is true. Nothing wrong with that.
re 143. Me too lucia, I just like to tease her.
Where did you get that data from hansen 88?
Lucia #143
I’m not sure what you have in mind, but if you’re meaning to review Hansen’s scenarios on GHG forcings, this could save you some time.
Also, Pielke Jr. took a crack at it here.
Be careful which scenarios you look at. (Fans of Newhart may recognize this as “this is my other scenario Darryl”.)
Dear everybody,
Reviewing my sitestats I found three crawlers that are sucking several Mb of bandwidth. I got two questions:
What’s the purpose of crawlers at my website? Is crawling a way to spam our server?
I’ll thank any answer to my questions.
John M– I have different things to say than Willis, but I did read his post and will be commenting.
First, I had read a comment by Bender–with some questions about precision of individual runs. Gavin posted digitized data, so I’m using his. 🙂
Many things could be said about those comparisons, but I will be needing to ask a few people a few questions. Hang on a sec and I’ll get you a quick and dirty graph that might not be correct or fair. But… it’s one I doodle with first.
Gunnar, what’s IOW?
Nasif, IOW = In Other Words. Sorry.
crawlers are how search engines determine what’s on your site. It’s not spam. Cost of doing business in the google world. There is no magic. 🙂
Gavin suggested that the correct way to assess whether or not the models predicted (as opposed to post-dicting) temperatures well is to begin a comparison in 1984. (My inclination would be to start in 1988 because the paper was published then.)
But, in anycase, after askign if the data were tabulated, he posted them. (He may have digitized them himself– if so, that was extremely nice of him!)
Here is a plot:
If I didn’t screw up (and I have checked) I averaged the temperatures for years 1981, 1982 and 1983 to created a “zero” reference or the anomolie. After that I plotted the temperature increase above that value for years 1984 and on. (So, year 1 is 1984.)
I put quick lines through, and I’m just sort of looking at things.
So far, generally it looks like:
a) there is probably not enough data to definitvely prove models don’t work.
b) there is not enough data to definitely prove models do work.
Any “conclusion” depends on how you formulate your null hypothesis: If you take “they work” as null, you can’t disprove it. If you take “they dont’ work” as null, you can’t disprove that either!
But…. I many change my mind on this. I just got the data today, and I’m trying to figure out how you really, correctly account for auto-correlation, formulating the alternate hypotheses and do things entirely fairly.
Oh– I normalized everything to make the temperature anomolie for the average of years 1981-1983 for each case equal to zero. That lets us compare how well the model predicts changes in the temperature levels. (If you are going to use anomolies, hey, use anomolies. Otherwised, I’d prefer real temperatures!)
Thank you, Gunnar by your prompt response. Those crawlers really alarmed me 🙂
re 153. Lucia, did you read gavins thread on this issue a while back?
Other questions. green is Met station data? So, that is land only data correct? not
land sea?
And the GCM data, is that land only or land/sea?
If it’s land only that would be odd. so perhaps ask gavin.
Thank you Gunnar. That what what I was trying to say.
The met stuff is land only. Gavin didn’t supply the GISS data– that’s from GISS’s site.
Gavin digitized the “Scenario A, B, C” stuff and also provided data on the forcings.
The land only temps are shown because I happened plotted that first, so that’s what’s on my graph. I grabbed the data today, and I’m just sort of taking a look see first. I like to do that to figure out what references I need to find to make sure I do reasonably useful hypothesis tests. I need to get a few references so I know how to test hypothesis about slopes etc. when the data exhibit lots of serial autocorrelation before I do much else.
I’m hoping to ask bender of Jean S a few questions. I think one or the other can point me to some references.
Oh– the GCM data should be the full world. Yes, I read Gavin’s thread. I also have Hansen’s paper, real willis’s discussion and read Roger’s article. 🙂
In a week or so, I will be have a better opinion of agreement between things with different plots.
Lucia isnt the only warmer here. I think the world is getting warmer and man
is a good enough suspect. I’d just argue the crime is a misdemeanor and not a felony
and we should give ourselves time off for good behavior.
re 157. Lucia dont forget that the average temperature provided by GISSTemp is (Tmax+Tmin)/2
( except for the sst) while the average temp provided by the GCM is an integrated average for the day, that is
is the time step is 30 minutes, then they compute the average for the grid by integration.
I have the latter from gavin in a thread somewhere on RC.
re: #466 David Smith, December 28th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
“N.H.” in the legend for the Cryosphere Today Antarctic sea ice area anomaly graph should read S.H.?
Steve– I realize they are not precisely the same thing. No two measurements are the same.
Are you saying GISS also provides data that are based on measurements taken every 30 minutes and then averaged to get the full yearly average? If so, I’ll look for that. However, I didn’t know that existed.
Re #474 The NH is a typo – the time series is the SH. The Cryosphere Today time series for the Arctic is here .
It is possible that they are still having reconstruction problems following their website crash.
If the numbers are correct then the sum of the NH and SH sea ice areas anomalies is currently a positive number. Interesting. Of course, that says nothing about ice thickness, which is probably low in parts of the Arctic.
What started this recent interglacial 10,000 years ago again steven mosher? Quite a swing in temps there, and we are now measuring (with much uncertainty) a few tenths of a degree C change in the past 150yrs and everyone’s all in a tizzy. Personally, I don’t get it.
I might be inclined to agree with you if industrialization wasn’t increasing the levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere at such a high rate. Granted that paleoclimate is fraught with uncertainties, what do you think about the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum event? From what I understand (and that is not much granted) that was a period when greenhouse gasses increased significantly and caused runaway global warming such that the Arctic was nearly tropical in climate. While there is no concensus on the cause of the PETM, if it was caused by greenhouse gas increases instead of other forcers, then it has a relevance to us today.
