by Judith Curry
Global prediction partnerships would cost little and reduce the regional carnage caused by floods, droughts and tropical cyclones. – Peter Webster
Peter Webster has a commentary article in Nature, entitled Meteorology: Improve Weather Forecasts for the Developing World. Unfortunately this article is behind paywall, but here are some liberal excerpts:
Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast coast of the United States with ample warning. The storm caused widespread damage but only around 100 people died, thanks to planning made possible by extended and accurate weather forecasts.
However, in the developing world, such storms take a much greater toll, some examples:
- Very Severe Storms Sidr in 2007 and Nargis in 2008 caused over 10,000 and 138,000 fatalities in Bangladesh and Myanmar, respectively.
- Flooding in the Ganges and Brahmaputra basins has displaced over 40 million people in each of the past few years.
- A three week break in rainfall just after seasonal planting, following what seemed to be a normal monsoon onset, caused a disastrous crop failure in India in 2002
Because the resilience of poor populations is low and falls with each crisis, the cumulative effects are relentlessly impoverishing.
Advances in prediction science mean that such catastrophes can be forecast anywhere in the world with as long a lead time as Hurricane Sandy. The problem is how to tailor complex global forecasts to a country or region and communicate them effectively to local populations.
No warning
In most developing countries hazard warnings are issued only a few days in advance, if at all. Yet, for a flood or cyclone, at least a week of forewarning is necessary to allow the slowest member of a society (perhaps a farmer and his cattle) to evacuate. For short droughts, several weeks’ notice would allow planting and harvesting schedules to be adjusted. Long droughts require warnings months ahead, so that resistant crops can be chosen and fodder and water stored.
Regional forecasts with long lead times must take global atmospheric circulations into account, because the local weather is influenced by distant events.
Taking decades to develop and expensive to build and maintain, global weather forecast models are run by only a few national or multinational government organizations, including the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the United Kingdom Meteorological Office and the U.S. National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).
In theory, developing countries can access these data streams. [However] less developed countries have small budgets and slow internet connections.
Bangladeshi network
Bangladesh offers one success story that could be emulated. Following the 1998 floods, the ECMWF and Bangladeshi government authorities, together with Georgia Institute of Technology, developed a 1-10 day flood forecasting system and created the Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN) to distribute it. Since 2004 CFAN has produced daily forecasts of the Brahmaputra and Ganges river flows, and transmitted them to the Bangladesh Flood Forecast and Warning Centre.
[LINK to Webster’s paper describing the Bangladesh project]
Before the 2007 flood season, village and community leaders in six unions of Bangladesh were trained to interpret the data and take action if flooding was likely. Local leaders might tell farmers to harvest crops, shelter animals, store clean water and secure food, household and farming effects.
Bangladesh experienced three major floods in 2007 and 2008. Each was forecast successfully 10 days in advance and mitigation steps taken. A World Bank report concluded that about $40 was saved for every dollar invested in the regional forecasting and warning system. Global forecasts produced in Europe and turned into flood forecasts in the United States were, within 6 hours, integrated into Bangladesh’s disaster management protocol by local experts.
In 2009, to help facilitate technological transfer and capacity building, CFAN handed over its flood forecast modules to the Bangladesh Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC), as part of the capacity building commitment. However, it proved difficult for FFWC to handle the large volume of data transfer and the responsibility was taken over by an international non-government entity funded to some degree by contributions from member states , the Regional Integrated and Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (RIMES). The RIMES framework is innovative but suffers from the funding pressures that plague forecasting and warning groups in the developing world. Limited funding also means that the necessary cadre of scientists to tackle specific problems cannot easily be maintained. It also makes it difficult to perform one essential process: the updating of the modules as the global forecast systems and satellite systems change.
Global partnerships
Building upon the Bangladesh model, it is envisioned that partnerships can be established in other regions to deal with a range of weather hazards. A partnership plan needs to be developed that bridges the gap between the producers of the global forecasts and the user community. The boundary organization or group that forms the bridge depends on the type of hazard being addressed. But the aim of each team is the same: to produce hazard forecast modules that utilize global forecasts to be used to provide hazard warnings for the developing country or region. The boundary team is also responsible for the updating of the module to keep up-to-date with changes in the satellite systems used for regional calibration and also in the global forecasting systems themselves. Depending on the resources and capabilities of the developing country, the production of the forecasts can be either transferred to an agency within the country or the boundary organization can provide continuing support.
Such partnerships can be facilitated by sustained funding from intergovernmental organizations, such the United Nation, the World Bank and USAID. The cost is relatively small and it has been estimated that flood forecasting modules for the entire South and East Asian region could be developed and implemented for less than $1M/year.
Asia and Africa stand on the threshold of immense economic advancement and can build resilience through the effective use of extended range weather forecasts. Faced with possible climate change, societies that learn to cope with and mitigate hazards in the current era will be most adept at dealing with more frequent and intense hazards in the future.
JC comments
What Peter Webster proposes could have enormous humanitarian and socioeconomic benefits in the developing world. The financial resources required to implement such a proposal is minimal. So, what are the roadblocks to accomplishing this?
After the devastating Pakistani floods in 2010, Peter Webster wrote a paper [link] that demonstrated that the Pakistani floods were predictable at least 10 days in advance using the ECMWF forecast system. ECMWF was actually criticized for not warning Pakistan in some way. Since then, the major global weather forecasting centers (ECMWF, NCEP, UKMO) have been paying more attention to extreme events in the developing world, and presumably communicating to some extent with the meteorological agencies in these countries.
However there is a big gap between a global model forecast of say a major blocking pattern developing, and a location specific flood forecast. You need a dedicated team that is focused on the specific region, while at the same time having the capability to process the global weather forecast stream. The boundary organizations (e.g. a university team, a private company, a NGO or a multigovernmental agency such as RIMES) have a critical role to play, but without funding for the boundary organizations, this just doesn’t happen.
How to fund the boundary organizations here? Webster proposes funding from agencies such as UN, WorldBank, USAID. RIMES has attempted a model whereby the funding comes from the developing countries themselves, but their experience has been that they cannot obtain funding to pay scientists from say the U.S. or Europe to facilitate this process. It seems possible that a social business model could be developed to pay for this.
The other impediment to this model is the governments of the recipient countries. Developing countries that do have meteorological agencies may not want to admit to their government that they do not have the tools or the capabilities to handle their nation’s weather forecasting needs. Peter Webster was told by one meteorological agency in a South Asian country that they only need a two day forecast, and that probabilistic forecasts don’t work for their country. Weather information is regarded by some countries as national security information: India does not make available its geostationary weather satellite data nor its streamflow data. Further, there are ancillary political considerations involved, such as when the Myanmar government did not inform its population of the coming cyclone for political purposes (link).
Even if all of the above impediments have been successfully managed, there is a further challenge particularly if funding from USAID and other government aid agencies has been involved. A key objective to their funding is build capacity in the developing countries, rather than have the project continuing to support the developing country. A laudable goal, but idealistic in many instances. Surely no one is proposing that each developing country develop a global weather forecast capability such as ECMWF. However, for example, Peter Webster’s grant from USAID in Bangladesh required the transfer of the flood forecasting technology to Bangladesh. After purchasing computer equipment and extensive training of personnel, the Bangladeshis were not capable of sustaining this project, for reasons that are outlined in Webster’s previous paper. The project was salvaged by RIMES, but RIMES continues to require support from Webster’s research group to maintain this project.
What Webster is proposing is a ‘flat world’ approach that takes advantage of expertise and resources around the world to tackle a problem in an efficient and economical way. The political impediments for governments to manage this may be insurmountable; NGOs, private companies and social business may be the way to go. But given the large amount of funds that the U.S. and European countries spend on humanitarian aid in response to these disasters, one would hope that the UN or the U.S. could figure out some way to support this idea that has such great humanitarian and economic potential for the developing world at so little cost.
Private weather forecasting companies are starting to develop in Asia: the first one to my knowledge is Skymet. We have also spoken with a group in China that is trying to develop a private company along these lines. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and to what extent these market driven developments from within the region can help countries such as Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Does China really want to fund Western academics’ wish to rescue the world from capitalism and nature? Does anyone really believe Western adademia gives a damn?
I question whether the impoverished populations in the examples could do anything constructive with the information. Knowing a disaster is headed your way and having the means to respond are two different things. Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Plenty of warning. Little response. Not exactly a wealthy population there in New Orleans but certainly wealthy compared to residents of Myanmar. Katrina killed 2000 people. Could have warning 6 months ahead of time instead of 6 days and I don’t think it would’ve changed the end result.
Pravda article on global warming posted on Drudge Report.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/04-01-2013/123380-global_warming-0/
Great read!
Yes, don’t believe those Western Elite scientists and follow your Russian comrade brethren in their continuing battle against them. Drudge Report readers surely appreciate the downtrodden communist ideals in their eternal fight against Elites.
NASA can’t put a man in orbit with an American rocket any longer. They have to rely on rockets designed by Russian scientists for that. Sad, innit? ‘Nuff said.
I need a T-shirt printed up.
“I spent a TRILLION dollars to win the cold war and all I got for it is a NASA that can’t put men in space anymore.”
Holy Cow, Spinger was suckered by Pravda. I knew he was a chump, but I didn’t know he was that easy.
The same good people and their climate computers COULD NOT foretell/predict GOOD CLIMATE NEWS like * “It’s Official: Australia Drought free after 10 years”, * so what makes anyone so sure their predictions of future oblivion by global warming induced drought are correct?
* [ http://www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/its-official-australia-no-longer-in-drought-20120427-1xpsp.html ]
Imagine the impoverished populations getting a text message saying, “Start planting, drought will be over in 9 months”!
It aint gonna happen.
“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.” -Mikhail Gorbachev, speech to the Soviet Politburo, November 1987
“As the Soviet collapse became imminent in the final years, the Communist strategy became to infiltrate global environmental organizations. Gorbachev was active in this effort as eary as 1990.”
Continued on: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread525624/pg1
But, don’t get all warped about this, the ideologies in play are merely pawns in the hands of the banking cartel, who took over the Russian Revolution by funding Lenin, who made their money lending to both sides in wars between the murderers and thieves who proclaimed themselves rulers and getting interest paid by taxes on the people, and then expanded by getting control of the governments to sanction the fraudulent fractional reserve system in which they create money out of nothing – and now they rule the world..
http://www.basicincome.com/basic_banks.htm
http://www.iamthewitness.com/books/Andrew.Carrington.Hitchcock/The.History.of.the.Money.Changers.htm
Now remember it was you al-a-Putin up a golden calf, today it has grown up to become the bronze bull you got down on wall street. Or was it, Pig Street? Still hard to say today.
Perfect post for a Sunday. I hope that a social business model is actually adopted. Let’s do a competition for fundraising–Team Curry vs…
There is absolutely no question that improving weather forecasting for the developing world is a good thing (with or without AGW).
There is a German students’ song, “Wer soll das bezahlen?” (Who’s supposed to pay for this?).
The “developing world” doesn’t have any money for this, so it would largely be up to the more affluent developed world to pick up the tab.
Some of the basic R+D cost would presumably occur in the developed world, anyway – but there would also be costs occurring in the developing world.
OK, so far, but who is going to administer this program, especially if it becomes one involving significant cost incurred internationally, outside the developed world?
A UN agency?
IMO the cited Bangladeshi example of a local program managed locally, possibly with some technical and financial support from the developed nations, makes more sense than an international effort run by the UN.
Max
Max,
That is the whole point of my piece. The work is already been done: it requires moulding to be useful locally. I could list the billions of developed world money that goes nowhere. Here is something cheap and all the developing world has to do is adopt the product and eventually make it their own. Alas, “there is a great distance between tee and green”. Giving is one thing but accepting is really something else.
Sounds like you are getting a steady dose of Easterly/Acemoglu realities in your worthy quest.
We have a real decision here: pay government scientists to worry about well being in the third world or do whatever it takes to actully bring about democracy and human rights there.
Full disclosure might be nice for this story, Judy.
Judith,
Warnings are only as good as the communication to distribute the warnings.
Many stations around my area rarely give any warnings at all.
That is IF you have the radio or TV on!
Hey, first you need a radio or TV. There are lots of places where it takes days to get any news in.
For this proposal to have any substantial success requires considerable infrastructure which is not available today
See bangledesh’s village phone program.
80% of the physical country has cell coverage and there is coverage where 95% of the population lives.
And stupid Eli doesnt even understand community radio.
I think it was a unicef project started in 2006 or 2008.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97171/BANGLADESH-Community-radio-role-in-disaster-preparedness
Sadly Eli, we see around the world today that copper has legs & no one knows where it is going.
Oh yes, everywhere. And, of course, you have to bring in resources and get people out. It’s sort of like PSA tests, you can test all you want, but since there is not much clinical to be done for prostate cancer why bother.
An old six transistor radio would do the trick. Of course, one of those in the modern version can be made for a few dollars or less. If someone really cared, they could start a movement. One transmitter can cover a small country.
Dr. Curry, as you and your husband know, and many many people who work to effect change in both the developed and developing world, cultural impediments are the most intransigent barriers to change. Change is slow when the situation calls for improving human kind. Change is rapid when demagogues appeal to biases and ignorance.
From what can only be called my limited experience in effecting social change, success occurs one person, face to face, at a time. Efforts to implement change by going through governments or tribal leaders or early adaptors frequently falters as each group or agency along the financial stream whats a piece of the action.
My solution? as with my own efforts, one-to-one. In the case of the rural poor: radios; cheap, grind the handle to generate power, weather channel radios. Tie the distribution of radios to future disaster relief programs and spot check for distribution and encumbrances applied by local leaders. Begin with the weather forecasts that the regional government will allow, then add longer term forecasts as resources become available. Use each regional weather disaster to tie longer term forecasts to the next broad cast cycle. This is the easy part.
The hard part is getting the money for developing regional forecasts. The money is in the “CO2 is leading us to hell” budgets. Extricating that money means two things: 1) forming a posse; guys/gals in white hats who will publicly call out the bad guys/gals who say the science is settled. Instead say the science of climate change is not likely going to be settled for a very long long time, and, in the mean time we have other fish to fry in the here and now. 2) The next obvious step is to close the CO2 wing of NASA, funding NASA for firing off rockets like they are capable of doing; expand NOAA just a tad bit in the regional forecast wing; fail to renew the renewable energy subsidies (its ok to spend on some R & D); redirect computer power and resources/efforts to expanding weather forecasting (we on the home front are likely to benefit); gently but firmly move the NGO’s off stage.
Now for my next trick I will need a volunteer.
I volunteer to second and third through infinity your suggestions above, Agent Double Oh Eight! All politics is local, all adaptation to weather and climate is local. Information and funding distributed from the Firstest of All World Nations will(should) be readily available, and serve as the most effective balm for the guilt felt by the ones who’ve most benefitted from whatever change Humans can wreak on the climate.
The US Navy was on its way to the Indonesion tsunami within hours. The decision took seconds, because it was foregone.
===============
Kim
You are the winner! 3 Qualoods to your account.
Quaaludes are drugs. Pills that make you feel warm, relaxed, and sleepy.
Quatloos are the monetary unit used on the planet Triskelon in the fictional Star Trek universe.
Write that down.
Quaaludes are drugs. P-i-l-l-s (the spam filter strikes again) that make you feel warm, relaxed, and sleepy.
Quatloos are the monetary unit used on the planet Triskelon in the fictional Star Trek universe.
Write that down.
I came to learn very quickly that producing a good forecast was 10% of the work. If you read the BAMS paper (2010) you will note that we went face to face in training and dissemination of the forecasts. It was successful. But what it really takes is for the governments to adopt the process or for social business to take over. This rarely happens. BTW, cell phone is the mode of communication that works.
Mr./Dr. Peter Webster
I applaud efforts, including your own, to implement social change in developing countries and in this particular case, Bangladesh.
I am aware of work in Africa to use cellphones to gather local environmental data and uplink such data through the internet to remote data collection and analysis centers including GPS derived locations. In this process, the success was determined by the availability of electricity. Much of the electricity was intermittent and dependent upon diesel generators which in turn was dependent upon a highly erratic distribution system, even in those rare circumstances where the diesel fuel funding was available through foreign university grants. In the developing world, infrastructure is missing, electricity availability is unpredictable. Without electricity, without diesel fuel to run generators, cellphone towers don’t operate.
In my mind’s eye, I envision hand cranked radios in the hands of many who will be impacted by severe weather and these people can hear and respond to weather forecasts including impending dangerous storms.
My experience with governments, NGO’s, and religious based organizations, suggests to me that sustained funding for whatever project, however noble and well intentioned, dries up and blows away.
A global network of satellite derived regional weather forecasts can be transmitted to strategically placed radio broadcasting centers, similar to the Radio Free America, BBC, etc., and the local receivers of such broadcasts can then react. In more democratic government systems, there will be broad based support for preparation and responding to weather.
The money for weather can be reallocated from the money going to the CO2 climate story. Removing the funding for efforts to mitigate CO2 is enough to launch several additional weather satellites that could provide at first regional, and then local weather forecasts. To extract the funds from the climate modelers and such types will require a posse who will call out the bad guys and re-introduce the considerable uncertainties of climate science to main stream media, Congress, the President and his appointees, and the public at large.
I have outlined a plan for social change that requires work both here and abroad. That change will have repercussions at home and reverberations in the developing world. Putting into the hands of the people who will be effected by weather a device they can possess and hear for themselves, without reliance upon sketchy forms of electric energy, is more likely than not, to effect the positive social change that makes lives more endurable.
Again, I congratulate you on efforts to implement positive social change.
RiH008, http://www.gizmag.com/go/1263/
The problem is political though. In some regions evacuating means losing everything whether or not the flood does come.