Chris, in the situation that you described, the your advisor was not behaving scientifically.
How do you know that whatever is making that one binary system different from the others does not invalidate your hypothesis? You don’t. You just assume that whatever is creating the difference is irrelevant. That’s not science.
Second. Your analogy fails. In your example, you threw out the entire data set for that system. An accurate analogy would have been for you to have been watching that binary system for say 10 years. And up to 6 months ago, the system was behaving as your hypothesis predicted. Since that time, the system has been behaving differently. So you just use the data up to the point of divergence, and ignore the data since then. After all, all the other systems that you are examining are still behaving as predicted.
#89, we’re talking about the PETM, 55M years ago? From what I have read, the North Pole was nearly tropical at that time. The research suggests that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was significantly higher (2,000 ppm) than before or after. It is thought that some event (tectonic, etc.) led to the release of methane hydrates which was converted to CO2, leading leading to warming. So this appears to be an example of GHG-led warming and may be of relevance to today’s warming. YMMV. I can’t say this is definitive, but if it is valid, if the data is reliable, it may be an important piece of the puzzle.
#466, the spam filter ate my comment about CT, but the SH sea ice anomaly continues to increase while the NH sea ice anomaly continues to decrease. Too early to call a secular trend, but interesting.
#86 and #90
The Pacific Rim and other tectonic areas were very active in the Paleocene. Could there be a link to the release of Methane Hydrates?
RE:479
Susann,
You might find this temperature/CO2 history interesting.
Sussan:
atmospheric methane has been stable for a decade. its a non-issue, considering the “unprecedented warming” in that time.
regards.
For posterity sake,
Over at RC Gavin is asked about what data would falsify GW predictions. His response and my query submitted to RC follow:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding
Gavin:
You write at comment 42:
“You need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections.”
OK, lets start with 1998. There is a significant cooling over the past 10 years:
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_amsu_trend_map_tlt
You suggest that trends from 1999 are appropriate to interpret, how about 1998?
Hi Arthur $26
Regarding the NASA FAQ you mentioned
“Finally, scientists are almost certain that warming during the last 50 years was
caused by human activity because models cant reproduce the observed temperature
trend without including a rise in greenhouse gases.”
I am a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in physics.
Models can’t do water vapor well, and water vapor is
the most important Greenhouse gas. The issue is not
whether the earth is warmer, the issue is whether CO2
emissions are making the earth warmer.
The Storch and Bray survey of scientists was not that definite
about the source of global warming. I think it was 60:40, with
about 60% believing CO2 was responsible and about 40% undecided
or against. This does not sound like almost certain to me.
Seeing this play out reminds me that science is conducted by humans. This famous quote from Dale Carnegie captures the problem:
Perhaps we should all chip in and buy Pierrehumbert a Dale Carnegie course. Maybe Gavin would like one too.
Phil, thanks for the summary of AccuWeather’s video on the McIntyre/Hansen controversy.
Re #487
There’s a very interesting sea ice peninsula that looks like it might break off and start floating around the southern ocean off SA any time soon.
Andrew Dessler’s double standard regarding IPCC warmers vs skeptic lists in 12-28-07 @ icecap.com
redirected from: http://www.climate-resistance.org/2007/12/physician-heal-thyself.html
Now this… physician-heal-thyself!
correction: @ icecap.us
#81 mccall …CMIIW but not too many “sustainable development” “scientists”
in the IPCC lists… Are they changing skins/furs already?? I’m not
surprised and as Dale Carnegie noted, humans are foremost emotional, not
logical…I have to read/scan through AR4 now…If Lomborg endorses it,
you begin to wonder…
Re #482 and #494, twice yesterday I tried to post before these to say that the total ice anomaly was positive, and highest for about 5 years. I was hoping Steve might resurrect them from spamdom, but apparently not.
If I knew what I wrote that caused it, I wouldn’t write it!
Rich.
Was that comment meant to be ironic? There have been hundreds of comments recently at CA debating whether and how much warming has occurred in the last 10 years. The dispute is between those who think warming has merely (temperarily?) slowed down over that period and those who think it has stopped entirely. Whatever warming has occurred over the last 10 years, it is most definitely not “unprecedented”.
What little evidence we have showing a direct warming effect from GHGs points to a much bigger effect from methane than from CO2. See this link that discusses the satellite evidence. Methane levels explain (or at least correlate with) the recent warming pattern much better than CO2.
Re 491, Daniel Klein
Did you actually analyse that data, or are you assuming statistical significance simply because 1998 was the warmest year?
Chris,
Its simple. One time series with points that don’t fit the hypothesis removed. Why is it that you have a hard time grokking that?
#83 M. Simon There *is* a divergence. Not only do the proxies “diverge” from the instrumental record, they “diverge” from each other. See “positive and negative responders. Note that such a divergence would be expected for an overfit model – which all proxy-based temperature reconstruction models are. The Team knows this but are being very coy about not disclosing the problem. (Note that the divergence can be readily diminished by recalibrating the models over the new data period. (The same thing they do with the GCMs.))
There’s no need to pile on Chris Crawford. He simply has a lot of reading to do to catch up. If after that he’s *still* in denial, then that’s a different story.
Folks, if divergence isn’t happening, how come it was the subject of one of the sessions at AGU? (Aside: How come it was attended by the younger dendros, not the older? How come neither Mann nor Hughes attended that session?)
Daniel Klein & Alan Woods: stay tuned for the analysis that Lucia is doing.
So during the PETM life thrived.
Yeah, let’s talk about that piece of the puzzle.