Capt’nDallas
Thank you for the link to the hand cranked radio, one version of which I have. I would expect a cigarette pack size hand cranked radio could do the job for a lot less money than I paid. You can build waterproof radios, cellphones not so much.
For weather information either before departure or when on the water I use Weatheradio Canada VHF broadcast. The synthesized voice makes for easier listening than code. It’s an FM broadcast easily replicable in the developing world.
Your point re: “political” reminds me that all politics are local and again, in my mind’s eye, when the local people have a device that provides useful information to themselves, they become involved politically to keep the information flowing. And, an informed public is dangerous to established political types so your point is still relevant although I seem to remember that a little bit of knowledge is a terrible thing to waste and when you are poor, very little goes to waste.
Regarding leaving everything behind during an evacuation means that one has to have something of substance in the first place. A weir to trap fish is easily replaceable. A house made of mud, bricks and sticks can be rebuilt locally. The bullock and plow are mobile; the iron skillet and knives one can carry. David Springer’s point that one has to have somewhere to go means there has to be higher ground either natural or man made as a short term refuge. Disaster relief agencies may be able to get into the mound building business. Burial mounds seem to have endured the ages.
I feel my recitation is problem solving from afar, a dangerous but all too common outside in strategy. Going from inside out, each locale has unique circumstances that provides input into a more generalized strategy. First one has to determine if rural local people will use a radio, and then ask them if they will act on the information. You get my point, begin with the end users and have their input for establishing the subsequent communication structures.
In the big picture, beginning with the end user would be my strategy whether in Bangladesh, Ghana, Zimbabwe or Gallop New Mexico.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Gear-LGSR481-Splashproof-Radio/dp/B0012DSEES/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357739575&sr=8-1&keywords=life+gear+radio
Works like a champ. Same width & height as a cell phone only greater depth. Also has an LED flashlight. No batteries. A few spins on the crank (2 seconds) keeps the radio going at moderate volume for about a minute. Made in China by the best forced labor government can compel at a mere $14 US. A novelty item really. Probably $3/ea COG. Basic cell phones are novelty items too.
Communication isn’t a big issue. Two thousand people died in SE Asia in the severe flooding in 2007. Almost two thousand people died along the US Gulf coast by flooding in 2005. The US has a vastly superior transportation system, communications, weather forecasts, emergency rescue resources, fire depts, you name it and the US has it.
So the benefit the US enjoys appears to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of jack diddly squat. The best flood warning that money can buy accounts for some fraction of the jack diddly squat benefit.
Electricity, clean water, sewers, refrigeration, vaccines, and stuff like that would be of far more benefit than better weather forecasts for impoverished people. For f*cks sake they don’t even have the means of hearing the forecasts. Academics are incredibly dense sometimes and just plain lacking common sense the rest of the time.
Cell phones are widely available, and communications in advance of the Bangladesh floods occurred via a cell phone network.
How much electricity, clean water, sewers etc can you buy for $1M, which is the cost for Webster’s proposal?
If you really want some leverage, get the open-sourceers involved. Put together a volunteer botnet to do the heavy computational lifting.
Thx, this is a useful suggestion
A milllion wasted here and a million wasted there and pretty soon you’re talking about real waste.
And I guess I forgot about those cell phones with the nuclear powered batteries that never need charging. Those are really convenient when you live somewhere with no electricity, huh? Try again.
Read Webster’s paper that I mentioned previously and then get back to me
In the third world with a million bucks you can pay for the education of a doctor and three nurses, build them a small facility, and with the leftover funds invested pay their living expenses ad infinitum. Or they can have another computer model that doesn’t have enough consumer confidence so they spend the time and money to evacuate and be housed elsewhere upon its warning if they are fortunate enough to have a choice about relocating out of harm’s way in the first place which the vast majority don’t.
“If you really want some leverage, get the open-sourceers involved. Put together a volunteer botnet to do the heavy computational lifting.”
yup, we would be down for that.
No, we wouldn’t.
David
Last week you and Edim posted a link to what was apparently a new ice bridge linking Greenland and Iceland.
I don’t know where the image came from, so wondered if you could post a like for like image from today to see what has been happening over the last week or so?
thanks
tonyb
She went like the Wicked Witch of the West.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/category/daily-image/
David
Thanks very much for that, so it never existed except in the satellites fevered imagination?
I recap what I posted when the original image was shown. It started with an email to NSIDC:
“I would be interested to have your comments as to how pre satellite researchers estimating sea ice extent could tell the difference between water, water floating on ice and solid ice, and how satellites can differentiate between the three states? I was very struck by Russian reports from the 1950’s I read at The Scott Polar institute in Cambridge when staff at the floating research stations commented about having to use wellington boots in order to walk around the station and how little dry ice islands eventually formed by the end of the summer surrounded by water on top of ice.”
I received the following reply from Julienne Stroeve ;
“Tony, using passive microwave data it is very easy to tell the difference between ice and water as the dielectric constant differs quite a bit and this is reflected in large differences in the microwave emission. The main advantage of using passive microwave is that it can see the ice even if it’s cloudy or dark.
There is a problem however in summer when melt ponds form on the ice since the sea ice algorithms then underestimate how much ice there really is (they think it’s open water). That’s one reason why we focus on extent rather than true ice area for the NSIDC sea ice news and analysis web site.
Visible and thermal imagery provides higher spatial resolution but is often hampered by clouds. Trying to do this work using earlier visible and thermal imagery requires the scientists to go through each image and manually filter out the clouds and determine where the ice is.”
You said before that you had no reason to disbelieve Satellite data. Makes you think doesn’t it?
tonyb
@david springer
Is a solar powered mobile phone charger completely beyond our technological capabilities? I had a solar powered calculator about 30 years ago, and the requirement doesn’t seem vastly different to me.
Seven-day weather forecast for most parts of the world are available on-line at underground.com. Examples of some forecasts for several locations in Africa are linked below:
Luanda, Angola http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.1.66160
Koudougou, Burkina Faso http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.3.65516
Douala, Cameroon http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.3.64910
Lusaka, Zambia http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.1.67665
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.1.67964
I don’t know about the accuracy of the 7-day forecasts, but the forecasts are available.
tony b
As I understand it, there are some things satellites are remarkably good at doing – others they are not.
Good: Continuously measuring changes in elevation of ice and snow in landed ice sheets, which can be used to estimate ice mass loss or gain when correcting for density differences in old (compacted) ice and snow and new (lighter) snow – except for coastal regions, where the changes in elevation are too abrupt.
Not so good: Measuring the same changes in a constantly heaving ocean in order to estimate sea level changes to millimeters per year (NOAA concedes that errors in the readings exceed the rate of SL change) – again, except for coastal regions, where SL cannot be measured at all.
Good: Measuring sea ice extent – except (apparently) for distinguishing between melt water on top of ice and water itself.
Good: Measuring tropospheric temperature (as long as satellite drift is compensated).
Poor: Estimating past changes before satellites could measure (~1979)
The two cases above where satellites have not improved our knowledge is in measuring SL changes (the old tide gauges gave a much more reliable record) and prior to 1979.
Maybe someone who is directly involved with satellite measurements could comment in more detail.
Max
tony, it was this image from NSIDC
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_bm_extent_hires.png
On that day, the image from NRL showed a bridge too, but narrower.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticicennowcast.gif
Other images showed no bridge, but they did show increased ice extent in that area (Denmark Strait). On the next day, there was still a bridge on the NSIDC image (smaller), but NRL showed a disintegrating bridge, bending southwards. After that, the ice extent decreased there. However, the Denmark Strait ice extent has been above (or same as) this season.
I find this reference page to be useful
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Edit
Thanks for those images. It’s a long way from Greenland to Iceland and that area has rough seas. It seems very unlikely there would be an ice bridge at this time of the year and those images show no ice anywhere near the area let alone enough to form an ice bridge.
I’m convinced it was a satellite glitch unless anyone can prove otherwise
Tonyb
tony, yes it”s a long way.
re; solar phone chargers
I have no experience with them. No one has much good to say about the smaller units the size of the phone itself except under ideal conditions where the panel is kept perfectly aligned with the sun for hours at a time to get a small recharge. Bangladesh gets 250-300 sunny days a year but as luck would have it I understand the rainy season when the floods come is when they get all the cloudy days so even larger panels will be close to useless when they need them for this particular application.
If push comes to shove what you do is use conventional one-use batteries. You know, like the energizer bunny. Those will hold a charge for many years in storage and be ready when you need them. They have a much higher energy density than rechargeables too. I happened to be on the design team of the first laptop to hit the streets with Lithium-Ion batteries going on 20 years ago. I think IBM was about 6 months behind us for second place. But I digress. Anyhow it’s uber cheap like a cigarette lighter adapter:
http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-97928-Power-Pack-Charger/dp/B007MLHS2S
$10 batteries not included.
But I was really being tongue-in-cheek about the cell phone. I have a combination AM/FM-radio and LED flashlight the size of a smart phone that has a hand crank generator and no batteries. Those are mass manufactured for a few dollars each and only a relatively small percentage of the population needs one to get emergency weather reports. Communication isn’t a problem. Nowhere to go and no way to get there is the problem. If it’s a problem in Houston and New Orleans where they have cars and gas stations and excellent paved roads made to move half the population back and forth from work every day and the most warning money can buy then imagine how much worse of a problem it is for Bangladesh.
About the same number of people died in SE Asia’s worst monsoon flooding in long time (2007) as died from Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005. Unlike Katrina 20 million SE Asians were displaced and homes destroyed. The days before the flood are pretty inconsequential. These people have been living on a floodplain for thousands of years. They generally know how to get away. What they can’t do and what no amount of early warning can do is stop the flood from coming and floating away everything that isn’t nailed down.
Hey Mosher, how far do you go back in Open Source? I go back to FIG/Forth in Los Angeles in 1981. It wasn’t called open source back then. You kids like to make up new names for stuff then pretend you invented it.
I used Forth (knew the inventor) for a project at a video game company in LA called Western Technologies. Their main claim to fame was the Vectrex vector graphics game machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex
They had a few Atari 2600 games that sold carts in the hundreds of thousands that paid the rent. One million seller by a friend of mine named Dave Hanson who wrote Qubert for the VCS and introduced me to the owner at Western Tech after he saw my reverse engineering job on the Coleco Vision console (a one weekend effort) running. Smith paid a guy in Florida fifty large for the same work I did in a weekend at home. Anyhow we were developing the first pixel addressable handheld game which eventually became the Nintendo GameBoy. My part was to write an operating system for it and software emulator running on an IBM PC. I ported the Fig/Forth kernal to it then wrote a mini-me Missile Command in Forth for it as an example for other programmers. You could develop games running Forth on an IBM-PC with a color graphics card to emulate the b/w LCD on the handheld. We were WAY ahead of our time. The hardware didn’t gel until Nintendo decided it was doable 5 or 6 years later. I was long gone by then. My most interesting project there was for Nolan Bushnel who was trying to make personal robots the next big thing in home electronics. He’d already been ousted from Atari by then but Atari was ultimately the buyer. Western Technologies was contracted to design a robot (AndroMan) with infrared remote control in an Atari 2600 joystick port. We cannabilized a Big Wheel toy truck chassis for the drive train and gave him a bar code reader on his butt and an IR transceiver on his head and custom microP to run it all. There were three programmers assigned. Before any of the two others completed their first assigned game I’d finished the real-time communication software that all the games used, my first game (Clue), and had begun my second game when Atari pulled the plug on it. I was the first person in the world to get 32 different colors simultaneously on a single horizontal scan line on the Atari VCS. In a meeting with the president of Atari and the VP of Engineering in (I think it was Palo Alto) the president looked at the faces of the characters in my Clue game, saw they were far more detailed than anything he’d ever seen before, and looked at VP of Engineering and said “Why can’t WE do that.” So anyhow… R? That’s pretty far removed from personal electronic toys but I’ll concede the Open Source community around it is small enough for you to speak for them.
https://github.com/languages/R
R has the distinction of being the 27th most popular language on GitHub. Fercrisakes I didn’t know there were 27 languages in total to categorize! The last thing contribution I made was fixing an IE9 hangup problem in John Resig’s (of jQuery fame) javascript port of the Processing language which is an MIT open-source graphics visualization language first written for Java and then ported by Resig to javascript to serve as a handy-dandy high level programming language for HTML5 canvas API. I’m using Twitter Bootstrap responsive framework and integrated processing.js into it. Processing is close enough to C so with tiny effort move C stuff over to it. I’m a really old hack at bit mapped graphics though so I use it mostly for the built-in SVG support. It’s way ahead of Raphael and CanVG Open Source libraries in that reg
In 1998, moonlighting in games while full time at Dell, Microsoft gave me a good size booth within their Computer Game Developer’s Conference pavillion. I did the very first DirectX compatible multi-player game lobby with several of MS games running on it and several my own. On the DirectX distribution CD that year was a stripped down version (no backend database for authentication and metrics, no sources for my own games) of my system. I was ahead of my time then too. I believe I’m the first person to have mixed client-server with peer-to-peer in the manner that Skype does today where a TCP socket is used for a low bandwidth client-server control channel to provide users with address information to establish peer-to-peer connections amongst themselves. It’s really cool but it became very hard to deal with when everyone started putting wireless routers into their homes. In order to use that with a wireless router means user has to reconfigure the router to allow some open ports for the peer-to-peer connection and it generally won’t work across corporate firewalls. I did a revision to that software in 2010 so it just uses port 80 and all traffic flows through the server. In 1998 that wasn’t as practical because server bandwidth was very expensive. Lately I’m using socket.io and node.js to port it for cross platform (iOS Safari, Android, Firefox, Chrome).
So… again… R… really? LOL
How far back? pretty far.
So funny that you should mention direct X. What kind of car did Alex drive?
You must mean Alex St. John. I seem to recall it was a HumVee and he did something really stupid with it showing off for out of town visitors. Drove it off the side of the road and buried the front end in a drainage ditch. If you see him, tell him I said hello. I only recall meeting him in person one time at a trade show in Austin for bartop computers with touchscreens used for gambling. Remind I’m the guy who released the D3D wrapper that translated OpenGL calls to D3D calls to run Quake II at some embarassingly (for the dweebs at Silicon Graphics) high frame rate. I was the main protagonist on the D3D side in the OpenGL wars that took place over a few years on rec.games.programming. I did the coding and testing of the wrapper at Dell during normal work hours. I had just joined Dimension at the time and we were in tight with NVidia. Joe Curley was our graphics guy. Joe really liked and thanked me by stealing the magnetic name plate on my cubicle and replacing it with one that read Geek Springer. It was kind of tradition at Dell for the more colorful characters that had been there a long time to get renamed in that fashion. I justified the time I spent (a few days I think) by saying it would be great to show how bloody fast D3D is running on our NVidia graphics board in a Dimension desktop. Contrary to urban legend Microsoft gave me the original source code which worked with an earlier version of Quake. MS also told me I could do whatever I wanted with it. When an engineer responsible for a desktop product line selling many millions of copies of Windoze calls Microsoft it doesn’t go through to voice mail to say the least. They were more than happy to accomodate my request.
David, Very strong words out of ignorance! Try reading the papers that Judith listed. Then exhibit a little more gentleman behavior based on evidence. Then I will listen to you seriously. Yes all of the things you list are great but if they are washed away in a flood it matters little.
Why exactly would I care if you listened to me seriously?
This is probably the worst part about ignoring global warming. Third world countries are being bombarded with harsher and harsher storms while first world countries do nothing.
Evidence?
Seeing as ACE is at historic lows.
Oh, and there’s been no significant increase in global temps for 16 years + and what heating there has been seems to be in polar regions, thus reducing the temperature gradient from equator (where these 3rd World countries congragate) to poles.
OK, read Mike Smith’s two books, ‘Warnings’ and ‘When the Sirens Were Silent’, about tornado warning, successes and failure. These two books should be in every library in the world, and available readily on the internet.
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While the American global model, the GFS, is not quite at the level of the European one (ECMWF), it is certainly adequate to drive regional models in these countries, and especially for forecasts of a few days where it is less distinguishable from the ECMWF model. The major benefit, of course, is that the Americans make their model outputs free over the internet in real time (unlike the Europeans who charge prohibitive amounts for their model products). With some local expertise and reasonable computing power, these global outputs can drive regional models. If these countries could devote some money to computers and getting training in numerical weather prediction and ancillary uses of model products, they would be in a good position to develop their capabilities.
I cannot tell from the clips what is being proposed for the million dollars, which is extremely small for any multi-country effort to protect millions or a billion people from weather extremes. Perhaps too small to be taken seriously. I suggest looking for $100 million and getting an international partner.
We’ve tried that, partnering with RIMES and World Bank. Efforts are ongoing (for a period of years already).
Have you tried venture capitol? The SF Bay area is full of them and a lot of the partners are into doing well by doing good.
A few VC types are interested in social business ventures, haven’t pushed hard in that direction tho since need to have the social business piece set up (which is difficult for us to do). RIMES is interested in this too, so this could happen but not exactly clear how to make it happen
Weather forecasting is not profitable unless it is customized and sold to specific sectors. Forecasting for the public is a necessary government service, as the public are not expected to pay for their forecasts except via tax (at least in any country I can think of). In some countries the government outsources its forecasting service, but the money is still government.
VC interested social business? For what, the mirth factor? Try the Gates Foundation. Or the Susan Dell foundation. Don’t try to snow them on it being profitable. They fund charities. All you have to do is make it appear credible that the funds will actually help people. I don’t think you can make that pitch successfully but if you’re bent on trying…
yes, david its called ’cause capitalism’ , there are VCs focused on it.
Have you considered Kickstarter?
There ain’t room enough for me and Curry both on Kickstarter!