/trying to channel kim 😉
=============
As noted here before, a problem for gavin and others who use the post-1975 warming as evidence of AGW is that post-1975 includes natural ocean-related factors (PDO and Atlantic thermohaline). The PDO has been much-discussed while evidence for post-1990 thermohaline activity, and high-latitude NH warming, includes this SST plot for the far North Atlantic .
Which (CO2, PDO, TH) is dominant, by how much and whether the natural factors are being driven by AGW is open to debate. The problem for gavin is that those natural factors are in the post-1975 mix – what goes up might come down, if only temporarily.
Headed to New Orleans to party a little and see how the recovery is going, in that order.
re 486 & 487. You guys missed the joke. On some sites which shall not be named denial is called
a crime, felonious crime. I’m pleading my case down to a misdemeanor.
Namely, i would prpose that the measured warming is over estimated ( see Ross’ work) or has
significant non climatic components. And further, that reconstructions cannot preclude with
high probability that the warming requires an explanation other than natural variability, while
recognizing that the science of C02 would explain some of this variability as an effect.
In short, I think they are overstating a shakey case, overcharging the crime, and proposing
punishments that are incomensurate with the crime.
decarbonifying is a good path, a measured response.
bender,
I guess I should have made my objections clearer instead of stating it was just a guess.
Given what A. Watts has done with his station audit and papers that show the UHI is under corrected and satellite data that shows little warming I think the tree ring reconstruction is correct. Thus my “guess” that the tree rings do in fact have a fairly strong correlation with temperature and thus the weather station record overstates the temperature rise. Thus the divergence.
I hope this explanation of my “guess” meets with Steve M’s approval.
OTOH because there are so many confounding variables (CO2, water availability, nutrient pockets, sunlight variations, volcanic/aerosol dimming etc.) it is more than possible I’m wrong and I am just looking for a hypothesis/data/reconstruction that supports my preferred position (climate sensitivity to CO2 + feedback is low).
Then there is the problem that if I accept the proxies then the MWP goes away. I think the MWP happened. What to do?
Which ever way I go there are large contradictions. That kind of throws the whole shooting match into doubt. If some one would care to take a stab at reconciling the contradictions it would be of great value to me. (Heh)
re 160.. no GISStemp doesnt do every 30 minutes, the gcm do ( or some other time step)
Follow up to 494:
Gavin: Are you sure about this comment you leave at number 47?
Plus, all the surface records even have positive (non-significant) trends, even starting from then [1998].
With 1998 remaining the record, and 2007 is the lowest since 2001 (UKMET) you certainly wont have a positive trend (significant or not) in that record at least.
While I agree with your comment that picking a single starting date is not good statistics, I am curious as to the meaning of your assertion, You need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections. One does need to start somewhere.
Let me rephrase the question then. How long would it need to be for the 1998 record global temperature to not be exceeded (or if you prefer, a non-trend beginning at that date) for you worry that something has been missed in your understanding? 2010? 2015? 2020? 2030? A single year as an answer would be appreciated.
I am simply curious and mean no disrespect with the question.
Daniel Klein: patience, see #506; your analysis is being prepared. See the opener by lucia.
Dan, your question makes perfect sense: do the models match reality. One thing to remember is how wide the confidence envelopes are on the ensemble GCM runs. My preliminary guess is that ANY BEHAVIOR is consistent with GCM predictions.
Best evidence so far indicates anthropogenic sources of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are either too small to measure and differentiate from natural sources or measurable and too small to be significant in comparison to natural sources. It has yet to be shown how, in any case, it can be possible for the future depletion of all fossil fuels to produce an effect greater than natural forces. It is claimed that humans are well on the road to depleting almost all of the economically recoverable petroleum reserves within the next lifetime. Coal is supposed to take awhile longer to deplete, but it too is reported to be a resource which can be or will be depleted within the forseeable future. Given the fact that the past depletions of the bulk of available fossil fuels in the past century can have at the most resulted in 0 parts per million to 100 parts per million increase, it begs an explanation how it is even remotely possible for the depletion of the perhaps lesser remaining fossil fuels to have any more than another 0 to 100 parts per million concentration in the atmosphere? In other words, there is no evidence that the combustion of all our remaining fossil fuel reserves in the span of only one year change the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other gases to even approach equality with the normal levels of such gases in the atmosphere during most of the Phanerozoic Eon in which life most flourished and diversified. If anything, the evidence shows that the present atmosphere is seriously CO2 deficient in comparison to past norms, and human contributions of such gases are too low and insignificant to have much of a global effect, harmful or beneficial.
Your source/s of PETM information are deceiving you by omitting the information which falsifies their conclusions. The Arctic circle is normally warm enough to be ice free during most of the Phanerozoic Eon. Rather than being a high temperature and high CO2 abnormality, the warmth and CO2 concentrations were normal. It is the present cold and glacial conditions which are abnormal and harmful to the flourishing of life. Also, an atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 2,000 ppm is not necessarily indicative of warmth, because the Earth has experienced periods of high warmth and low CO2a concentrations, low colds and high CO2 concentrations, and other combinations in which CO2 concentrations did not correlate with temperatures.
The fact that the past consumption of the major proportion or nearly the major proportion of fossil fuels in the world has resulted in temperature changes and CO2 changes too small in comparison to natural contributions to be discerned with undisputed confidence should cause the reader to question how it is possible for the consumption of all remaining fossil fuels to even remotely result in a large increase in temperature and 1,000 to 2,000 ppm CO2 levels which are normal to the Earth’s environment during most of the Phanerozoic Eon of more than 500 million years?
bender- Thank you. I will observe with interest. Also, here is my follow up and Gavin’s reply at RC:
Daniel Klein Says:
29 December 2007 at 11:40 AM
OK, simply to clarify what Ive heard from you.