Now, seeing as “The Developing World”‘s movers & shakers, by and large, couldn’t care two hoots about their poor, if something like this is developed, how would these poor be contacted to warn them & how would they be moved to a safer area?
Read peter webster’s bangladesh paper:
http://webster.eas.gatech.edu/Papers/BAMS_Webster_etal_2010.pdf
No biggie. A cell phone that works without a recharger can also have a matter transmitter. Beam me up, Bangladeshi.
un fool yourself david. In about 6 years bangledesh went from having less than 1 cell phone per hundred people, to having 50million people with cell phones. think micro loans. The program was called something like the village phone program. close to 80% of the physical country has coverage and over 95% of the population is covered.
I thought the matter transmitter part made it obvious I was being facetious, Mosher.
http://www.pressenza.com/2011/10/bangladeshx-cell-phones-are-more-popular-than-toilets/
Bangladeshis can update their friends on facebook while shiiting on the sidewalk. Isn’t that just precious?
There’s still the matter of how they’re going to move to safe ground. Do they all have cars and plenty of highways now too? Not that cars and highways would matter much. You should have seen it in and around Houston when Curry’s Crew warned of Hurricane Rita’s impending landfall there. It was a gigantic parking lot for 100 miles in every direction when they tried to evacuate the city. A cousin of mine from NY was there assisting Hurricane Katrina evacuees when he became an evacuee himself from Rita. He rented the last car at the airport and it took him 18 hours to drive the 175 miles from Houston to Austin. I was on the phone with him all night me with google maps searching for alternate paths through residential neighborhoods because the major roads were literally not moving at all.
I don’t think any of you appreciate the difficulty in evacuations. And then even if you can get people out of harms way you have to house them somewhere else. Where is that supposed to be? More advanced warning would be like giving the captain of the Titanic a more accurate forecast of how long it would take the ship to sink. Utterly useless information given his constraint was number of lifeboats not how long it takes to get them in the water.
No David, you were caught out in just being a little bitch.
You are the world’s leading expert in little bitches if the meme “it takes one to know one” holds true but in this particular case you’re projecting.
If you read the paper you’ll see that there are a variety of measures that can be taken with advanced warning.. delaying planting, accelerating harvesting, provisioning food and water. So, rather than reacting with your pre conceptions about parts of the world you probably havent spent time in, spend time reading the paper and un fool yourself
I gotta say, to think that I saw it @ Howrah Station.
=========
There’s a sucker born every minute. You account for one of those minutes.
Minutes sound forever at The Hotel Howrahfonia.
===========
So would these be projections or predictions of flooding?
Would they be better than the 95% confidence failures of the IPCC?
How might the quality of the final product be tested before delivery?
What is the cost of a bad forecast and how might the generators of the bad forecast be held accountable for damages?
This really sounds like “gimme a million bucks to make a computer model and, scout’s honor (but no escrow) it’ll be worth the price.”
As PT Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe you’ll find one. I just hope it isn’t the American taxpayer. Again.
The forecasts are probabilistic, read Webster’s other papers cited in the posts for details. Very good skill out to 10 days.
Yeah that’s what I thought.
Jim, Good points, the GFS is good enough. but ECMWF provides their forecasts free on a humanitarian basis (e.g., Bangladesh, RIMES and India). Alas not all countries use the free ECMWF, UK Met office or NCEP forecasts. One must ask the tougher question and ask why India still only gives public forecasts for two days and tropical cyclone forecasts for 3 days given the much longer and probabilistic forecasts achievable with the data from the major centers. I sometimes think that a better policy might be if you don’t use the free data then we won’t provide it. Eventually in India private forecast groups will rise up but they face enormous downward pressure from the government institutions.
At some stage someone in India is going to say that not providing flood forecasts longer than two days is outrageous. Perhaps the tens of millions affected each year.
Peter, in your other paper it seemed to say that the concrete problem was that when you trained Bangladeshis to do the work, they left the country to go to graduate school and so you had to start from scratch again the next year. (That specific framing is more helpful than vague discussions of “problems in capacity building.”) Do you believe that if that specific problem were overcome that the project could achieve continuity without further outside support? Or do you believe that there are other constraints that would start to bind if the turnover problem were addressed?
The multiple billions continuing to be spent on CAGW would probably be sufficient to fund the need for all world critical forcasting, up to the limits of the technology if it were redirected for that use. There are clear limitations of the length of usable prediction times (several days for most cases), as the MET office continually notices. If the modelers and climate fear activists did redirect, it would be a face (and job) saver from an otherwise oncoming day of retribution from their misdirected fear mongering, when warming continues to far underperform expectations.
+1
I have long argued for this, the funds would be much more effective spent on shorter term forecasts
Yes but then you’d be expected to produce verifiable results. There’d be like, you know, metrics and stuff to see if you’d improved the state of weather forecasting. We both know that wouldn’t turn out well. That’s why forecasts of what the weather is going to be like in the year 2100 are so popular in universities and the peer reviewed rags they support. Zero accountability. That’s sort of like how the American auto industry, banks, and assorted others too big to fail turned out . The profits are private but the losses are public. Great model. They’d have loved you at Enron.
Ok, I see you haven’t read the papers, and know nothing about the verification statistics of weather forecasts
No wonder you’re having a hard time selling it. VC – explain this to me Curry. Curry “Go read the paper, dummy.” Thanks, Professor, I’ll do that. In the meantime don’t call me I’ll call you. That about how it goes?
http://www.nwas.org/ej/rose/verify.htm
Good skill out to 10 days, huh?
Nobody in your business is even interested in looking into how good you are past 3 days. Most of us ignorati that read the forecasts can tell you why introspection is scarce beyond 72 hours. I’ll give you three guesses as to why and the first two don’t count.
The good skill for extended range (out to 10 days) is far greater for the ECMWF than the NCEP model; further there is greater predictability for floods and hurricanes than say for local surface temperature.
Not only do I publish on this topic, but I also provide operational forecasts. Look at the recent posts in the hurricane category to see how well I’m doing in terms of hurricane forecasts.
David,
Judith is pointing you in the direction of the answers to your questions.
Refusing to get off your arse and look at them is no one’s problem but your own.
Determined ignorance can’t be helped.
http://judithcurry.com/category/hurricanes/
Curry, against my better judgement because I’m pretty certain it’s just a literature bluff, there is nothing in that category that establishes your superiority nor anything attesting to any great improvements in general in forecasting nor anything substantial about great returns on investment from hurricane predictions. You yourself, in the only substantive article that turned up in that category (early 2012 hurricane season), simply look at the state of AMO, PDO, make a guess (which turned out to be wrong) about ENSO later in the season, and then said “Well this looks most like the conditions in 1951 and then use that as your best guess.”
Wow. Brilliant. Innovative. Stunning. President Obama hasn’t called you to the Whitehouse yet to officially make you a national hero?
Hey, Dave, she’s seen hurricanes from both sides now. She never really knew hurricanes at all.
===============
More contrary data:
Excuse me for eschewing the fox’s appraisal of how well the henhouse is secured. I’m not much interested in Curry’s self-appraisals.
http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/3239-hurricane-forecast-improvements.html (July, 2012)
Still can’t find any independent corroboration of “good skill at 10 days”. Curry is bluffing. It’s called a literature bluff. She presumes no one is going to call it. That ploy very often works on blogs. It might even work when petititioning our brain-dead federal government for funding. It won’t work for getting funding from the private sector.
So where’s the actual evidence of the good skill out to 10 days?
And where’s the actual evidence that a few extra days warning will do any good especially for the more laughable claims like scheduling planting and harvests? Do US farmers with the best forewarning that money can buy do this?
The sound a curry makes after its literature bluff is called:
[crickets chirping]
Vlad, has his views,
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/04-01-2013/123380-global_warming-0/
we do too.
Not that this means anything…
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/major-change-in-uk-met-office-global-warming-forecast/
ouch.
Tom
Re MET Office
“Welcome to reality.”
Max
Vlad really can’t believe his frakkin’ bad luck.
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The population, and population density, of Bangladesh doubles every 30 years. I don’t need a satellite to foresee the future.
George Harrison, did not have them either and they did not tell him anything so what is new?.
DocMartyn | January 6, 2013 at 4:51 pm said: ”The population, and population density, of Bangladesh doubles every 30 years. I don’t need a satellite to foresee the future”
+1.
In many poor countries, people will only take seriously what their religious leaders tell them. The leaders in turn will say that their mission is to distribute the word of God, not that of western science. The idea that religion and state are separate has not penetrated in those countries.
So we get back to secular education, particularly of girls as being a priority, if we are to distribute useful knowledge imcluding weather forecasting. Some will resist this, like whoever shot the Pakistan school girl recantly. So worthy cause as it is, progress is bound to be slow.
Actually, in the Bangladesh model, the forecasts were disseminated and discussed at prayer meetings
Well, that is real progress. Perhaps I am unduly pessimistic.
Let us pray.
Judith
I like the Bangladeshi model. Small is beautiful.
It seems to me the problem is how to fund and implement other models like this in individual developing nations.
I don’t know how such things work, but have a suspicion that a big international effort sponsored by a UN agency would fail, because of several reasons I won’t go into here.
Since there is US foreign aid to many of these nations, would it be possible to earmark a piece of this aid specifically to the programs you are describing, with a portion being the cost for US knowhow and development work to support the program?
Max
Judith
Bangladesh is a Commonwealth country and as such receives some £250 Million of UK aid each year.
The department that handles it and the categories where it is spent, is on this link.
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Where-we-work/Asia-South/Bangladesh/
Britain is very big on weather and climate change. Merge the two together and advance it as aiding business development and helping the infrastructure and you’ve got the basis for funding and perhaps British on the ground assistance from the Embassies. Worth trying
tonyb
‘the forecasts were disseminated and discussed at prayer meetings’
Just for a moment I thought you were referring to the way the IPCC produces its reports……..
Why don’t scientists help God and spread the gospel, in their travels?
Big win.
Thanks Tom. Most try to by spreading the truth, or a close approximation.
According to Latimer Alder even the IPCC does that. But they won’t touch Quantum mechanics despite that it might give a closer approximation.
Yes, it is always the power of One, over zeros
I like the idea of better and longer-term weather forecasting which seems particularly useful in landlocked countries where gridbased modelling could be based on the fact that one zone’s current weather will be the next zone’s future weather.
More relevant and up-to-date information on weather conditions on the oceans needs to be developed using floating weather stations on order to better protect the more vulnerable coastal communities.
TfT H/t RiHo08.
‘When yer live on the littoral, at the local level little things mean a lot.’
(I heard it on the radio.)
Beth Cooper,
Living on the littoral I am reminded of the sign on the waterway: “Slow Wake.” Following one impulse I want to gun the engine of my boat, create a big wake and rock the moored boats, metaphorically of course. The other side of my brain says to go slow as those who live in ecologically fragile zones will have to endure the erosion my wake has cause.
Given my right brain/left brain dysfunction, there is nothing to prevent my turning up the volume on my radio listening to “I heard it through the grapevine.” Motown of course. Or listening for when the Alberta Clipper is passing this way.
When big cruisers come by my place making damaging wakes and I’m feeling particularly peevish I’ll jump in my jet boat, catch up to them, line up and head straight at them at 60 knots and at the last second turn sideways bringing myself to a quick stop and sending a wave of water washing over the deck of their boat drenching the passengers and crew. It’s a beautiful thing to behold. I often hear cheers coming from others in the vicinity who are upset by the big boat wakes. Sometimes I simply restrain myself to telling the captain, through a bullhorn, how unattractive their female passengers are. That’s a lot of fun too.
And, do we help rebuild third world communities on the river banks that overflowed and destroyed all of the rank and disposable, non-insured, dirt floor shanties?
I’m willing to send every government bureaucrat all expenses paid to any third world country of their choice to make a difference there and hopefully stay there and reap the rewards of bringing about their liberal Utopia there. But, there is no there, there. You don’t save the world from a bar in Cancun drinking margaritas.
You’re dealing from your strong suit now. Avoid discussing natural science of any kind and I might let you remain in the denier camp. ;-)
Waggy, I think we already do that. They are the diplomatic corps. If you are in a foreign country and need help (say your passport was stolen), you will be glad it has a U.S. Embassy.
We don’t need to send more of our government bureaucrats overseas. Instead, we need to send our anti-government ideologues, the cranks who hate our government, in exchange for some foreigners who like our government. I would even be willing to trade our entire population of anti-government ideologues for one decent foreigner. I know the U.S. would be a better place if such a trade could be arranged.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.” ~Ronald Reagan
Waggy, I have lost so many freedoms, Iife is hardly worth living anymore.
1. Can’t paint my woodwork with lead paint anymore.
2. Can’t burn old tires in the backyard anymore.
3. Can’t build an outhouse on my front lawn.
4. Can’t keep a milk cow in my backyard anymore.
5. Can’t keep rooster in my backyard anymore.
5. Can’t drink beer while driving and throw the empty cans out of my pickup.
6. Can’t drive back and plunk the empty cans with my 22
7. Can’t enjoy the thrill of driving without seat-belts.
And those are just the important freedoms.
You know, there is a reason that I rarely post blogs or attend to them. Though I now see a purpose. It gives you and this David fellow a chance to sound off about something you know nothing about. Prejudice abounds. No one is asking you to do anything nor ask this David fellow (so angry) to walk through the issues on the streets that seem to worry him! Perhaps that is part of his deeper problem. But some of us do care a little although I am worn down from working with developing world bureaucrats. I have hope that the private sector will win through and that will lead to “self care”.
Americans can’t burn trash fires in your front yards either but that does not mean they should have to pay for a government bureaucrats to tell them the reason for the loss of that liberty is because acccording to Western science that activity is killing polar bears.
Peter Webster said on January 7, 2013 at 6:19 pm
“You know, there is a reason that I rarely post blogs or attend to them. Though I now see a purpose. It gives you and this David fellow a chance to sound off about something you know nothing about.”
__________
Peter, “this David fellow” knows a little about lot, but not a lot about much. Wagathon knows little of anything, but is pretty good with a keyboard. Both can be entertaining, but neither is to be taken seriously. Please don’t let the clowns discourage you from posting here at Climate Etc.
I applaud Judith Curry introducing topics of interests from guests like yourself, and letting everyone have a say. Unfortunately, some posters (myself included) are at times rude and/or don’t have anything of relevance to say. For me, Judith’s policy of tolerance makes her blog preferable to blogs with heavy-handed moderation. I don’t get the impression she is trying to cultivate a following of people who agree with her views and heap praise on her.
Compare Judith’s Climate Etc. with Anthony Watt’s WUWT where the denizens adulate him for just about anything he says or does. Yesterday, they were even congratulating Anthony for his inability to understand why temperatures in the SOTC report differed slightly from those in the NCDC database. Watt’s groupies are astonishing.
I believe it’s to Judith’s credit no one fawns over her much here. OK, maybe this looks like I’m fawning. I’ll fix that. Judith, what I don’t like about you is your uncertainty. I can’t imagine anyone more wishy-washy. Get a grip!
As in all successful endeavours persistence is key. Just because you don’t save the world by drinking marguaritas in Cancun on your first attempt you can be guaranteed of not saving it if you stop trying. Bottoms up!
Judith, I just wanted to say that I totally applaud the focus and the effort on improving regional forecasts for the developing world. It is a crucial need, of far higher priority to me than any amount of 100-year forecasts …
w.
That’s an excellent point but the problem is constrained by resources available to take actions based on the extended forecasts. It didn’t do much good for New Orleans in 2005. Then frayed nerves a month later caused everyone in Houston to evacuate on Rita’s approach and it turned into a huge clusterf*ck of stalled vehicles blocking every escape route.
It’s going to be different in Bangladesh? How? How is Bangladesh more prepared to respond to advance warning than compatively wealthy cities like New Orleans and the uber wealthy Houston?
This is the moral equivalent of throwing a drowning man a gift certificate for swimming lessons.
You bring up a good point. A couple of false alarms, and nobody will act on the alarms after that. Especially in Bangladesh, where weather is the will of Allah, anyway.
Do you really want to know or is this just another opportunity to sound of your limited knowledge. Because there are methods…
Judy linked to a paper that describes exactly the adjustments Bangladeshis made in response to 10-day forecasts. Some of them are exceedingly simple, like moving livestock to higher ground, delaying plantings until after the flood, prepping nets around aquaculture sites, and so on. These are rural Bangladeshis, not urban New Orleaneans–they’ve seen a lot of floods go by, and while these often cost them lives and property because of their thin margin of existence, they have a minimal savvy and resilience born of resilience and the mobility of their key assets (seeds, livestock, utensils, etc.).
The data on adjustments came from a survey of residents on the ground in the affected areas. Sample size was limited and I’m not sure how random it was, but at a minimum it indicates the qualitative direction of adaptation.
That ol’ right brain / left brain disfunction, RiH :)
Is a problem fer us homo / sapiens.
if they employ meteorologist for the developing countries, would be a noble move. BUT, if they send there ”climatologist” as a mouthpiece for IPCC; it can only do harm to the world as a whole. Meteorologist are good in predicting the weather in advance for few days, give them credit; even for 4-5 months regarding the effect from El Nino / La Nina.
BUT, getting ”climatologist” to brainwash the ignorant in those countries b] to send fabricated informations from the developing countries to the western countries… is same as they are already sending bad news constantly from the polar caps – they are good at falsifying / lying./ cherry-picking for the media / public
For the public is cheaper to believe them, than to go regularly and check for themselves… bad climate news from the developing countries will increase the con / for brainwashing the fakes and more weapons fore the Warmist
JC said: “Private weather forecasting companies are starting to develop in Asia: the first one to my knowledge is Skymet.”