(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, youll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any years global temperature that is on trend should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds weather noise)
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, Id need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so thats the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]
Nasif,
Thermo hour has switched channels. Permanently. Uncensored. Uncut.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2007/new-climate-blog/comment-page-13/#comment-294
Your perspective would be appreciated.
On the other hand, who can assure that the current fluctuations (not anomalies) of the tropospheric temperature are “abnormal”? The fluctuations of the temperature some 350 million years ago were from -5 K to 5 K; the fluctuations about three million years ago were from -3 K to 3 K; the fluctuations about one million years ago were from -1.5 K to 1.5 K; and the Oscar is… Oops, sorry… and the current fluctuations are from – 0.2 K to 0.8 K, i.e. 1 K. What’s odd?
Last time I checked, NASA’s webpage FAQ on the temperature error bars actually put it at +/-0.5 C, without any confidence intervals.
Particularly when those portions actually cast doubt on the series’ ability to test what it is you want to test. They don’t remove them, however, because to do so brings the MWP and LIA back in as strong as the two periods were known to be, which makes claims of CWP “unprecedented” warming rather silly.
Mark
It completely undermines tree ring chronologies. You can also look at the spaghetti graphs above and note that the farther back they go, the less in agreement they all are. They correlate well over the recent time simply because they were calibrated to this period. If they were robust in any sense of the word, they’d match a lot close far back than they do.
Um, it’s not just a “failure to justify a statement”, there’s literally not one single piece of evidence provided by Cook that the divergence is only a 20th century problem. I’m not sure how you can come to such a conclusion… oh wait, yes I am. The IPCC then followed up by using Cook’s unsubstantiated claim as “proof”, which begins the entire circular argument/special pleading these folks are known for. It’s beyond a joke, and you with a background in science should be ashamed for thinking this is in any way scientific.
Mark
Uh, that should read:
Mark
I’d very much appreciate a reasoned response to Raven’s 163. It would appear, at least for the chosen time period, that the model sensitivity to CO2 is not born out by the instrumental record. If the difference can be attributed to aerosols, what is the basis for such a contention? Or does the absence of error bars make the question meaningless?
Yup, beyond falsifiability. The problem is that the advocates masquerading as scientists understand this completely. Indeed, they use the concept to their advantage. The average Joe Schmoe journalist does not understand, and reports it to the average Joe Schmoe in the audience. It is tiring.
Mark
A divergence that happens now has probably happened in the past – that is the uniformitarian principle – unless you believe current divergence is caused by an unprecedented climate. The problem is that that is the question. Note that appeal to circular reasoning is a logical error.
Wait – if it’s true, as Mark T says:
does that mean that the current temp record could be as much as .5 ABOVE or .5 BELOW the current?
If thats the case, is it possible that they wouldn’t be able to resolve any temp changes (or record any anomalies) finer than .5 degrees?
Yes and no, Henry. When your error bars are about as big as the signal your measuring, it’s obviously cause for concern. Nevertheless, you can be sure that if there is a specific trend, it is highly unlikely that it is the result of nothing but continuous and consistently growing upward or downward errors, which would be expected to be random. But we also know that there are definite upward errors in the record, of unknown magnitude.
Actually, by “you can be sure of the trend” I should have said pretty sure obviously in the unlikely event that past temperatures were .5 degrees warmer and present temperatures .5 degrees colder than we’ve measured, you’d actually have cooling. But that is, as I said, not very likely.
I find it incredibly hard to draft on this cite. The box cuts off the text. Do others have that problem? At any rate, it appears that this cite is devoted to encouraging fiddle playing while … well … you know stuff burns.
At any rate, I wish Steve and the Gang would simply come out in the open and stop hiding behind this “audit” charade and put out some real research that reaches material conclusions regarding the ultimate issues. Instead, we are left with this in the business world [followed by the choir nodding its head] stuff. So, Id like to offer a different view that challenges the whole premise of this page.
Anybody whos ever actually seen a real audit function in the business world knows that audits are run by a bunch of overworked kids (just out of school with fresh accounting degrees) who in turn sit around bugging a bunch of overworked book keepers (who are really pissed off by these kids who are bossing them around) followed by a meaningless product called an opinion letter that essentially is a giant exercise in CYA. And, everybody in the business world knows that real business decisions are based on grey matter (e.g., behind the scenes info, word of mouth, etc.), and not audits or prospectuses. And, I am betting sure that people like Steve rarely, if ever, make business decisions based on audits, prospectuses, or any other such worthless paper work.
So, the whole premise that there is some kind of superior auditing that takes place in the business world (as opposed to within the scientific/academic community) is simply misleading. In short, this whole alleged audit standard that is being peddled here as gold is, frankly, a fiction.
@88 Eric McFarland says:
I beg to differ. STEVE’S audits as shown on this blog have been open and very well documented. It is a straw man argument and unfair to present the example that you may have had of an audit and compare it to what Steve has done here.
Mark T in #82 says:
You have this slightly wrong. The disagreement in the past is not alarming per se. What’s alarming is that it implies that the r^2 in the past (test error) is necessarily substantially lower than the r^2 in the present (training error). This implies that a significant overfit mistake has taken place given that the r^2 of the 20th century is so high.
Robustness is the property that the r^2 in the training predicts the r^2 out-of-sample well.
Bender in #84 writes:
Well, lets say that we calibrate tree rings as temperature proxies using some interval 1900-1970. I argue that such a proxy is more likely to accurately predict 1970-present than 1000-1850. Consequently, the forward looking divergence suggests that the temperature record is suspect.
Conversely, the clear loss of r^2 between the proxies going backwards (in contrast to their concordance during the calibration interval) implies to me that they are garbage for predicting historic temperature. One need not even mince words about ‘divergence’ and ‘uniformitarian’.