_________
Skymet also is involved in weather related activities, such a as crop insurance and renewable energy. Fossil fuels fans, who seem suspicious of any energy that doesn’t cause more CO2, may not like Skymet’s view on wind energy.
“Skymet has done a research project for a major power trader where Skymet’s ultrasonic anemometers (wind measurement sensors) were established at different heights across five locations in Tamil Nadu and generated a forecast for these points to see how good the accuracy was.
This experience is tremendous because it will help in bringing Tamil Nadu wind energy (70% of the total generation) to the market.”
http://www.skymet.net/services.php#energy
Ah. Mosher’s experience might come in handy dealing with Asian concerns. He spent 11 years, from 1995 – 2006, working for a Singapore firm called Creative Technology. The American office is better known as Creative Labs whose claim to fame is the venerable Sound Blaster PC add-in card which was made obsolete by Windows 95’s workable virtual hardware device driver interface. I’m not sure what they did while Mosher was there except win a big lawsuit and then by 2007 voluntarily delisting itself from NASDAQ. Creative was the first Singapore company to be listed on the NASDAQ exchange which happened in 1992 when the Sound Blaster card was still the only way to get decent audio on a PC. Delisting from the NASDAQ is involuntary when stock price goes below a buck a share. Meanwhile, I was at Dell from 1993 – 2000 where the stock price went from $1 per share to $40 share and company revenue went from $1B/yr to $40B/yr. We bought and resold a buttload of Sound Blasters for a while. Probably Creative’s single largest customer. Mosher was VP of Emerging Technologies at Creative. I travelled a lot with Dell’s emergent technology crew (which consisted of three people) when they went to Intel & Microsoft. I’ve been pitched on new technologies by Bill Gates himself addressing a half dozen people. Microsoft and Intel used to have like a love-hate co-dependent relationship and would have little wars about what technologies to champion. Dell was their single largest and inarguagly Wintel’s most loyal customer so we were like the tie-breaking vote.
But I digress.
So how about that Singapore airlines? They were the best by a long shot on all my travels to Asia. The stews were like Asian playboy models and they served sushi in business class. Can’t beat that with a stick. So my advice on Asia is book your flights on Singapore airlines and I’ll leave it at that. :-)
I agree. Singapore Airlines is the best in my experience.
Dell nice folks they used to invite me down to explain the future of 3D graphics to them Dell was a little slow on new technology. I built the dell DJ for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox
We probably know some of the same folks. So this one time back in late 90s I’m in texas talking with John Carmack about 3D ( we were both big OpenGl proponents and before that Glide proponents ) because he was optimizing quake for the rendition card I was working on and the discussion turns to 3D audio and physics and what I can do on the chip side for those things. Later some of that stuff would get turned into a whole company. very cool technology. John’s a great guy. You are from texas you should know him.
Hey if you ever bought a Nvidia card I want to thank you.
I was actually there in 1995 in santa clara when the NV1 went through bring up! haha curtis jensen . very cool guys. ever wonder who coined the term GPU? that would come later.
There was one cool thing the TNT did.. We were sitting there one day. Mike Songy and Bill Bilodeau and I discussing the TNT chip design and what it could be used for.. Shadows! very cool. So Mike and Bill who worked for me went ahead and filed that as a patent and wrote it up.
Later, this would happen
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/john-carmack-to-rewrite-doom-3-shadow-volume-code-to-avoid-lawsuit-20111118/
If you are a real game nut then you should remember the whole Glide wrapper lawsuit. This was really funny. So 3dfx has Glide which is smokin fast thin layer just about the metal. Gamers love it rather than the pig D3D. But Nvidia is a big D3D proponent. I’m switching horses from 3DFx to Nvidia ( after crushing the market with the Voodoo2 ahah 12Mb killed diamond, put them out of business) because 3dfx is buying STB so they can get dell business ( stupid move) so I go on 3Dfx site and find a copy of Glide. No licence. no click through.. I sit down with Songy and after a couple of hours the approach to wrapping glide is done. So 3dfx games will work on D3D . Nvidia was pissed cause they thought I was prolonging Glide, but it was the best way of killing it.. and from there on we only had to worry about OpenGl and D3D.
http://www.glideunderground.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=HTMLArticles&file=index&req=showcontent&id=23
ha the good old days. fun stuff.
Basically your millikelvins belong all arse.
===========
Shortly after I was hired at Dell I was having lunch with Michael and several other new hires in 1993. I asked him “I’ve heard Dell referred to as an emergent commodity company as opposed to an emergent technology company. Would you say that’s a fair characterization?” He got a bit annoyed because he knows it’s true and doesn’t really like being put in the ME TOO category which is essentially what I did but in more polite terms. He replied “If by that you mean we sell what our customers want to buy then yes, that’s fair”.
So yeah, I hear ya. But as you know I’m special. I was on the team that produced the first laptop on the market with a Lithium-Ion battery. I think it was 1995 when it was released and it had Win95 on it too. I worked on the embedded uP code that handled battery charge/discharge and power managment in general as well as the core BIOS. We ruled. We were second to no one in battery life of laptops. At least not as long as I was in laptop R&D at any rate. I was in laptop R&D the first five years and was engineering my exit when I joined desktops in 1998 just marking days until stock options vested. When my boss that year gave me my annual raise I gave it back and told him to give it to one of the younger engineers in the department who could use it. I said I’d just as soon get a demotion to minimum wage and work at night pushing a broom and emptying trash cans so long as my stock options continued vesting. I didn’t get the demotion and he didn’t even take back the annual salary increase. Go figure. No good deed goes unpunished I guess.
This month is my 13th anniversary of being happily unemployed but I started engineering my reentrance into the game about two years ago. It looks like there’s sufficient resources to do decent web apps finally. Sound support still sucks but I’m pretty bloody amazed how fast stupid javascript is on a one-gig dual core processor (or better). Hell I’ve got Chrome & Firefox performing well on an antique single-core 1.2ghz Windows XP box that lives in a dark corner of my lab that I use for testing across my router firewall. I’d give you the IP and port address of my old lab server but then I’d have to kill you. FYI, probably nobody knows it but me, but Windows XP runs NODE.JS like a top with one little modification to the socket.io code to fix up the URL of the flash.swx fallback. Systems that use flash for sockets support (Android Native &IE9 as I recall) instead of websockets will use XHR polling (hideous) if the flash swx file isn’t served. I forget the details but just knowing what drops out leads you quickly to the fix.
There is no doubt that better immediate weather forecasting is of immense benefit to rural and semi-rural communities, so congratulations to Dr Curry and others who are trying to extend it to people who need it.
As others have said, as soon as we get into ‘forecasting’ droughts and suchlike, we are in UK Met territory – ie complete rubbish which could be very damaging to people living on the smell of an oily rag.
As with all such projects, they are really many, many micro-projects. The spread of mobile phones is an obvious pathway for providing information – but unless it goes to people who support the project in each community (and have good empirical reasons to support it) – like so much well-meant Western aid, it will be a complete waste and possibly even counter-productive.
Therefore, it might be worthwhile for Dr Curry et al to include, as part of their proposal to the Gates Foundation or whoever, an implementation strategy which starts off small – pilot projects in a mix of locations – and builds on that. This will require expertise and assistance that is well beyond the technical issues. Without that, it could easily join the depressingly long list of top-down initiatives that look so good and so simple from afar, and achieve absolutely nothing on the ground.
Good luck with it!
Johanna,
Happy New Year. Excellent comment. I support all you said and emphasise this bit (although I expect Judith is already well and truly on top of it):
Thanks Peter, and Happy New Year to you too.
Thanks Johanna,
Good suggestions.
All that Arctic ice? It didn’t melt. It moved to China,
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_COLDEST_WINTER?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-05-07-52-05
Gary M
It’s all part of a Machiavellian plot by the inscrutable Chinese.
In a rampantly warming world (caused largely by its very own CO2 emissions) China plans to corner not only all of the combined currencies of the world, but also all of its ice.
Confucius say:
Man who sit on ice has cool buns.
Max
To paraphrase General Buck Turgidson – “We must be…increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over sea ice extent, in order to breed polar bears more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when they emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow…a sea ice gap!”
It will be interesting to observe how the AGW convinced will react to the further cooling, which, IMO, will ‘accelerate’ in a few years (~2015). The solar connection is, again IMO, very remarkable (instrumental and paleo records) and it’s a travesty how it has been ignored and laughed at by the AGW orthodoxy. I just wish humanity will learn something from it.
The weavers of narratives may view the tapestry of Nature anew.
===================
It will be interesting to see how skeptics react when their predicted cooling doesn’t materialize.
Given they were talking about it back in 2007, it’s been 5 years and temperatures remain toasty.
Not nearly as interesting, think about it. I personally would be very surprised if it doesn’t materialize (for many reasons). However, many skeptics don’t predict anything or no further warming or whatever. Very few skeptics really predict significant cooling and many expect the secular warming trend to continue (after the multidecadal hiatus).
OT
Today is 70th anniversary of death of Nikola Tesla, one of the world’s greatest inventors http://www.teslasociety.ch/info/ton/Fiorello_La_Guardia_uber_Tesla.wma
I think Tesla’s grip on reality was slip sliding away in the later years. He’s still got a small cult following who, in my experience, have a similarly diminished number of marbles to play with and who believe that Tesla’s grand scheme of endless free power extracted from and transmitted wirelessly by earth’s electromagnetic field is viable but still c0ck blocked by Edison Electric.
Tesla should be celebrated for what he achieved, not for what he might have dreamed off. It is the detractors of his achievements who keep putting emphasis on non-existing rather than what it is currently in use all around the globe. Many still fall in for the failed Edison propaganda of endlessly portraying Tesla as a lunatic, hence the myth of impossible wireless power transmission is always brought to the fore, mainly by the poorly informed, rather than indispensable reality of the alternate and polyphase currents, generators and motors.
It is sad that in the country where Tesla worked and whose industry benefited the most from his inventions, that there is so much ignorance. In Europe, where he was born and educated, but never worked as an inventor, Tesla’s achievements are far better known and appreciated, but then Europeans didn’t care much for the Edison propaganda.
$100,000,000.00 free energy, plus shipping.
http://www.viewzone.com/tether.html
If it only were a penny for their thoughts.
Note to self: Vukcevik not playing with full deck.
I suggest to anyone who is of a view that the Tesla achievements aren’t worth any attention, to purge his invention from their home or office and enjoy ‘Tesla-less’ comforts of life.
For a start, Tesla invented the transformer – to high – low voltage, not to lose most of the electricity direct from the cables. in transport.
Greens should be especially thankful, because: without that invention – would have needed power station in every suburb, inside the city. Now electricity is produced far outside the city, where the vegetation is starving for more CO2 == clean electricity comes to the snobs in the city.. thanks to Tesla!!!,
I was clear that I thought Tesla lost the plot later in life. Maybe those demonstrations with arcs from a Tesla coil running through his body weren’t so harmless after all. At any rate I didn’t mean to downsell his prior work. So don’t get me wrong. Tesla was a great inventor. Edison on the other hand was the greatest inventor of all time.
Tesla should be celebrated for what he achieved, not for what he might have dreamed off. It is the detractors of his achievements who keep putting emphasis on non-existing rather than what it is currently in use all around the globe. Many still fall in for the failed Edison propaganda of endlessly portraying Tesla as a lunatic, hence the myth of impossible wireless power transmission is always brought to the fore, mainly by the poorly informed, rather than indispensable reality of the alternate and polyphase currents, generators and motors.
Tesla isn’t understoood because Maxwell’s asymmetry isn’t understood, and so, what Tesla actually also achieved isn’t understood and now claimed unachieved, or ‘dreamed of by a madman’..
One of the greatest discoverers Nikola Tesla undoubtly could be considered as a pioneer researcher of the transient properties of the natural medium – the physical vacuum. Being closer to the experiments, than to the abstractive theories, he always referenced the space (a physical vacuum) as a Natural Medium. He unveiled experimentally some of the hidden properties of the space. His experiments, not understood by the modern physics, now are labeled as “exotic”. Despite the fact that Nicola Tesla has been the greatest inventor contributing to the industrial boom of the beginning of the 20th century, he considers himself mostly a discoverer than an inventor. The discovered by him Radian energy in fact is a phenomenon belonging to the transient state of the space (physical vacuum). This discovery is so significant, that it could be compared with the electromagnetic induction discovered by Michael Faraday. This kind of achievement and the theoretical vision of Nikola Tesla are dismissed by the contemporary modern physics today, because they do not match to some postulates in the 1925 formulation of the Quantum Mechanics. That’s why he did not obtain the credit he deserves from the physics community today.
Some researchers now succeeded to replicate some of the Tesla experiments getting similar results. Presently, one may find quite rich information about such experiments by Internet sources, than in the pages of the officially supported journals. While skeptics prefer to close their eyes for such information, it is quite useful for open mind thinkers.
A team of scientists from a Russian scientific institution (D. S. Strebkov et al) has rediscovered the method of the single wire energy transmission based on the Tesla discoveries 100 years ago.” etc. continued http://www.helical-structures.org/new_evidences/Maxwell_vision.pdf
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Site:LRP:James_Clerk_Maxwell
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Site:LRP:Supporting_Documentation:Deliberate_Curtailment_of_Tesla%27s_Primary_Energy_Source
“So every joule of EM energy pouring out of the generator and (its tiny Poynting component) being used to power the external circuit, comes directly from the seething virtual state vacuum.
“If one simply lets the internal source dipole alone, once it is formed and paid for, then it will freely extract real energy from the seething virtual state vacuum and pour it out forever. That would be a primary example of an asymmetrical Maxwellian circuit, and it can permissibly exhibit COP>1.0 and self-powering.
“But our symmetrized electrical engineering teaches only symmetrized circuits, ever since Lorentz mutilated them in 1892 specifically to throw out just such asymmetrical systems.
”””So the EE is taught to “wire” the source dipole inside the generator into the generator’s “external circuit”, and split the freely collected energy in the external circuit into halves. One half is expended to force the electrons from the (+) side (standard engineering assumption) down to the ground line or (-) side of the external circuit. This powers the loads and also the losses in that external circuit, so that less than half the collected “free EM energy from the vacuum” in the external circuit winds up actually powering the load or loads.
”””The other half drives the spent electrons from the ground or (-) line back up through the source dipole inside the generator to the (+) terminal, thereby scattering the internal separated charges of the dipole and destroying the dipole itself – along with its broken symmetry that just was freely extracting the real EM energy from the virtual state vacuum.”””
So we have to crank the shaft of the generator again – in the same process, to RESTORE THE INTERNAL SOURCE DIPOLE AND ITS BROKEN SYMMETRY, that we ourselves just destroyed!
“So inanely, our engineers only build symmetrical systems and circuits that destroy their own “extraction of free EM energy from the seething vacuum” faster than they use a bit of it to power the loads!
“This is the real reason – and the only reason – for the escalating energy crisis worldwide, that will shortly threaten the very survival of Western Civilization. The electrical engineering model was deliberately and horribly mutilated and “set in symmetrized concrete” more than a century ago. And now, even a half century after we know better than all that symmetrizing in our actual modern physics, it isn’t in our EE model at all – and the leaders of the scientific community have no intention of changing the terrible falsities being taught in electrical engineering, even though eminent scientists (such as Nobelist Feynman, etc.) have pointed out these non sequiturs and downright lies in our present electrical engineering model.
“So the real “fix” for the energy crisis is to – hopefully – get the scientific community to insist on modernizing and correcting our sad old classical electrical engineering model.
“Higher group symmetry electrodynamics models already exist in physics, and one can do things with them that totally defy and baffle the staid old electrical engineering. And indeed Tesla had discovered these asymmetrical systems. For rigorous proof, see a nice but very sophisticated little paper by T. W. Barrett, one of the co-founders of ultrawideband radar. See T. W. Barrett, “Tesla’s Nonlinear Oscillator-Shuttle-Circuit (OSC) Theory,” Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 16(1), 1991, p. 23-41. Here Barrett shows that EM expressed in quaternions (hey! almost precisely Maxwell’s theory itself!) allows shuttling and storage of potentials in circuits, and also allows additional EM functioning of a circuit that a conventional EM analysis cannot reveal. He shows that Tesla’s patented circuits did exactly this.
“Tesla’s circuits could in fact deliberately shuttle potential energy around at will, and these circuits did so. Barrett was so impressed by the capability that he saw a way to extend it a bit, and obtained two patents on his extension. They are: ” etc.
——————————————————————————–
An explanation of the above with diagrams: http://free-energy-info.co.uk/Intro.html
Patents are even now being taken out based on Tesla’s work, from the first link above:
“Based on provided experiments the Russian team claims that a technology is developed allowing them to obtain six patents. For the priory art only the Tesla patent “Apparatus for transmission of electrical energy [10] is cited.
The newly developed unified theory Basic Structures of Matter [13,14], based on an alternative vacuum concept, agrees in full with the Maxwell and Tesla’s vision about the space. It suggests quite successful original model of the underlying structure of the physical vacuum giving a fundamental bases for analysis of physical phenomena in both states of the space, the steady state and the transient one.”
A good overview of Tesla’s work Myrrh. I think that energy is all around us and that the 2nd law of thermodynamics will be accepted by mainstream science as being falsified as soon as scientists start replicating Tesla’s early experiments.
The potential for power generation via the space in which we exist but as yet we are not fully aware of seems limitless.
Peter Davies | January 7, 2013 at 7:08 pm | A good overview of Tesla’s work Myrrh.
Thank you!
I think that energy is all around us and that the 2nd law of thermodynamics will be accepted by mainstream science as being falsified as soon as scientists start replicating Tesla’s early experiments.
Not sure how this falsifies the 2nd Law, which is simply the not observed to the contary fact that heat flows spontaneously from hotter to colder. Any work done to alter that isn’t spontaneous.
The potential for power generation via the space in which we exist but as yet we are not fully aware of seems limitless.
As long as the space around us is infinite..? We could all be utilising cheap safe energy via thorium now but, vested interests and a rather insane ‘greenie’ movement hates the thought of us having access to such let alone a Morley pole equivalent in our back gardens. I can see a new meme being created, “depleting the universe of the fabric of energy will lead to the implosion of same”..
I have a theory that God only created us cause he got stumped..
Sorry, “Any work done to alter that isn’t spontaneous” should be: Any work
done to create that isn’t spontaneous.
Why did you mention the 2nd Law? There are two claims from the AGWScienceFiction’s The Greenhouse Effect about the Law. The first is that “backradiation of cooler heating the hotter is possible” as epitomised in the Yes Virginia thought ‘experiment’ claim of Spencer, which he has never produced empirically and which is never observed, as the 2nd Law sums up, and the second claims that there is a “net” in the 2nd Law and this has some bearing on heat flowing from colder to hotter and so ‘proves’ the AGW claim, but fails to explain what exactly.
AGW supporters have usually alluded to basic physics to support their greenhouse gas theory but significantly, never have they invoked the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Since this law is so fundamental to the workings of the physical universe I became interested, especially in the context of Maxwell and Tesla’s work.
http://canspeccy.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/climate-warming-skeptics-ditch-second.html
This article outlines some of the arguments that have been put forward by sceptics of AGW and, indeed, the supportes of AGW in the context of this law and both sides are found wanting IMO.
“AGW supporters have usually alluded to basic physics to support their greenhouse gas theory but significantly, never have they invoked the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Since this law is so fundamental to the workings of the physical universe I became interested, especially in the context of Maxwell and Tesla’s work.
http://canspeccy.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/climate-warming-skeptics-ditch-second.html ”
“If Jelbring is correct, it would mean that even if a planetary atmosphere were entirely transparent, which is to say free of greenhouse gases and thus incapable of either absorbing or emitting radiant energy, it would nevertheless raise the surface temperature of the planet above what it would be without an atmosphere.”
What would more accurate is if were said ,if Earth was a blackbody it would have an uniform surface temperature of 5 C.
And if Jelbring is correct, Earth’s average temperature would be
higher than than this uniform temperature.
If Earth was a was body which was a blackbody in sense of just being a perfect absorber and perfect emitter of radiation- but NOT a perfect conductor of heat [say it’s conducted heat as well as Iron conducts heat] then this type of “blackbody earth” would not have a uniform temperature- and it’s average temperature could be higher than 5 C.
And in terms of having highest uniform or average temperature a perfect absorber and emitter is not the highest possible average temperature. Obviously it was less than a perfect emitter of energy,
it would have a higher average or uniform temperature.
And it’s possible that if Earth were same in terms being imperfect- say, .8 instead of 1 in both absorption and emission, that it could have a higher average or uniform temperature.
Greenhouse theory is always assuming the earth is a perfect emitter of energy- and this doesn’t vaguely describe earth. Not only does make this error but increases the error when adds in the Bond albedo or though often incorrectly calls this albedo. When it says Earth reflects 30% of surface area, it reduces the surface area that adsorbs energy, more importantly this also effectively increases the area in which earth is a perfect emitter of energy. And this gives the foolish
number of -18 C of uniform temperature as the baseline to which is then added the 33 C due to the greenhouse effect.
What the average temperature of blackbody which lacking perfect conduction, would depend on many factors. The advantage of having perfect conduction is you don’t need to consider heat capacity- with perfect conduction and one dealing millions of years of heating- whatever the heat capacity happens to be, one can ignored or zeroed out.
But heat capacity is important if dealing non-idealized blackbodies- which is in fact, what we *are* dealing with.
So if had planet which surface was iron, one have different average temperature if 1 inch of iron and compare to 1 foot of iron [one has 12 times the heat capacity] as it would take longer to cool during the night.
When you add any kind of atmosphere to a planet, the atmospheric temperature [air temperature] will be lower temperature than the skin surface temperature.
On Earth one could get a skin surface temperature as high as around 80 C but you are not going to get a air temperature higher than this surface.
No amount of greenhouse gases will change this.
Earth-like planet covered in say 1 foot solid iron without an atmosphere would heat during the day to higher temperature than compared the planet with 1 atm of atmosphere.
With vacuum would give high daytime temperature similar to the Moon [120 C]. And could average temperature [day/night/summer/winter] of this surface being quite high- higher than earth’s average temperature.
If adds 1 atm then the highest surface temperature would instead be about 80 C. And highest air temperature might be around 60 C.
The main notable aspect of atmosphere mainly composed of nitrogen is it’s a lousy emitter of energy. With air if you reduce the amount heat conducted to a surface [via convection] one has nearly perfect insulation- fiberglass insulation works by prevention of the convection of the heat of air by trapping air molecules inside the fiberglass.
The air of the atmosphere can not convect heat to the space environment [vacuum conducts/convects no heat].
For a mostly nitrogen atmosphere to radiate much heat it needs stuff in the atmosphere that does this. So this can be particles in the air or droplets of water [clouds]. It needs it because this atmosphere essentially radiates no significant amount of energy.
So if had iron surface and 1 atm of atmosphere, the iron surface would absorb large amounts of solar energy and emit large amounts of energy and could take days to weeks to heat up the atmosphere. So atmosphere would adsorb less energy per hour when the sun is shining as compared to the iron surface. Or said differently, a cool atmosphere doesn’t cool the surface by much, but because of gravity
the surface warms the atmosphere more than the atmosphere warms the surface. Any heating of the gases causes this heat to rise. Also there is greater difference in temperature- daytime surface may approach 80 C and air temperature may be 20 to 30 C cooler. For atmosphere to warms surface as much as surface warms the atmosphere one needs same [or greater] difference in temperature.
So over time, say one is starting from a cool temperature of say 250 K, each day and night cycles warms and cools the the iron surface, and air temperature [the entire mass of the atmosphere] increases slowly. Once the atmosphere is warmed, it is warmed less per day cycle and can add some warming to surface at night time if the temperature difference is great. So if one has 1 foot of iron as the surface it’s unlikely the tropical temperatures of this surface will cool much during the night time, but surface temperatures poleward can be much much cooler and the air can add some heat to this surface.
So during winter in arctic circle when one 6 months of no sunlight the global air temperature may prevent surface temperature from getting as cold as 173 K [-100 C]. 6 months darkness is 12 times the length of
a lunar night and temperature on lunar surface can reach 100 K. To warm from 100 K to to around 173 K doesn’t require much heat. A perfect emitter at 173 K radiates 50 watts per square meter.
So the poles in winter would cool less if one has atmosphere, but poles are small amount of surface area and therefore such increase isn’t going to increases average global temperature. But say area like the entire northern hemisphere during winter, is a large part of entire surface and it’s night time temperature might get addition of 20 C to it’s average temperature.
So the shorter days and the atmosphere will not allow such an earth to get anywhere near the very cold temperatures of 100 K which found on the Moon. And in terms cost to total heat budget, warming from 100K to 200 K is cheap.
And most important aspect about Earth is that it’s a water planet, and it seems to me that having planet covered mostly by water would cause higher average temperature than one cover by 1 foot of iron.
gbaike has shown some examples of ambient temperatures given various scenarios wrt Earth’s capacity to absorb and emit energy. None of these scenarios appear to be be anything like what the Earth really is so can we conclude that the so-called greenhouse effect is consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics? A base temperature of -18C is way off-line.
http://canspeccy.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/climate-warming-skeptics-ditch-second.html
This article outlines some of the arguments that have been put forward by sceptics of AGW and, indeed, the supportes of AGW in the context of this law and both sides are found wanting IMO.
There are sceptics and sceptics.. I don’t include such as Watts and Monckton who claim there is a Greenhouse Effect as per the AGWScienceFiction telling of it – they’ve hijacked the term to use in their arguments against CAGWs and the results are ironic. Both these for example get their knickers into a twist about the use of the term “deniers” assuming incorrectly that it refers to themselves when it was coined for use against those saying the claimed Greenhouse Effect didn’t exist, and then spend half their time explaining to CAGWs that they’re not against the concept GE. They complain bitterly about the CAGWs censorship of their own counter arguments, yet both exercise censorship of arguments against the concept GreenhouseEffect, which is now standard teaching, and Singer shows the hijack complete by claiming his ilk the sceptics and any questioning the basic claims deniers – quite content to call us deniers who say the AGWGE effect is rot all the while being deeply offended at himself and his ilk being called deniers..
It seems they are incapable of looking up the meaning of hypocrisy.
Monckton amused me greatly when he called for my arguments to be confined to a ghetto in a piece where he was pontificating on the importance of science truth to a group of university students, encouraging them to actively contradict their tutor etc.
Anyway, whatever kind of sceptic, these arguments are all so convoluted and confused mainly because those arguing don’t know that in the mix is a complete package of fake fisics basics so some who do understand real gases aren’t aware that those they are arguing with don’t have real gases, but ideal. The funniest posts on this was Willis getting furious with someone who insisted gravity played a part! Gravity became a non-pc word on WUWT.
So what we have here is everyone talking at cross purposes, using the same science terms to describe different concepts, and it isn’t easy to explain.., but I’ll have another go.
What AGWScienceFiction has produced is a completely different world from the real physical world we see around us which has already been well understood in its properties and processes and parts named, in traditional physics which is still taught to some.
The AGWSF Greenhouse Effect is built on changing the properties of the atmosphere by substituting ideal gas for real gas, ideal and real both technical terms in this subject with ideal being a non existant gas, i.e. completely imaginary, and real meaning real physical gases. No real gas obeys the ideal gas law.
In the history of this when ideal gas law first postulated Van der Waals made the point that no real calculations could come from it because ideal gas was stripped of its volume – without volume there is no gravity/nothing for gravity to work on. Ideal gas has no properties, no mass no volume no attraction no weight not subject to gravity, so, what we have is AGWSF using what is at best a starting point in calculations and creating a completely imaginary atmosphere from it.
Which is why there is no atmosphere in the Greenhouse Effect, just empty space and hard dots of nothing ideal gas molecules miles apart from each other travelling at tremendous speeds under their own molecular momentum bouncing off each other in elastic collisions (no attraction) and so “thoroughly mixing” – this is how the carbon dioxide is claimed to be thoroughly mixed.
So instead of the natural world around us we have AGWSF substituting a purely imaginary world in order to make its “radiation only” arguments, which has taken out the atmosphere altogether by substituting empty space it. As someone, iirc arguing with Willis, put it, AGW goes straight from the surface to empty space. There is no convection for heat transport and no gravity because AGWSF has excised the atmosphere completely by this sleight of hand substitution of propertyless ideal gas for real gas.
And those involved in these arguments don’t understand that is why the different sides don’t understand each other.
I discovered this by chance when I began questioning a PhD in physics about the claims of “carbon dioxide accumulating for hundreds and thousands of years”, he taught at university level and set exams and he was teaching AGWSF fisics that carbon dioxide, and oxygen and nitrogen, were ideal gases and the atmosphere empty space. He didn’t know any different because he was a product of AGWSF infiltration into the education system a few decades previously.
He claimed, as the meme goes, that carbon dioxide mixed thoroughly as I’ve described, diffusing into the ‘atmosphere’ under its own molecular momentum, and that once mixed could not be separated out without a great deal of work being done, as for example in separating out again ink which had been poured into water.
This is important to understand – AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect atmosphere is based completely on an imaginary concept created out of descriptions of ideal gas in empty space (as in a container in an imaginary lab). They don’t have an atmosphere at all and so can’t include convection and gravity because their gases don’t have real world properties of volume, weight, attraction etc. And without these properties we don’t have any winds or weather systems..
Actually, really, physically, AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect has empty space instead of the huge heavy voluminous ocean of real gas pressing down on us a ton on our shoulders, a stone/14lbs per square inch.
Because ideal gases don’t have attraction, they bounce off each other at great speeds in elastic collisions, so there is no way that they can get water combining with carbon dioxide to form rain, for example and thus they don’t have rain in their carbon cycle.
These change in the basic physics alters all our traditional fisics knowledge.
They can’t have winds and weather or the water cycle because their ideal gases “have no weight and aren’t buoyant in air” etc., because they have no AIR! Air is the fluid volume of gas around us which is our whole atmosphere..
So, to your later post: Peter Davies | January 8, 2013 at 7:42 pm | gbaike has shown some examples of ambient temperatures given various scenarios wrt Earth’s capacity to absorb and emit energy. None of these scenarios appear to be be anything like what the Earth really is so can we conclude that the so-called greenhouse effect is consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics? A base temperature of -18C is way off-line.
Exactly nothing like the Earth really is.. The -18°C is an AGWScienceFiction fraud for its claimed “The Greenhouse Effect”, by sleight of hand misattribution.
That figure in the real world physics is the temperature of the Earth minus the heavy volume of fluid real gas atmosphere around us which is practically 98% nitrogen and oxygen which are not included in the AGWSF “greenhouse gases”.
What they have done is lie that this figure relates to the Earth with these gases in place and only minus their “greenhouse gases which are ir eaters”.
Which is why they can never produce any real empirical physics to show that their greenhouse gases can physically raise the temperature 33°C from that -18°C. Because no such base exists.
Real world physics says that without the heavy voluminous real fluid gas ocean which is our atmosphere and which is overwhelmingly nitrogen and oxygen, the Earth would be minus -18°C.
This is the real “thermal blanket” around the Earth keeping heat from the Sun heated land and ocean from escaping too quickly before the Sun heats the surface again. Compare with the Moon without an atmosphere.
They have taken this blanket concept and term from real Earth physics where the whole atmosphere is this, and given it to the 1-4% water and trace carbon dioxide and even smaller percentages of the other “greenhouse” gases.
This whole real gas atmosphere which they don’t have is what gravity acts on, and so, real gases being real gases with real properties, the lighter gases rise and heavier sink and the hotter gases get the lighter they get and so rise and when they cool down they again sink displacing the hotter lighter; these create the Cycles from convection in the our real gas fluid ocean of our huge winds and weather systems from the intense heating of land and water at the equator.
Now, our real Earth with our real thermal blanket of mainly nitrogen and oxygen trapping the Earth’s heat would be 67°C without water.
That’s how efficient our gravity constrained real gas volume blanket of nitrogen and oxygen is, the real gases trapping the upwelling heat as in a real greenhouse, by convection constrained as in a real greenhouse by the invisible glass of gravity.
AGWSF has taken out the Water Cycle completely, not only because its ideal gases have no way to produce it, but to excise the particular contribution it makes within the real greenhouse thermal blanket of real gases which comprises our atmosphere, because including the Water Cycle shows there is no “Greenhouse Effect of AGWgreenhouse gases raising the Earth’s temperature 33°C from -18° it would be without them to the 15°C” .
The Water Cycle within the great thermal blanket of real gas atmosphere takes the temperature down 52°C from the 67°C it would be with without it. Think Deserts..
In other words, the claim that AGW greenhouse gases can do this is a lie because they have misattributed the -18°C to their claimed “absence of water/carbon dioxide greenhouse gases” when it is actually the temp minus the majority gases nitrogen and oxygen.
Hope this is clear…
It’s not easy to explain magicians tricks at the best of times, but here the tricks are created by several sleights of hand from different aspects of real physics, excising properties and processes and misattribution of terms and so on confusing the language in which arguments about this take place.
Bottom line: There is no Greenhouse Effect
Earth with atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen is 15°C
Earth without this real gas atmosphere is -18°C
Earth with this real gas atmosphere of mainly oxygen and nitrogen but without water is 67°C.
There is no logical, physical, direct connection between -18°C and 15°C – the “AGWSF 33°C Greenhouse Effect” is an illusion.
Created by manipulating real physics it’s completely fictional, so I call it fake fisics to differentiate between the two. It’s the kind of clever play that an author might make creating an imaginary fisics for an imaginary fantasy world.
The very real problem is that is exactly what has been done here and it was deliberately introduced into the real world education system to dumb down science basics for the masses in order to promote the AGWSF global warming scam.
There is no point in continuing any of the confused arguments about AGW/CAGW unless this is first taken aboard.
They are both based on this fictional fake fisics.
Why are cranks so painfully long-winded……….
I agree with you Michael. Long posts are difficult to read and absorb. So here is a short post for those of you who support the AGW theory of greenhouse gas effects:: where does your greenhouse gas theory accord with the 2nd law of thermodynamics? And do you seriously claim that the Earth’s atmosphere is a closed system?
…and so obsessed with the second law.
From an email from geophysicist Norm Kalmanovitch:
“My definition of the greenhouse effect is that it is just a number; 34.5°C for the Earth, 5.5°C for Mars and 450°C for Venus and is merely the theoretical difference in temperature between the actual temperature of a planet and what that temperature would be if there was no atmosphere.
It has nothing to do with what components cause what portion of this effect it is just the numerical value.
Most importantly the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with climate because climate is always changing and the greenhouse effect is essentially static.
The effect is caused by atmospheric components slowing down the rate at which thermal energy escapes from the planet during hours of darkness so it is essentially a passive insulating effect supplying no energy and therefore since climate requires energy, there is no driving of climate from this insulating effect.
All of the misleading terminology pertaining to the greenhouse effect was coined after the 1988 Hansen paper and the formation of the IPCC. There was no such term as greenhouse gas prior to 1988, and if there had been such a term defining the most prominent contributors to the Earth’s greenhouse effect, it would not be GHG but GHP for greenhouse particles which are the water particles of clouds the provide well over 70% of the greenhouse effect. If there was a second term to define only the gaseous contributors to the greenhouse effect only three gases would be named water vapour, CO2, and ozone because these three gases account for most of the gaseous part of the greenhouse effect.