Eric McFarland, you are obviously a very angry man. You are a man, right? Well, your completely wrong if you think that Steve’s work is meaningless. If Steve had a goal in what he was doing, he’d do as you said, present research regarding things or whatever. But that is precisely the opposite of what an object checking of the facts of a study, and the methods, is. Frankly, science isn’t about “goals” so Steve is in fact far more scientific than you, in that he is actually concerned with finding the truth, whatever it may be, by checking the facts. Steve’s found some facts as put forth by AGW supporters to be erroneous. People would be wrong to think that means AGW is wrong, or that Steve deliberately went looking for errors in these particular studies because he didn’t like their implications. Steve just wanted to make sure the facts as they were presented were right. I think he was surprised and more than a little disgusted to find that they weren’t, because it was quite different from what he experienced in “the business world” Steve is not contrasting “the business world” with science in general, just this bogus science in particular. Typical of people who like to defend debunked notions that once supported their pet theory, you cry “These bastards are attacking science!”, but they aren’t, they are attacking psuedo-scientific claims made to support a particular theory.
Eric, no one here said it’s gold. It’s simply the best one can do with part time volunteer help. If there are ways to improve, by all means, chip in and make it better. The fact is Steve M has found several critical errors – with both the paleoclimate proxies and the surface instrumental record – suggesting audit is worthwhile. Doesn’t it bother you that Lonnie Thompson’s ice core data, for example, is considered by him to be a proprietary secret, when his funding agency and the journals he publishes in insist on prompt archiving?
Well… a t-test checks whether means are identical. This can be applied to anything where one has a mean, sample standard deviation etc. This includes slopes of lines– in fact, testing whether or not a slope for an OLS is statistically different from zero is explained in the help notes for EXCEL. It’s that standard. 🙂
There are “issues” with this data though:
1) It displays serial autocorrelation, so I have to read a bit. (Normally, when doing calibrations, or taking data in a lab, the experimentalist wants to learn enough to ensure the data won’t have serial autocorrelation when you don’t want it. Then the statistics become easier. So… I know how to detect it, and how to avoid it when designing and experiment, but I need to read precisely how to handle it when it exists!
2) I have to read a bit about flipping the null hypotheses around. Normally, the “scientific hypothesis” you want to test is such that it makes sense for the “null hypothesis” to be “the mean is no different from zero”. Then, to accept the alternate hypothesis, you set a high value for the confidence interval (like say 95%) so that you don’t go around deciding every single theory you pull out of your rear is “true” for no reason other than pure random chance. In the case of testing models, it’s useful to both look at “disproving” and “proving” the models work. (Basically, I’m pretty sure you can’t demonstrate either based on recent data, and using statistics. But, I need to look up some references, and needless to say, Christmas-New Years is not the best time to do this. Today, I cut out fabric for my dress for New Years, and I’ll be sewing tomorrow. So… after New Years, I’ll be looking at stuff.)
@Raven: Yep. If you actually look at “after 1984” only, and plot only that data, eyeballing the graphs don’t give the viewer an overwhelming sense of confidence in the accuracy in the predictive value of the models. Looking at only post-1984 data strips years that are clearly post-dictive stuff, but leaves a few years we could argue over. (I’ll be discussing “why pick 1984?” when I write up. The choices for testing predictive ability are pretty much start checking no earlier than 1983 but no later than 1988. )
@Steve– thanks for that answer. I’ll be doing the best comparison I can. Unforunately, certain data exists, others doesn’t. Hansen, when publishing in 1988 published what he published. I can’t alter that, so that’s just life. Gavin also compared the Hansen data to GISS temperatures, so whatever I’m doing… well.. it’s because I don’t have much alternative as a method of evaluating predictive ability.
Business audits cover far more than finances. We have safety audits, manufacturing audits and data quality audits.
A recent safety audit found a non-compliance issue. As it turned out the local safety guys had been a bit overenthusiastic with some test schedules an hadn’t been able to keep up. Fortunately the auditors were experienced, understood this and realized that no one had been endangered. Even so it demonstrated a failure in the system so they required an explanation of how this happened and what steps would be taken to ensure that it did not happen again. I’m really glad that these guys were experienced or it may have taken hours to try to explain the situation.
If this had been climate science we could just have said that the failure did not affect the result, i.e. safety, and carried on as usual. In fact we would have taken action anyway because an error is an error. The next error could be fatal!
re 170..
Yes Lucia, I just wanted to give you a heads up that the two temperature measures are actually
different.. I cannot recall if (tmax+tmin)/2 Underestimates the integrated temp or over estimates
it, or is an unbiased estimate.. Dont even know if it matters.
Personally I would like to compare the grids square by square. In Gisstemp the grids are unevenly sampled
( different vraience per grid square) but in GCM each grid is “equally” sampled..
Something bothers me about averaging a grid that is unevenly sampled and comparing it to the average of
a grid that is evenly sampled..
BENDER? am I making sense?
#169 — and those pink confidence intervals have nothing to do with physical uncertainty. They’re merely numerical SD’s. They have no physical meaning at all.
mosh, it makes sense to worry about *any* comparison that is potentially apples-oranges.
1. You mention “two grids”. GISSTEMP and what? What is it being compared exactly (and why?) and what are the spatial acaling differences? Regular vs. irregular grids will matter if there are climatological reasons why the one grid is irregular.
2. I believe the 12-h integration (tmin+tmax)/2 is biased high compared to the 30 min (GCM?) integration, but I don’t know for sure. I do know that the answer is known for certain in the primary literature.