The next set of contributors would be N2 and O2, because these two gases make up 99% of the dry atmosphere and even though they have only a minor effect because of their molecular structure the effect from these two gases is still greater than any of the other gases named in the Kyoto Protocol and that includes methane because methane occupies a very narrow band in a low energy portion of the Earth’s radiative spectrum that is already saturated by water vapour. Most of the other gases named in the Kyoto Protocol are completely outside the thermal spectrum radiated by the Earth. They are only included because they are pollutants and when included in the collective term GHG this makes GHG’s pollutants and CO2 is depicted as a GHG so it can be named as a pollutant.
The greenhouse effect is real; the IPCC version of the greenhouse effect is just as make believe as the energy that the IPCC claims CO2 emissions create.”
Sorry about the length of this extract but AGWers need to rethink what the GHG effect really means and explain to people like me how CO2 emissions creates energy sufficient to warm the land and sea surfaces below the always cooler stratosphere without violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Peter Davies | January 9, 2013 at 6:11 am |
“So here is a short post for those of you who support the AGW theory of greenhouse gas effects:: where does your greenhouse gas theory accord with the 2nd law of thermodynamics? And do you seriously claim that the Earth’s atmosphere is a closed system?”
Unlikely they will answer.
Wiki, greenhouse effect:
“The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface and the lower atmosphere, it results in an elevation of the average surface temperature above what it would be in the absence of the gases.”
So the greenhouse effect is suppose to increase average surface temperature. Many might say the greenhouse effect will slow down the rate of cooling and if doesn’t cool as quickly the result is a higher average temperature. And some may claim that surface temperature can be increased from greenhouse affect during direct heating from the Sun.
I don’t think it does not either in any significant amount or by no measurable amount.
But I don’t think it has much to do with 2nd law of thermodynamics other than in some general sort of way.
By which I mean, that it’s not about the difference in heat or temperature.
So first line of wiki is: “The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. ”
So no problem so far.
But an important aspect is that the heat or temperature of gas is about motion of molecules of gas. Gas molecules are heated by other moving gas molecules or by warm surfaces. This is definitional in terms what is meant by the temperature or heating of gas- it’s not about the spin or various kinds of wobbling molecules of gas, rather it’s about their motion.
So the temperature of CO2 or H2O gas molecule is unrelated to the radiation it’s absorbing or radiating.
Any gas is warm is because billions of molecules of gas are traveling at average velocity of a bit less than 1000 mph in random directions.
If bunch of them were all going zero mph- then they are at zero absolute temperature [zero heat]. And if they bouncing about at very high velocity you have hot gas.
And hot or cold gas has nothing to do with radiant energy they absorbing or re-emitting.
And so the next part indicates lack of this basic understanding:
“Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface and the lower atmosphere, it results in an elevation of the average surface temperature above what it would be in the absence of the gases.”
As said above, this radiation doesn’t warm lower or upper atmosphere.
The reason things are kept somewhat warm at night time is same reason one kept warm in a house- one has warm air temperature.
If one stand in a greenhouse which has freezing temperature outside the greenhouse, what matters in terms not being cold is the temperature of the air inside the greenhouse.
So the air of atmosphere is warmed by a surface which has been warmed by sunlight.
This energy from sun is easily measurable and one make do work- solar panels can make electricity. One reflect sunlight and heat things
to very high temperatures and use to energy to to do work.
One can even use the very low amount energy from moonlight to do work. But something which is claimed suppose to increase the average temperature by 33 C is a energy which can not be made to do work. The only work it suppose to be able to do is warm up lower atmosphere and the surface surface. That the theory.
One needs understand scale of the issue. If planet were blackbody and it had uniform temperature of -18 C, the energy needed to increase the uniform blackbody temperature up to 15 C would be a staggering amount of energy. Yet other heat the earth in some theory, this same energy can not used to power anything. There no work done by this theoretical energy.
That is the short answer.
Myrrh
“I have a theory that God only created us cause he got stumped.”
Close but no cigar. God created us cause he got bored. Imagine you created a clockwork universe where you knew precisely everything that was going to happen and when. So in order to not be bored He invented free will. So the sole exception to determinism in the universe is the human mind. The one irrational, unpredictable thing in a perfectly rational universe.
gbaike “But I don’t think it has much to do with 2nd law of thermodynamics other than in some general sort of way.”
The 2nd law of Thermodynamics in Beth talk: Ya cain’t make sumfing out of nutting.
The atmosphere acts as a thermal blanket in keeping the Earth’s temperature to within a comparatively narrow range but it doesn’t create energy in itself.
“Peter Davies | January 9, 2013 at 6:17 pm |
gbaike “But I don’t think it has much to do with 2nd law of thermodynamics other than in some general sort of way.”
The 2nd law of Thermodynamics in Beth talk: Ya cain’t make sumfing out of nutting.
The atmosphere acts as a thermal blanket in keeping the Earth’s temperature to within a comparatively narrow range but it doesn’t create energy in itself.”
So yeah, in Beth talk it has something to 2nd law of thermodynamics.
But in the sense of the idea that cold sky can not warm a warmed surface, type 2nd law of thermodynamics argument, it’s not exactly correct.
And nor as you say, the blanket isn’t adding heat- it’s not an electric blanket.
But of course there are lots problem with analogy of atmosphere as blanket. One obvious problem is blanket doesn’t work too good with dead people.
And if want to die from heat, wrap yourself in saran wrap- you can not shed enough body heat through just radiating heat.
You are cooled mostly by evaporation and convection/conduction of heat.
Or you can be cooler in a dry sauna than wrapped in saran wrap at room temperature [or in a vacuum].
Or if Earth had a lot geothermal heat, and therefore functioned similar to a human body, the blanket analogy would be closer.
And I would argue that the cold high elevation air does warm the surface- but not via radiant transfer of heat.
And atmosphere is more like a sponge or battery than a blanket.
Peter Davies | January 9, 2013 at 8:32 am | From an email from geophysicist Norm Kalmanovitch:
“My definition of the greenhouse effect is that it is just a number; 34.5°C for the Earth, 5.5°C for Mars and 450°C for Venus and is merely the theoretical difference in temperature between the actual temperature of a planet and what that temperature would be if there was no atmosphere.
That’s the key point to see the sleight of hand from AGWScienceFiction, the minus 18°C is the Earth without any atmosphere at all as he says, but AGWScienceFiction says it is the Earth’s temperature with the nitrogen and oxygen in place, and only without its “greenhouse gases”, water, carbon dioxide etc.
How do the greenhouse gases as he defines them, which are only around 1-4% of the atmosphere, have such a great ability to trap the upwelling heat from the Earth? As he says here:
The effect is caused by atmospheric components slowing down the rate at which thermal energy escapes from the planet during hours of darkness so it is essentially a passive insulating effect supplying no energy and therefore since climate requires energy, there is no driving of climate from this insulating effect.
All of the misleading terminology pertaining to the greenhouse effect was coined after the 1988 Hansen paper and the formation of the IPCC. There was no such term as greenhouse gas prior to 1988, and if there had been such a term defining the most prominent contributors to the Earth’s greenhouse effect, it would not be GHG but GHP for greenhouse particles which are the water particles of clouds the provide well over 70% of the greenhouse effect. If there was a second term to define only the gaseous contributors to the greenhouse effect only three gases would be named water vapour, CO2, and ozone because these three gases account for most of the gaseous part of the greenhouse effect.
The next set of contributors would be N2 and O2, because these two gases make up 99% of the dry atmosphere and even though they have only a minor effect because of their molecular structure the effect from these two gases is still greater than any of the other gases named in the Kyoto Protocol
The Earth with the atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen would be 67°C without the main “AGWSF greenhouse gas water” – this is hardly a bit player in his description as he sees the process..
He is still doing what AGWSF intended, marginalising the real thermal blanket power of our real gas atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen.
David Springer | January 9, 2013 at 5:53 pm | Myrrh
“I have a theory that God only created us cause he got stumped.”
Close but no cigar. God created us cause he got bored. Imagine you created a clockwork universe where you knew precisely everything that was going to happen and when. So in order to not be bored He invented free will. So the sole exception to determinism in the universe is the human mind. The one irrational, unpredictable thing in a perfectly rational universe.
Grin. But, how could he have created us with free will if being created was against our will?
In actual fact, improving the creation and communication of weather forecasts for the developing world is something that is completely separated from and has nothing to do with AGW.
However, it could be advantageous for funding reasons to posit a link, if the funding is to come from public (i.e. taxpayer) funds, since many nations (like the USA) appear to have “budgets” for this.
forecast /predict the future weather/climate hohoho-hahah, seems science can’t even get the past correct !!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/06/does-noaas-national-climatic-data-center-ncdc-keep-two-separate-sets-of-climate-books-for-the-usa/
Try reading: become open minded and then criticze!
@Peter, blah blah blah,
I repeat. predict future climate hohoho-hahah, seems science can’t even get the past correct (see link above)!!
Sun Blotch, what Peter is talking about is just quality weather forecasting and local preparedness. I tend to think his plan would fail, but not because weather forecasting is BS. As far as NASA, NCDC and the NHC goes though, maybe he could set up a prototype network for Florida :)
Seems to me that you want a two-pronged approach:
1. Find a way to sustain the funding for Bangladesh, which is the exemplar. In many ways, this seems like a perfect USAID project, but I’m not sure what their budget is now and going forward. Perhaps it could be sold to the Red Cross and other disaster relief organizations as a leverage point. (Though perhaps they won’t want to give to something which may decrease their perceived helpfulness.)
2. Find other countries/regions/peoples who have the same critical characteristics that the Bangladeshi’s had:
A. A shared understanding of a critical need.
B. A political and scientific leadership that’s willing to accept and act on forecasts.
C. A means by which warnings can be propagated widely.
D. A willingness by the population to follow the warnings. (Either because they believe the forecasts, or because they believe their leaders.)
E. A set of politically, culturally, and economically realistic actions that can be taken to mitigate damage.
I don’t think other Bangladesh’s will be made, I’d suggest that they must be discovered. You can’t sell this top-down: we have a forecast, they need to act upon it. You’ll need to be satisfying a demand: they have a strong need and actions they’d like to take, if only you had a forecast they could depend upon.
The Northern part of the Bay of Bengal is one of several places on Earth where weather related disasters on a grand scale are almost a predictable consequence of the particular local situation. Arable land, barely above sea level, gets settled by the press of the burgeoning, hungering, population, even despite governmental attempts to discourage, even prohibit, settlement of these areas. When the oddly unexpected, but predictable typhoon roars up next to Burma by the Bay, there are mass casualties, even with warning.
The Chinese, now Pakistani, too, river valleys have similar local situations: great population pressure to settle dangerous but fertile land.
Another place with similar built in doom is the edge of the Sahara, which alternately beckons and desiccates.
Like the seafood diet, so goes peak land. Land peeks up, and people grub it.
===============
Bangladesh managed to get a million solar kits. How’d that happen? They managed to get a cellphone in everybody’s hands. How’d that happen? Why are you all talking like this is as tough as the Apollo Project? Make it a Millenium Goal, get seed money from Gates and Buffett, get developing countries to push it as a bloc in the U.N. and get it done.
I’ll help.
Who can believe anything coming out of the AGW community government scientists and eco-fearmongers? Do they really care about the developing world?
When AGW government science promotes a world view that would condemn the people in the developing countries to a future of misery, poverty and death you know there is more to the story, right? UN support for such insanity should be all you need to know.
Ideas from the usual suspects that America is bad for the world cannot be seriously entertained. Not for a moment. Not a penny should even go to the UN so long as a dime of UN money goes to the IPCC.
Why doesn’t the UN move its headquarters to a developing country? How about Libya? These are the same folks who would destroy every job in America because soccer moms driving SUVs are murdering polar bears with every fill-up.
How much public money would go to Al Gore/Jazeera TV to broadcast weather warnings to the Third World?
A catalogue of early warning signals:
Ants swarming,
Sirens caterwauling,
Bells ringing,
Birds stop singing,
Cars tooting,
Owls hooting,
Clouds massing,
Global snow mass crashing,
(or amassing)
El nino’s increasing,
Rainfall mean decreasing,
Red sky in the morning,
Radio alert warning,
Smoke rising,
Sea levels surprising,
Volcanoes rumbling,
Temp records tumbling.
…owls hooting…
Barn Owl (Tyto Alba.)
‘The moon drops down silver daggers of light
On the dark trees, and calls to his totem;
Tyto Alba, ‘Come, ready your claws,
It is time for the ambush of blood
That quickens my frozen valleys. Come,
Time for the hunt. I will allow no shadow
To hide our prey. They will not escape us.’
The barn owl replies, pair calling,’ee iy iah.
I come. I … your creature of the night,
I hold your image in my round eyes,
Reflect your light reflected from the sun.
I follow where your silver rays penetrate
The dark forest, shining on the feathers and
Terrified eyes of victims. My downy wings
Make no sound as I flush out our prey,
Without warning, without mercy, which is the way
Of night hunters, highway men, foot-pad assassins.’
The owl screams across the tops of trees,
Disturbs the dreaming of small birds,
Giving pause to small mammals scurrying
On the forest floor, warning them
That death is never far away.’
BC H/t Lorca’ ‘Blood Wedding.’
Beth Cooper,
I always wondered why owls asked “who.”
I guess the bell tolls for me?
According to Tim Ball in a post today at WUWT, you can’t count on regional weather forecast. He says “Everyone knows that regional weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable, especially beyond 48 hours.”
Tim believes because the Environment Canada (EC) 1-12 month forecasts have been no more accurate than you would get by forecasting with coin tosses, EC should’t be forecasting for such periods, and the IPCC shouldn’t be forecasting for even longer periods.
I don’t know why he thinks “beyond 48 hours” is the same as 1 month.
Forecasting the weather is no different than forecasting stock market trends. People until can do it but ideally they’re only risking their own money betting on their market predictions. With the liberal fascists of AGW alamism government bureaucrats are blowing the public purse on feckless speculations and betting the economy based on the fears of Western climatists whose prediction results that will be no better than a room full of monkeys throwing darts at charts.
Waggy, if stock market forecasting was like weather forecasting, we could sure make a lot of money. We know temperatures rise in the spring and fall in autumn. Too bad stock prices aren’t that predictable. Daily and weekly weather forecasts also are more accurate than market forecasts for these short periods.
Forecasting is not as hard as you seem to believe. Forecasting the stock market. for example, is easy as pie. I predict the S&P 500 will rise from it’s current level of 1,450 by the end of the year. See how easy that was. Am I confident in my prediction? No !
It’s also easy for me to forecast the S&P 500 will rise over the next 30 years, rise enough to make more money than bonds will make. Am I confident enough in my prediction? Yes, I invest for the long term.
I also would be more confident in a 30-year forecast of of change in average global temperature than I would be in a shorter term forecast.
Waggy, I’ll leave it to you to figure out why I am more confident in long-term forecasts.
Pretending to be able to predict stock prices is no way to enhance ones credibility. In that realm predictions based on sunspots actually make some sense.
I think we also realize that the Leftists-libs’ hatred of Americanism has turned industrialization into a paralyzing Tower of Babel and English into a liars language. The success of capitalism also sustains a trusting, rusting, hapless and helpless group of 47%’rs into a charlatan’s mark that Leftist activists, plaintiff’s lawyers, government opportunists and bureaucrats exploit to their personal advantage at the expense of the productive. The result has been the emergence of a contentious class of professional government gadflies that has attached itself to the body of the republic with the sole purpose of increasing job-killing burdens on manufacturers and providers of services.
Waggy, that’s a very long non-answer to my question.
I don’t know why you brought up government gadflies, but I wish I was one. Getting paid to annoy people would be the perfect job for me, and I imagine, also the perfect job for you. Too bad I don’t need a job. Being a successful investor has left me with no need to work.
Which means there is a snowball’s chance in hell pigs can fly. Good to know.
To save the poor ignorants in the Developing world…? Riiiiighhht! If not simply for more government money and continued wasting of the public purse its simply camera-chasing at its worst.
Peter Webster
Most people seem to have wandered back into the multidecadal salon where they are throwing vitriol at each other.
However I am sure that many of us applaud the idea of the project and hope you will keep us informed on progress.
tonyb
Me too.
Sure, sure… even bed bugs need to eat, right?
“A lot of environmentalists are stuck in the 1970s and continue to promote a strain of leftish romanticism about idyllic rural village life powered by windmills and solar panels. They idealize poverty, seeing it as a noble way of life, and oppose all large developments. James Cameron, the multimillionaire producer of the most lucrative movie in history, Avatar, paints his face and joins the disaffected to protest a hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.” ~Patrick Moore
Reason and the scientific method is a process. Meanwhile, any scientist with a reputation to defend headed for the UN exits beginning in about 1997 with the big crush coming at the time of the foi2009.pdf CRUgate disclosures. The ’Harry Read Me” File is another mustread.
AGW model-makers have indulged the fiction that GCMs will be reliable predicting long range global climate change precisely because their GCMs have already been shown to fail grandly when comparing predictions to reality on both a ‘zonal’ and ‘seasonal scale.’ So, are we now expected to trade one self-defeating preconception of the Left for yet another and far more disingenuous preconception that from the luxury of their ivory towers Western government scientists now believe they can redirect dollars flowing from evil American enterprise to the more noble cause of saving the world from being the Fukushima’d by nature.
RiHo08,
John Donne warned us, ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls.’
Beth.
Beth Cooper
“… it tolls for thee.” but I did not want to be hurtful nor predictive, so its “me”.
I hear climatological alarms in the far distance and ask: why?