Here’s a link to a chart showing the difference between using a mean of hourly readings versus (Tmin+Tmax)/2. The second method seems sensitive to the amount and timing of clear sky.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2201#comment-169136
Eric McFarland:
Instead of your suggestion, I think it would be better if you could address the issues at hand. Have you found an error in Steve M’s work? By all means, bring it forward so we can all have a look. Disagreement on methodology? Great, let’s discuss the merits.
Oh wait, you haven’t presented anything that can be objectively and empirically discussed.
As for disclosure, Steve M has disclosed all of his data, methods and code.
Eric #97
The core of most of the findings of the anthropogenic global warming community is that the recent warming of the globe cannot fully be explained by natural means. There are several papers out there, some of whom have been referenced here, that between 30-50% of the current warming can be explained by natural means (solar variation, and other sources). When there is concrete data presented by folks like Ross and the http://www.surfacestations.org that fully 50% of the North American climate monitoring network falls into the lowest quality rating (temperature error exceeding +/-2 degrees C), and that only 17% of the stations audited meet NOAA’s own standards for the highest quality climate monitoring stations, then this leads to further questions. It is my understanding that stations around the world are no better in quality. This brings the current magnitude of warming into question, and if natural variation can explain 50%, then it is within the realm of possibility that the current warming being attributed to CO2 emissions could be in error.
Auditing of scientific papers that form the basis of a political movement to fundamentally change the entire global economy is an absolute necessity as the sacrifices that are being asked of the global population are of such fundamental importance as to materially change the entire shape of civilization for centuries to come.
Consensus is such a stupid word. Until the 20th century and modern physics every single paper ever written that tried to explain the source of the suns heat was wrong. If one dataset that cannot be refuted is published that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that natural variation has produced temperatures as warm or warmer than today’s then you have lost your consensus. I have seen many such papers, including one regarding an assemblage of wood that just emerged from a glacier in Greenland that indicates that temperatures in that part of the world were warmer than today for centuries. If this is the case, then we have a situation where science could easily be subverted through the political power of the purse to produce results that conform to the “consensus” rather than the norms of scientific study.
This is simply too important of a subject NOT to have someone like Steve McIntyre around.
Your pretty foolish to think that “Mann’s basic conclusion still stands”. On what basis? Moreover, the description you made of the audit as a “ambush” would seem to demonstrate that you believe that demonstrating that a study is complete rubbish is wrong, though presumably not if the study contradicts the “consensus that has emerged (globally) re climate change and its human causes.” Steve is not checking these studies for the purpose “obscuring the general clarity”, he is trying to make things clearer by getting rid of all the junk. Nothing in the link you showed suggests that Steve has any interest in “profiting from of an industry that depends heavily on releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gasses for its profits” misspelled gases, By the way). But your “follow the money” statement applies equally well to everyone I presume? Good, because I’m sure you’ll want to know about money received by James Hansen From the Heinz Foundation, or George Soros.
Anyway, Steve isn’t a “denier”, I don’t even think he’s a “skeptic”, and in no way do any of his findings fatally undermine AGW, and that is not his goal, because Steve’s only “goal” is the truth.
Funny that people were so “intrusive” to Mann, only demanding to see the methods he used so they could be evaluated, while you advocate what is surely an absolute invasion of privacy.
Eric, you seriously need to grow up.
#177 the question is what is the bias over long periods of time, where the amount of night-time cloudiness is a random variable, and the sensitivity you refer to comes out in the wash. The answer depends on the shape of the daily cycle. If it is perfectly sinusoidal the (tmin+tmax)/2 is unbiased. But is is not simusoidal, so it is baised. I just can’t remember which way. A second issue is how that bias varies from place to place, and therefore across the globe.
Steve: The new high-quality US CRN data shows that it spends more time near the min.
Eric, what is your proof that current temperatures are “unprecedented”?
Bender:
The NAS for one, which is fairly conservative.
What do you spelling geniuses think about Tim Flannery?
As for the Mann ambush, have any of you read the document request that the US Congress sent out to Mann? It was very aggressive, intimidating, and intrusive.
There are claims being repeatedly bandied about here that seem to rely on previous discussions on this site – but nobody ever provides links to back up their assertions. Instead of the current pathetic list of “Favorite posts” in the left nav bar (many of which are not even on this website, and one of which is duplicated) how about getting a concise list of the most convincing posts on the site for the following claims:
(1) “the current magnitude of warming [is in] question” (Wingo, #99; Gunnar, #67, etc.) – precisely how much question is it in, and why? Let’s see the data and calculations!
(2) “current temperatures are [not] ‘unprecedented'” (bender, #101; bender, #72) – presumably talking about the last 1000 to 2000 years. I understand this is the central point about the hockey-stick issue that’s so much the focus of this site. So where’s the key post here that clearly explains this? When was temperature likely higher than now, and what is that likelihood?
(3) “tree rings [are invalid] as a proxy thermometer” (Philip_B, #43, and many others) – ok, this sounds like something that merits a major scientific paper. Let’s see the data and analysis!
(4) “current warming being attributed to CO2 emissions could be in error” (Wingo, #99, and many recent comments in “unthreaded”, “Svalgaard”, etc.) – where’s the article here that shows how IPCC and friends have gotten the radiative forcing numbers wrong for CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases? I’d love to see that one!
and I know there are several others along these lines that would make a greatly improved nav bar. Or just post the links for me in a comment. Thanks!
Steve: try using the categories on the left frame.
#573 Steven Mosher:
From:
Weiss, A. & C. J. Hays (2005) Calculating daily mean air temperatures by different methods: implications from a non-linear algorithm. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 128: 57-65.
The direction and magnitude of bias varies depending on location and season. The warmer, drier and more continental the seasonal climate the lower the bias. Compare California vs. Florida.
#582
Please provide page numbers and figure numbers. Be warned – I’ve read it all. This is a test that you can not pass.
Arthur, read the blog archive. As you become informed your questions will be taken more seriously. Let’s start with the MWP. What was the average annual temperature in the year AD832, say? And with what degree of precision is this known?
re 575 Bender.
Ok. Lucia is going to revisit the “skill” of hansen 1988. So basicaly you are comparing a GCM run
with the Temp record.. So I’m puzling on a couple things that bug me.
The Temperature record ( global average) is compiled from non uniformly sampled grid.
Simply, we got a 1221 thermometers in the US and roughly 1800 thermometers for the ROW.
These measurements are averaged into grid averages ( say 5×5) and then the whole mess is averaged
into one number with one error term. +.5C anomaly.
When the GCM is run you also get grid averages, and then you can combine these into a global average.
Question: should we compare GCM Grids with the temp records grids to check for Skill? or should we lump
it into one number for both?
should we compare the model to reality at grid level? or global level? It’s simulated at the grid level
shouldnt we test its ability to get a grid right? and if it gets all the grids right, then the global
comparisipn just falls out. On the other hand it is entirely possible to get the global “right” and
miss hugely on the grid level? or is it? hmm.
Should we compare hemisphere to hemisphere? or lump the two together. I can well imagine Missing BOTH
hemispheres ( one too high the other too low) but getting the global right.
And that fact that different grids and different hemispheres are sampled differently also gives me pause
to lumping it all together.
Finally, the (tmax+tmin)/2 versus integrated temp.. I just wanted Lucia to be aware that the two things
she was comparing ( GCM results versus temp records ) might have different error structure..
probably inconsequential
Arthur Smith #583
Arthur, go to the left of the screen, and find “favourite posts.”
Click on “McKitrick: what is the hockey stick debate about?”
At the top of this thread you will find a link to an 18 page paper by
McKitrick. I found this a good place to start.
#587 Steven Mosher:
1. Scale of comparison. Comparing global mean GCM run (regular grid) to GMT (irregular network) makes some sense, but I would think the model might produce (or fail to produce) some systematic biases that we do not (or do) see in the real system. Obvious candidates off the top of my head are observed Arctic heating and SH cooling, both far in excess of what the models predict – but note how these offset each other when integrated globally. A fit in terms of global mean does not imply regional fit.
2. Comparing grid vs network. A point-to-point comparison in (1) would give you maximum information as to how model is performing. But obviously this is not easy when gridpoints do not line up with network locations. Which apple goes to which orange? Surely this problem has been approached by the gatekeepers. I would be inclined not to regularize the instrumental network, but to get some downscaled estimate from the GCM. This may not be possible. I know it is an area of active research how best to do this. There are not a lot of options. Which is probably one of the main reasons why mean fields are compared. Your question, I guess, is “how wrong could you be, regionally, and still be right globally?” I bet the answer is “a lot”. (Surely these kinds of analyses have been done already by Schmidt et al?)
3. Spatial pattern of bias. The method of approximating the “daily mean” matters. The two-point method (tmin,tmax) is far noisier than the integrated 24-point method. (It’s the same problem as taking 2 tree cores vs 24.) The error is not random. The bias is systematic, and therefore should not be ignored. The magnitude of bias appears to be large if your goal is to resolve tenths of a degree. But I would read more before drawing a firm conclusion there. What concerns me in a global comparison is that tropical vs. arctic differences in bias could be huge, and non-uniform among seasons.
Our conversation should be threaded.
re: 592 I was thinking the same thing. LOL
Polar Bear dudes – nice bit of research there. You may also find this useful; I always send it to friends/relatives whenever P.B. discussions rear their ugly heads.
Of course, no sooner had Mitchell published it then one of the eco groups tried to smear him. Claimed – get this – that he was in the back pocket of some Hudson’s Bay-area Native Americans who were afraid they’d lose their hunting rights if the bears were declared endangered. Probably intended to pay him off with whale oil, which would become his private bio-diesel stash. The sneaky b*****d.
The coyness of the condescension corroborates the corruption.
============================================================
re 592….
explains a lot, need to go back to the comment where I engaged in wild speculations about
her idenity and she corrected me. ( neat trick huh?)
funny also, initially I miss spelled her name on purpose, adding an e to the end.
usually when i do this people correct me, iff they are using their real name.
So my initial thought was susann was not a real name ( hence my check of her using gendergenie)
but if susanne is her right name, then that also explains why shse didnt correct me.
(Now this doesnt always work, I called Jeg a woman for sometime and he never corrected me.
for a while I thought somebody might be pretending to be Jeg, so you try to smoke them
out by making mistakes about the identity and watch to see if they correct you or not)
neat trick huh? doesnt always work though..
she thinks this should be preserved for history.
like i said before she has probably had training or experience writing, correct form but
lacking heart.
Steve Mc: Enough silly speculation about Susann.
not related to bob mosher, obviously.
Count me in the Kim fan club.
re 596. yes. The aphoristic acumen is astounding. Laconic kim kicks butt.
re 595. ok SteveMc. Bender and I think a thread on comparing GCM to the temperature record would
be an interesting thing…
lucia is revisiting hansen 88, perhaps bender and I should look for a suitable paper to discuss beyond
this.
bender?
Steve: OK.
lucia will be finished the first part of her analysis soon enough. presumably she will publish at “where lucia doesn’t knit” (lucia, your blog needs a better name). at that point steve m can link to her. alternatively, pick the best definitive paper on assaying GCM perfomance (anything nice and teamy by schmidt?), and start by discussing it.
@Bender– true. I need a better name. I set that up so people could gab, and didn’t think of a name. I also need an “about” page, a contact form etc. The problem with starting a blog around the holidays is the holidays interfere!