Maybe the owl is asking a climatologist: “Who do you think you are?” one wing pointing to hubris and the other wing to charlatanism.
in any case, we need to make do with what we have. To me that means: adapt.
Let’s forget about the brouhaha surrounding IPCC’s CAGW claim for a moment.
Improving weather forecasts for the developing world is a worthwhile effort (or, more precisely, several relatively small-scale local and regional efforts), as it will undoubtedly result in fewer deaths from sudden extreme weather events (as early warning systems have done in the USA).
The cited Bangladeshi example is a good one as a model for how this could be done in many places.
Even though the requirements for each individual project are quite limited, the basic problems appear to be transfer of knowhow, lack of local infrastructure and funding.
Does anyone here have any ideas for Judith how to overcome these problems?
Max
The biggest problem is the lack of credibility of the supposed problem-solvers. About all they’re good at is sending other peoples’ money for their own personal gratification. We cannot even afford the luxury of presuming good intentions when government scientists have been shown to be charlatans, liars and petty liberal fascists.
Epilogue: I fear for the future of Western civilization. AGW prognosticating has become a smithy’s craft. From an age of technology, reason and hope we have turned a dark corner to the disinformation age where schoolteachers trade in their sheepskins for hammers to pound out the coffin nails to be used to bury science.
The joke is on humanity. Global warming alarmists don’t care about people and the business of living. Poverty, misery and death is the legacy of the Left and liberal fascism.
Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about ‘saving the planet.’ What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act. (Philip Stott)
Why should U.S. government bureaucrats waste their time and budgets trying to save actual lives in the third world? What’s really important is seizing ever more power over every aspect of the U.S. economy.
First, the breath we exhale was labelled a pollutant.
Now, rain itself is a “surrogate” pollutant – at least in the fevered mind of progressive U.S. bureaucrats.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/08/Virginia-AG-Cuccinelli-Thumps-EPA-in-Federal-Court
Head explosion warning – that’s a conservative site, you progressives and moderates may want to take a valium before visiting it. Or go directly to the court’s opinion here.
http://www.ag.virginia.gov/Media%20and%20News%20Releases/News_Releases/Cuccinelli/Memorandum%20Opinion%20on%2012%28c%29%20Motion%20%281%203%2012%29.pdf
(The court held that the EPA cannot claim that storm water is a “surrogate” pollutant because of the sediment that drains into a river as it falls. For some bizarre reason, the court thought it inappropriate to allow the EPA to re-define the limits of its own authority.)
GaryM said on January 8, 2013 at 10:10 pm
“First, the breath we exhale was labelled a pollutant.”
_____
And it damed well should be. I know people whose breath will curl your whiskers. These people should be required to wear some kind of filter over their mouths when in public.
But since the CO2 we exhale is already a part of the carbon cycle, it shouldn’t add to the greenhouse effect. Exhale without fear or guilt.
Hey, what if we could add CO2 to the carbon cycle by exhaling? That suggest we could make more water by peeing. Dry spells would be less of a problem if everyone was a little water factory, and I can always use an excuse to drink more beer.
Max_OK
You may not be aware of it (unless you studied some chemistry) but every animal is a CO2 factory.
Just like every plant is an O2 factory.
All those evil fossil fuels originally came out of the atmosphere.
We’re just putting them back where they came from.
The plants love it!
Could that be a contributing factor to the observed fact that yields of major food crops are up 240% since 1970?
Most likely.
Max
Max_CH, I ain’t ever had no coarse in chemistry. Never had time for book learning beyond reading, writing, and counting.
I’m sure you have some books saying we exhale more CO2 than we inhale, and I wouldn’t argue with a fact, but do you also have some books saying:
1.We exhale the CO2 trapped underground in fossil fuels (that would be a neat trick).
2.The CO2 we exhale is a significant part of the growth in atmospheric CO2.
If you have books saying those things, throw the books away
Max_CH, I’m not knocking your book learning. I like books myself, especially those with pictures. IMO, however, you may be too willing to accept whatever you like without question. I hate to say this, but you give the impression of being a fake skeptic
A true skeptic will question his beliefs. He will ask himself the hard questions. Now might be a good time for you to start. If you believe additional CO2 will save plants as temperatures rise, you might ask yourself why greenhouses use cooling.
Max_OK
When reading books to gain information, the trick is to pick the right books.
It’s generally best to avoid “sales pitches”, whether these are for “snake oil” or a “carbon tax”.
IPCC has published one of these (and NOAA has copied the data), so take this with a grain of salt: All animals on Earth supposedly exhale 119 GtC per year (humans are only 0.5 Gt/year of that), all plants (bless ’em) consume 120 GtC/year, while human industrial activity generates 6.3 GtC/year
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/carbon/
Only around half of the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere by human industrial activity “remains” there, with the other half “disappearing” (partly to the ocean and partly to the biosphere?)
So don’t stop breathing to save the planet – it won’t help.
Max
Is CO2 “pollution”?
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5262/5821041152_8efb25aaf2_b.jpg
(Depends on your point of view.)
Max_OK
No need to “stop breathing”, but you could pop a Beano or two before pigging out on frijoles to cut down on methane outgassing.
Just a tip of how you can help in the war against climate change.
Max
Max_Ch, if you read my post as carefully as you read your books you would know I said “Exhale without fear or guilt.”
If you read my post carefully, you would also know I asked you a question about greenhouses, which you forgot to answer. Old timers don’t have good short-term memory. But it’s not your fault.
Max_OK
Naw. If I didn’t answer your question it’s not because of a “memory problem”.
I don’t generally answer stupid questions.
Max_CH
manacker said onJan 9, 2013 at 7:10 pm
“I don’t generally answer stupid questions.”
_________
Translation: I don’t generally answer questions that make me look stupid.
Max_CH my question was not intended to make you look stupid. I just want to help you in your struggle with the truth. I will ask the question again.
If you believe additional CO2 will save plants as temperatures rise, you might ask yourself why greenhouses use cooling?
You evidently don’t understand that a greenhouse would be hot inside even if there was no CO2 inside.
Waggy, although I concurred with David Springer when he advised you not to talk about anything having to do with natural science, you notion of a greenhouse with no CO2 is interesting.
A CO2-free greenhouse implies a CO2-free atmosphere outside the greenhouse, and since we exhale CO2, this would mean a people-free earth.
I suppose you might build an air-tight greenhouse that contained no CO2, but what would be its purpose? No plants would grow inside it, so you would have to call it something other than a greenhouse.
Max_OK
Your post (about “dumb questions”) demonstrates that you are lacking not only in skills of logic, but also in translational skills.
Whut in the worl’ did they teach y’all there in Okie-land ‘xeptn playin football?
Max_CH
Max_OK
Greenhouse operators use a combination of heaters and coolers to control the inside temperature to optimum levels for the plants that are growing inside.
They also often control CO2 levels to the optimum levels for plant growth.
Optimum growing temperatures appear to be a bit warmer than ambient temperatures today (that’s why most greenhouses are a bit warmer than the outside temp most of the year).
Optimum CO2 levels for growing are also a bit higher than current atmospheric levels (that;s why operators add CO2).
Hope this answers your question.
Max_CH
Heh, he’d sooner be there than right.
=====
Re manacker’s post on January 10, 2013 at 7:14 am
Max_Ch, your reply to my question was pretty good except for the following puzzling statement:
“Optimum growing temperatures appear to be a bit warmer than ambient temperatures today (that’s why most greenhouses are a bit warmer than the outside temp most of the year).”
Max_CH, of course green houses usually have to be kept warmer than outside temperatures in winter so tomatoes and other vegetables can be grown out of season. But where did you get the idea outside temperatures are too low in summer for optimal growth ?
Why, Sooner than Later, that idea popped autogenetically from the fertile soil of your supratentorium; it certainly didn’t come from him.
==========
Max_OK
Although I have no hard data to back this assumption, I’d guess that, over an entire year the “globally and annually averaged temperature” inside a greenhouse is normally warmer than the “”globally and annually averaged ambient temperature”.
From several sources I read that for most crops, such as tomatoes, aubergines, etc., greenhouses should be kept within the extreme range of 15C to 40C, with an ideal temperature of 20C to 25C.
The “globally and annually averaged land temperature is around 15C.
Go figure.
Max_CH
Max_CH says : I’d guess that, over an entire year the “globally and annually averaged temperature” inside a greenhouse is normally warmer than the “”globally and annually averaged ambient temperature”.
____
Max_CH, I don’t think that’s a very risky guess. The average annual temperature of green houses as a whole should be warmer than the ambient global average, as greenhouses are used largely to grow plants in winter that grow outside in summer. To compensate for the shorter winter days, greenhouses also use artificial lighting, which sometimes can cause unwanted heat.
I think the comparison you may want, however, is the annual average temperature inside each greenhouse and the annual average ambient temperature near it for greenhouses that operate year round.
Max_OK,
Let’s see, population has doubled since 1960. Combine increase in CO2 emissions with man’s deforestation of the planet, thus reducing O2 production, and I believe that the EPA should label people as the real pollutant.
All sources of pollution are really surrogates for that ultimate pollutant, mankind.
What we need are EPA regulations limiting the “emission” of human beings from the womb. Better yet, we could form an NGO to avoid constitutional issues, and maybe call it Planned parenthood.
Oh wait….
Speaking of weather, the Australian heat wave is hot, hot, hot !
Just how hot is it ? According to the linked report from wired.com, “So hot that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology had to add new colors to its weather map.”
The report goes on to say: “Now, those unfortunate parts of Australia that achieve temperatures above 122ºF (50ºC) — temperatures that were, until recently, literally off the scale — will be marked in deep purple and terrifying hot pink.”
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/01/australia-temperature-map/
But, look here Max_OK, isn’t warmer better for people and plants you might ask? Hell no, the plants are on fire and the people don’t like it.
Maybe the Ausralian climatists should quick move to China where a 1,000 ships are lock by ice in the harbor.
‘Clicking on the prediction for 5pm AEDT next Monday, a Tasmania-sized deep purple opens up over South Australia – implying 50 degrees or above.
Aaron Coutts-Smith, the bureau’s NSW head of climate monitoring, though, cautioned that the 50-degree reading is the result of just one of the bureau’s models. “The indications are, from the South Australian office, that we are not looking at getting any where near that (50 degree level).”‘
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/temperatures-off-the-charts-as-australia-turns-deep-purple-20130108-2ce33.html#ixzz2HRlSWLi7
The difference between this and previous heat waves is marginal at most – and the result of both the failure of the northern monsoon and the weakness of southern fronts. It is cooler in te outh today.
We have seen it before and had the signs made up. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/22/2778901.htm?site=eyre It is part of the warming system. We can text a million people and move them to safety within hours.
The rebuilbing has already commenced – hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians moving in huge conveys to provide supplies to distressed communities. A community effort rather than government. God I am impressed with the functionaity of the Australian community.
Much of Australia’s ecology is fire dependant. Not sure if they like it but they sure need it.
Australia had its hottest day on record Monday, and although 2013 is only about a week old, four of the country’s hottest ten days on record have been in that short period.
David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology says the heat wave “is arguably the most significant in Australia’s history. “
Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Australia-Brief-reprieve-from-record-heatwave/tabid/417/articleID/282528/Default.aspx#ixzz2HVhnYojB
‘Australia had its hottest day on record Monday with a nationwide average of 40.33degC, narrowly breaking a 1972 record of 40.17degC. Tuesday was the third hottest day at 40.11degC. Four of Australia’s hottest 10 days on record have been in 2013.
“There’s little doubt that this is a very, very extreme heat wave event,” said David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology.
“If you look at its extent, its duration, its intensity, it is arguably the most significant in Australia’s history,” he added.
Arguably it is not much different to the 1970’s heat wave. These are fairly rare events and it doesn’t seem surprising to me that the hottest days occur in extreme conditions that result from an unusual combination of meterological conditions. It might be noted that Australia’s ‘history’ in this regard extends only to the 1950’s – earlier records not being reliable enough.
Yet the world is not warming again last year and we are instead supposed to make something of unusual regional conditions that owe much to what is simply weather. So we had the tail end of a large La Nina last year. We are likely to get another this year. It is part of the system in decadal (and longer) changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO. The world is not warming for a decade or three more at least.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
Robert I Ellison said on January 8, 2013 at 11:13 pm
Yet the world is not warming again last year and we are instead supposed to make something of unusual regional conditions that owe much to what is simply weather.
——-
Robert, the world didn’t warm from 1980 to 1995, but that wasn’t the end of global warming.
Max_OK
You wrote to Robert Ellison:
“Robert, the world didn’t warm from 1980 to 1995”
Put down whatever you’re smoking, Okie. 4 out of 5 records show it did warm over that period.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/to:1995/trend
Max_CH
MaxCH I agree with MaxOK on this one. The surface statistical model results are not records. There was no statistically significant warming from 1980 to 1997. But all the warming since then occurred during the 1998-2000 ENSO cycle so there is still no AGW. The warmists have been reduced to local and regional events which have no significance whatsoever.
We are all aware that temperatures increased from 1976 to 1998 in the period of recent warming. Because there are factors in the arbitrary period chosen by you – volcanoes and ENSO – that complicate interpretation means very little.
The NASA link suggests that natural variations augment and counteract warming over decades in recent times – and we know what those periods are and how long they generally last.
We even have some clues on how and why they happen.
‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008GL037022.shtml
The temperature records tell very little by themselves. What is needed is an appropriate conceptual model for realistic nterpretation.
.
Statistically speaking Max_OK is correct. Warming under 0.15C/decade is not significant and the most reliable only truly global measure of average lower troposphere temperature is the two satellite records which show no trend at all.
If Okie Max has come to the realization that warming since 1980 occured in essentially one step change between 1998 and 2000 then this is significant progress for Max. Wojick mentions the step change as well. About two years later a step change in summer arctic sea ice extent took place as well which is about how long the north Pacific conveyor belt takes to transport water from tropics to pole.
——————————————————————————-
manacker | January 9, 2013 at 7:06 pm |
Max_OK
You wrote to Robert Ellison:
“Robert, the world didn’t warm from 1980 to 1995″
Put down whatever you’re smoking, Okie. 4 out of 5 records show it did warm over that period.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/to:1995/trend
Max_CH
David Springer said on January 10, 2013 at 10:57 am
“If Okie Max has come to the realization that warming since 1980 occured in essentially one step change between 1998 and 2000 then this is significant progress for Max.”
_______
“One step” ? I believe you will find more than one step if you look back further in the century. You will see an entire staircase of steps in temperature, big steps, little steps, medium size steps.
One step, indeed ! I will call you “One-step Springer.”
One-step Springer, HA HA, that’s a good one.
Forget Australia, the US lower 48 just had its hottest year on record beating 1998 by a full degree F. Wait for the denial from WUWT when they’ve figured out which stations to cherry-pick to prove it isn’t the hottest.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/2012-hottest-year-on-record_n_2433210.html
That would be every year, right?
Yep, 2012 beats every year back to 1895.
If you start with feckless government scientists and add GIGO and UHI effects to corrupted historical data and who needs a weatherman to know which way the wind blows?
Jim D
What happened in 1895?
Max
That was back when schoolteachers were not completely destitute of the slightest impulse to any uplifting activity but obviously everything is different now.
manacker, 1895 is when their record starts, so 2012 is the warmest year on the record.
So now we know the magnitude of the UHI effect since 1895. How much did we have to pay for that bit of knowledge?
I think the Wattsies are too busy pouring over draft versions of most most chapters of IPCC’s AR5, which some yet to be identified author or reviewer leaked to Donna Laframboise. A previous leaker identified himself, and made some flimsy excuse for breaking his promise to not release drafts. So far, Laframboise’s leaker is anonymous, perhaps because he doesn’t want to be seen as someone who can’t be trusted to keep his word.
Of course, there is the possibility the draft chapters were leaked intentionally by the IPCC. This would give the organization more time to address outside criticism in the final drafts.
“Of course, there is the possibility the draft chapters were leaked intentionally by the IPCC. This would give the organization more time to address outside criticism in the final drafts.”
Yeah, that would be really smart idea.
MaxOk
Even more fun would be if completely bogus papers were deliberately leaked in order to keep everyone occupied :)
I don’t like people breaking their word on confidentiality, but it is diffcult to judge when someone crosses that line from being dishonest through not keeping their word, to being a socially responsible ‘whistleblower.’ We had several people who blew the whistle on the corruption and money wasting going on in the EU. Arguably they did the right thing.
I’m not sure where the current spate of IPCC material sits in that sort of moral equivalence, but I am uncomfortable with it.
tonyb
Sooner Max, there are cryptic inscriptions on the rocks on the field past which you whistle so blithely. Don’t avert your gaze, there is special meaning for you there.
=============
“I don’t like people breaking their word on confidentiality, but it is difficult to judge when someone crosses that line from being dishonest through not keeping their word, to being a socially responsible ‘whistleblower.’ ”
But I don’t like people in authority requiring someone to unnecessarily have keep confidentiality.
And the more important something is in terms of public policy, it seems there needs to be a stronger compelling reason to require it.
The other factor is the duration of time which this confidentiality is required.
And generally think it’s better policy to release a preliminary report as soon as possible and follow this up with final and revised public report.
Next IPCC report someone should sign up for Expert Reviewer, get the draft, modify it by adding in some denial friendly statements, eg:
“Hence 20th century warming is unlikely to be caused by man”
and “leak” it to WUWT.
Hilarity ensues.
lolwot
It’s hilarious enough as it is.
5 chuckles, 4 hee-haws plus 3 belly-laughs per chapter.