@SteveMosher–
The short answer to your question is:
One can only work with available information.
Do simpler things first. You will learn something, but still have questions.
Do more complicated things later.
Now, the long answer:
What you compare to what depends on
a) What question you are asking and
b) What data are available.
With Hansen A,B & C, the only data easily available to me is the data in Hansen et al. 1988. It would appear this is the only data available to the public. Nothing was provided in numerical form. A chart was provided for GMST for scenarios A,B & C and colored isotherms were provided for toher information.
Given what is available, I will ask only:
Do the GCM’s predict (as opposed to post-dict) the GMST data?
That is a minimal criterion for GCMs predicting the global effect of CO2.
Is it possible to get this right and be wrong on the local level? Yes.
But the question of: are they tracking in a predictive sense (not postdictive) should first see if they are getting the global numbers right.
The first thing I will do is compare GMST from GISS and HadCrut to GMST in Hansen. This will be an imperfect test. I am aware that Hansen calculated his GCM values in a way that differs from the way GISS calculates the physical data. (And so was Hansen, as GISS uses a method developed by Hansen for the measurements.)
However, there is nothing I can do about the lack of perfection. If you try for statistical & logical perfection in these comparisons, you will find you can do nothing at all. I want to do two things, limiting comparison to the time after 1984 (and possibly 1988):
1) Test whether we can confidently say the models agree with the data (to 95% certainty.)
2) Test whether we can confidently say they don’t agree with the data (to 95% certainty.)
I need to get some references to learn how to do #2 right, and I’m hoping Bender or Jean S. can tell me. However, it appears the what I may have to do is just wing it,and then after I do it the “seems to me” way, people will understand what I am trying to do and give me advice! Then I’ll be able to do ti right. After all, neither Bender nor Jean S can read my mind, so until they see what I am trying to do, it will be difficult for me to ask them questions and/or for them to suggest references. 🙂
How about “Lucia in the sky with dimers”?
There are many arbitary choices to be made in such an analysis. Many subjective assumptions as well. I think the question is ultimately not answerable, that there are only better and poorer approximations. My guess is your first attempt will be good and that once you have put something down in script form, then it will be worthwhile to make it better.
Regarding the all-important cherry-picking of time frames, it is instructive to observe the alarmist bias in the IPCC Ch 3, how they depict an acceleration in warming through the use of four successive linear trend lines – time frames all cherry picked. People ask how skeptics justify their choice of 1998 as the starting point for alleged “flattening” of the warming trend. MBH*98* aside, the flattening serves as a counterpoint to the equally untenable never-slowing perspective that IPCC presents. Even Gavin Schmidt recognizes that the anticipated warming will come in cycles.
Susann, the instrumental surface temperature record is biased and the paleoclimate studies are biased, and the GCMs are methodologically biased. Let’s focus on these facts, shall we? What do all these biases add up to? You apparently have nothing to say of any substance. Hopefully that will change?
#602: I dunno. Something evoking the bright light of truth, the sunshine of audit, the quiet of introspection, the care of calculation. Cozy corners, sunshine, tea, kittycats, balls of yarn unraveling, whirring laptops, quiet conversation, brilliant little insights, numbers that speak volumes. Everything that CA is NOT.
“Climate Diary”
“Spinning Thread”
“Climate Numbers”
“Reverie”
“On Second Thought”
cheesy, yes. work with me.
Susann, what should lucia name her blog?
Re: #601
Lucia, I admire your Steve M like energy levels for doing these analyses and look forward with much anticipation to your comments and results on this analysis. You appear to be eminently qualified to do the appropriate statistical analysis. When I attempted to do a less sophisticated analysis of Hansen scenarios I was surprised by the apparent overestimation in the 1988 scenarios for the emissions of GHGs going forward. I found that the scenario methods make estimating the power of climate model predictions most difficult to make on anything other than an approximate level. What would be needed in my viewpoint to truly test the model would be to freeze the model at its 1988 detailed form and then input the actual measured variables relevant for model projections in the following years for an out-of-sample test. Otherwise with scenarios and even multiple ones, part of the projection is done outside the model in determining the future values of the important variables/inputs to the model. I found this mixing and matching of Hansens scenario approach very unsatisfying.
My conclusion based on finding the closest scenario to the real world out-of-sample conditions was that Hansens model underestimated the temperature increases.
Re #608 “Where climate talk gets hot”
How about “Climate Science Hot Talk” (CSHT)
Susann, I concur that speculating about your identity is just plain silly and wastes much bandwidth attempting to make you a more powerful entity than you are a bogey woman if you will. Your blogging persona is defined by your posts and why anyone would need to dig further is beyond me. If you are here to learn, my only advice to you would be to stick to the context of the subject matter at hand and get less distracted by forays into the politeness and tone of posters. For example, my disappointment with JEGs appearance here was not about his Poirot attitude but the fact that he failed to apply his little gray cells in being more forthcoming about his thoughts on MBH 1998 and teleconnections.
Climate Engineering
A topic that’s aways interested me, though it’s mostly taboo among warmer purists. SCIENCE has an interesting conference report and discussion at http://www.sciencemag.org/hottopics/geoengineering/ –free access, though not to the article itself, dammit. RC’s own Raypierre is quoted worrying that a successful climate-engineering program could, if interrupted by war (or whatever), lead to a catastrophic 7ºC temp rise in just 30 years… Really. There are a couple of new-to-me ideas here, along with the predictable handwringing by the priesthood, who worry that the public will be less likely to support their expensive social-engineering if cheap climate-engineering might work. One can almost smell the incense in the temple…
It would be nice to see a thread discussing climate engineering here, though this may be too peripheral to SM’s interests.
Best for 2008, Pete Tillman