Max
Tony, in case you haven’t already seen Richard Bett’s comments at bishop over the hill, you might want to read them:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/1/8/secret-santa-releases-ipcc-draft-josh-193.html#comments
Betts points out that just about anyone who wanted to comment on the IPCC drafts could have signed on as a reviewer. A “whistleblower” is by definition someone who reveals a covert activity of wrongdoing. As I recall, Anthony Watts was accepted as a reviewer. Does this mean Donna Laframboise, who says the leaker is a whistleblower, believes Watts was engaging in a covert act of wrong doing?
MacBook
Thanks for the Betts link.
I was a reviewer on the draft. I didn’t find the ipcc very helpful. I asked for some research that backed up a sweeping assertion on abyssal warming but they said as there was no reference (just an assertion) they couldnt supply the research paper. A classic catch 22 that was never resolved.
It was Like wading through mud, I am not sure I would bother to do it again
Tonyb
Maxok
Just noticed that for some inexplicable reason my iPad decided to rename you. It’s a good name though, perhaps you might like to keep it in order to make my life easier?
Tonyb
climatereason said on | January 9, 2013 at 4:52 pm
“Maxok
Just noticed that for some inexplicable reason my iPad decided to rename you. It’s a good name though, perhaps you might like to keep it in order to make my life easier?”
______
Renamed me “MacBook” ? Well, that’s catchy , but “Max_OK” is more of an Okie name. Because the other Max, who is from Switzerland, was here at Climate Etc before me, I have no right to ask him to change his name, so to avoid confusion I just call him Max_CH rather than Max. I was going to suggest he call himself “cheese chomper,” but according to the Urban Dictionary, that means something obscene. However, he could call himself “cheese eater, cheese chewer, or cheese biter.”
The Legal and Liaison Officer of the IPCC has sent Donna Laframboise a letter by e-mail requesting she remove its leaked drafts from her website. I don’t know if the IPCC has legal recourse if she refuses their request. My guess is the IPCC may have made the request for the benefit of its contributors who promised to not release drafts prior to publication, and has no intention of pursuing the matter with her. But that’s just my guess.
Donna Laframboise’s comments on the request begin with her annoyance over having received an e-mail with the following message at the bottom of the page, a message I presume appears on all e-mails from this IPCC officer.
“Save paper – Please do not print this e-mail unless absolutely necessary”
Laframboise says “Lately I’ve begun to view the UN as a vast, unaccountable, bossy bureaucracy. One whose employees imagine they have a right to lecture you about your e-mail printing habits when contacting you about an entirely unrelated topic.”
Why such a small thing set her off is puzzling. It was just a polite request to save paper.
Laframboise doesn’t say whether she intends to comply with the IPCC request, but ends here comments with the following statement.
“But really, the cat is out-of-the-bag. The damage is done. Thousands of copies of these documents are now out there. They can’t be recalled.”
This statement could be interpreted as meaning she purposely posted the IPCC’s drafts in an attempt to damage the organization. If I were her, I’m not sure I would have made that statement.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/01/09/ipcc-legal-notice/
Personally, I’m gratified that she is pursuing her vision of her duty.
========
I think Donna Laframboise is a science-illiterate ideology-driven libertarian journalist, and therefore I don’t expect her to be objective and accurate. After what she did with the IPCC drafts, I question her ethics.
Max_OK
“Whistleblowers” generally irritate “whistleblowees”.
But they are protected by laws in most countries.
So I agree with you – it is unlikely that IPCC takes legal action against Donna Laframboise or the “whistleblower” who gave her the info.
A second point: IPCC has had no damage that I can think of from the premature release – the material itself will look just as contrived in September as it does now (unless they change it in the meantime).
Max
manacker
You are misusing the term ‘whistleblower’. Max_OK pointed this out to you some time ago upthread. So you are either not reading the comments or you are misusing the term deliberately with intent to mislead.
Either way, you can stop now.
Jim D | January 9, 2013 at 8:59 pm SAID: ”manacker, 1895 is when their record starts, so 2012 is the warmest year on the record”
In 1895 was few thermometers in Europe / USA – and you ”believe” that is proof of the GLOBAL temp… Jim D, you and manaker must have same shrink – should ask him for money back. And report him for malpractice; I’ll be your witness
It’s dead, Jim.
Warming that is.
It died 15 years ago. It’s warm but not warming. Maybe warming will resume. If it does it has a lot of catching up to do to stay on a 3C or more by 2100 trajectory because it did nothing at all for the past 15 years when it was supposed to have gone up by 0.45C instead. The US is 1% of the earth’s surface. Can you spell cherry picking? I knew you could.
Springer, global warming has died many times, yet has sprung back to life even stronger. Some wishful thinkers believe this time will be different, but wishing doesn’t make things happen.
Judith, if people tell politicians that “the greatest problem in the world” is a small amount of warming in 100years … why does anyone imagine they would care about short range weather forecasts?
I was at a recent presentation by someone from Christian Aid who basically lied from the beginning to the end of their talk about the devastation being caused by climate change (I counted only one fact that could be substantiated in 10 minutes).
She had absolutely no concept at all that weather forecasting does save lives and that the simplest gift she could give the developing world is a decent weather forecasting service.
But then again … why would she want to stop the disasters that keep her in a job?
And well done for publicising the Bangladesh paper!!
I was very impressed with the project when it presented at the Royal Society Meeting on climate. I thought it definitely deserved funding and support from … “pragmatists” who know how to deal with civil servants.
If just a fraction of the money that was wasted at Doha … if just a fraction of the people, if just a fraction of the time wasted with the dross and PR non-science at Doha had been spent supporting this project and the many others that are around showing that weekly-seasonal regional forecasts already do save lives and could I’d suggest save 1000s if not millions of lives …
THESE LIVES WOULD BE SAVED.
handjive | January 7, 2013 at 6:06 am |
“Imagine the impoverished populations getting a text message saying, “Start planting, drought will be over in 9 months”!”
Please read the paper! OK, I realise that when I first heard about these seasonal forecasts, I just thought “another bunch of alarmists out to get research grants for non-science”. But I’m glad I had to listen because I now realise that we are talking about research that IS ALREADY PROVING ITSELF and not some airy fairy climate forecast but a flood forecast about a week in advance that has PROVEN it allows villages to get to safety.
The goal of producing a useful prediction on the weekly monthly or even yearly timescale appears to be very achievable. According to my own paper (http://scef.org.uk/attachments/article/106/Climate%20changes.pdf) it appears that we get a 10x improvement in forecast time horizon for a 10x increase in experience.As numerical models area only a few decades old, that suggests that in a few centuries, our weekly-monthly forecast will be as accurate as our daily forecast is today.
Or more realistically, in a couple of decades the 6-10day forecast will be as good as the current 3-5 day forecast.
I would urge you to look at Table 1 which is a summary of the current level of “skill” and utility of various scales of forecast. Monthly forecasts may not be anywhere near good enough to predict the actual weather, but even now they are being used by professional users. So they do have utility (people don’t pay unless there is some benefit to them).
Sure, a tiny fraction of the money spent for Doha would get several “Bangladeshi projects” going, but we should remember that the Doha and Bangladeshi expenditures were for two totally different and completely unrelated things:
Bangladesh was for saving lives in a developing country by providing improved weather forecasting to warn them of impending severe weather events..
Doha was for politics: to exploit the rich white man’s guilt feelings and the gullibility of the general public – using the CAGW ruse – in order to slap a carbon tax on humanity so politicians can have more money to shuffle around plus the increased political power that goes with it.
There is ALWAYS more money for politics (especially when enormous sums of money are potentially at stake) than for saving lives in developing countries.
A sad truth.
Max
We should stand by and let government grant scientists gather in the graveyard to wiz on the remains of Galileo and assis the Left in its mission to convert America from Liberty to poverty. As Emerson wisely instructed us, “every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.”
Bertrand Russell would give the governmental-education complex an “F” for failing to teach that science by ‘consensus’ is no science at all. As Russell cautioned us, “the fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
Waggy, stop complaining, and got yourself a nice government job. Life is too short to waste it complaining.
Going Greek is not for me.
Well, you probably would have to pass some kind of intelligence test to get a government job, but you could probably take it again if you failed. So you shouldn’t give up before trying.
At this point the Little Eichmanns of the Left with their odd penchant to follow charismatic figures into the immoral abyss with such fascist glee may be drawing unwanted attention to the Left’s other tendencies — e.g., the Left’s failure to recognize and confront evil (they’d much rather confront the issue of the Ten Commandments in US courthouses), the Left’s antipathy toward capitalism (the evil big business and big oil), and the Left’s contempt toward those that embrace an ethic of free individuals taking personal responsibility for their own futures. Instead, the Left would rather address their own shortcomings by stealing from the wages of the productive.
Max_OK
“Intelligence test to get a gumment job?”
Hmmm…
“the fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;”
The widely held opinion here is that climate science is a fraud.
Timely advice from Mr Russell.
It also is a widely held opinion outside Western academia that the science of climatology can be likened to the science of ancient astrology.
“widely held opinion outside Western academia that the science of climatology can be likened to the science of ancient astrology.”
So you’re saying that statement is more likely foolish than sensible?
I must say Waggy, i think I agree with you for a change!
Most of the people in the world, living in places like Brazil, Russia, India and China, stopped listening long ago to the 1984 version of the English language that is spoken today by Leftists in America.
And that’s more foolish than sensible?
The Left’s continued denigration of real science and thoughtful scientists and common sense working citizens is an in-your-face reminder of how much the Left’s real agenda is motivated by their hatred of Americanism and to that end there is not much they will not do to destroy the culture.
I must say that’s a very fetching tin-foil hat.
Michael
I’d have to disagree with what you consider the “widely held opinion” (that “climate science is a fraud”).
There are certainly some “fraudsters” in the climate field (as there are in many other fields) and it’s true that a poll in the USA showed that, after the Climategate revelations, close to 70% of the public thought climate scientists fudged the data, but I believe there are some honest climate scientists out there and certainly the science, itself, is not a fraud..
It’s unfortunate that the IPCC forced “consensus” process has led to this loss of public trust – but I would not condemn all of “climate science” because of a corrupted political process led by IPCC and a handful of overeager bad eggs.
Would you?
Max
.
‘forced consensus’ dosn’t acutally mean anything, as far as I can tell.
Michael
“Forced consensus?”
When papers and findings, which are not in agreement with the “consensus” are systematically ignored and “gray literature” supporting the “consensus” is embraced and included in summary reports, then there is some “forcing” to defend the “consensus”.
Wouldn’t you agree?
For examples in IPCC’s AR4 report see:
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc
Max
It’s pretty warm down under right now. The Australian weather bureau has had to add a new colour contour to their maps recently: ” deep purple and pink — to mark out areas experiencing peaks above 122 deg F (50 degC)”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9787084/Australian-weather-bureau-introduces-new-colours-for-heatwave.html
‘Clicking on the prediction for 5pm AEDT next Monday, a Tasmania-sized deep purple opens up over South Australia – implying 50 degrees or above.
Aaron Coutts-Smith, the bureau’s NSW head of climate monitoring, though, cautioned that the 50-degree reading is the result of just one of the bureau’s models. “The indications are, from the South Australian office, that we are not looking at getting any where near that (50 degree level).”‘
At least try to understand the difference bewteeen models and reality.
tempterrain
You mention the current heat wave and wildfire problem in Tasmania and southeastern Australia.
The topic here is improving weather forecasts for the developing world.
I don’t think you’d consider Australia part of the “developing world”, but do you think there could have been better forecasts and early warning systems for this problem and, if so, what specifically could have been done that wasn’t?
Max
PS This is NOT a trick question.
I addressed this somewhat earlier. No one is dead yet in these bushfires – knock on wood.
We have a national condition classification system established following the disasterous 2009 fires. These are still too close to us for anyone to take it lightly. http://www.fire.tas.gov.au/Show?pageId=colFireDangerRatings
A million people were texted Tuesday morning in southern NSW. This triggers individual bushfire preparedness plans. Everyone in rural Australia is encouraged to have a written bush fire plan – and are reminded again and again in community service announcements. There is a network of indentified fire refuges across the country.
There are hundreds of thousands of volunteer firefighters. They are trained, organised and well equiped. For example – the leader of the opposition has temporarily stepped down from his job and is driving a fire truck. It seems something that is very Australian.
God willing – it will all be enough.
Robert Ellison,
You write “At least try to understand the difference bewteeen models and reality.” and temperatures are “not looking at getting anywhere near that (50 degree level)”?
The reality is that very high temperatures have recently been recorded in Australia. Marree in SA last week reached 48.4 °C
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs43b.pdf
Are you saying 48.4°C is nowhere near 50 °C ?
Max,
Australia is a developing country. It’s changed a lot in the last few decades. Weather forecasts are much more accurate than they were too. But whether better forecasts, though useful, would have saved towns from being destroyed in the last week is very doubtful.
The peak temperature in Australia is still for ‘Oodnadatta, South Australia 50.7 C (123.3 F) on the 2nd January, 1960.’
Peaks at specific places might be very high but the averages get less the broader the geographaphical coverge.
You still mistook models for reality and now attempt to distract by misrepresenting me – and your implication was clearly that these were unprecedented conditions on the ground.
I never said that real temperatures were nowhere near the models. I merely quoted the modeller from the BOM. I would suggest that good faith would involve owning up to error on your part – or simply moving on – rather than compounding the error.
Australia is a developing country? Seriously – forecasts are as accurate as anywhere in the world and the intention is to save lives rather than property. Stopping either a flood or a fire is very difficult – particularly in ‘catastrosphic’ conditions. The intention is usually to move out of harms way.
Robert I Ellison | January 10, 2013 at 1:53 am said: ”The peak temperature in Australia is still for ‘Oodnadatta, South Australia 50.7 C (123.3 F) on the 2nd January, 1960′.’
AND YOU ARE PROUD OF IT, SOD!!! Present hot temp is; because of the dry heat created in the desert, in the tropics, inland!!! Not because is too much CO2 around Detroit, Stuttgart and Beijing; BUT, because is not enough H2O inland, to prevent dry heat creation / to destroy some of the dry heat created on those places for the previous 11months… YOU CAL YOURSELF ”CHIEF CLIMATOLOGIST?..IDIOT!!!!!
Green senator Brown’s ”water Embargo on Australia” since 82.- no saving extra storm-water, to improve the climate, on the driest continent – instead repossessing farmer’s water – to drain into the estuary, during storms => to increase even more dry heat creation -> to increase vacuuming the moisture from the vegetation in the coastal areas and to prepare it for bigger and bigger bushfires. Chief is an ARSONIST!!!
because in the 60-70 was increased irritation and built few dams => improved the climate; WHERE THE BIG VOTE IS – now the extra dry heat produced in the tropics is regrouping and retaliating. you are chief hydrologist… .or. Bob Brown’s left testicle, is much more appropriate. shame, shame, shame!!! Look at the damages, house, properties incinerated / domestic and protected wildlife incinerated… because con like you are presenting that CO2 controls the climate, instead of H2O. D/H traitors like you should be put on a witness stand, under oath and asked 100 questions by me
“increased irritation” indeed.
Robert I Ellison | January 10, 2013 at 1:53 am | The peak temperature in Australia is still for ‘Oodnadatta, South Australia 50.7 C (123.3 F) on the 2nd January, 1960.’
Which perhaps was UHI driven as at an airport?
It looks like peak temperatures in Australia have actually declined from the highs recorded in the first half of the 19th C. From a discussion on Charles Sturt, Jo Nova writes:
===================
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/charles-sturts-time-so-hot-that-thermometers-exploded-was-australias-hottest-day-in-1828-53-9c/
“PROLONGED DROUGHT“ AND “CHANGES OF CLIMATE“.
These Australian headlines from the 1800′s above describe extremes the early colonists faced. At the time the European explorers who were instructed and equipped to map the country and record the climate were frustrated by the only constant …change.
The heat was extreme – often hotter than 127F!
Like the other explorers Sturt was asked to record everything and in detail:
….
For more info about the water levels at Buddah lake click here.
Sturt seems to have been at Buddah lake early to mid Dec 1828 and in case you missed that temperature: that’s 129 degrees or 53.9 °C.
His thermometer gave a temperature in the shade 0.8 degrees °C hotter than the recently attacked Australian record at Cloncurry QLD from the 16th Jan 1889. It is far hotter than the temperature recorded during the strongest solar cycle of last century, 50.7 degrees °C on the 2nd of January 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport S.A.
He was not alone in recording 129 degrees Sir Thomas Mitchell also recorded 129 F during another expedition at the Bogan river. In his words:
================
Jo Nova gives a quote from Sturt in which he describes that his graduated to 127°F thermometer exploded
127.4°F is 53°C
C F
43 109.4
50 122
51 123.8
55 131
56 132.2
60 140
70 158
(http://www.asknumbers.com/CelsiusToFahrenheitConversion.aspx)
55°C in the shade, recorded by one of the explorers tasked with making accurate records and they were conscious that these were extraordinary.., Jo notes:
So how did the temperature go from these highs recorded in the first half of the 19th century and showing a period of consistently high temperatures?
And, these were recorded by people dedicated to giving accurate information, why are these records ignored today?
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/charles-sturts-time-so-hot-that-thermometers-exploded-was-australias-hottest-day-in-1828-53-9c/
Poor buggers, lugging Stevenson screens around with them…..
Where do you go from pink and purple?
Next they’ll add a legend saying “here, there be dragons.”
The UN body, WHO, managed to make the transition from simply politicizing on health to actually doing something useful — running vaccination programs, tracking epidemics, etc.
Maybe the WMO could do the same for weather.
The UN should move to these areas of great need. The UN cannot do anything for the Third and Developing world from New York–just a small meeting room in the US is all they need: we don’t need the UN to monitor voting and what money the US gets is from China the UN. Move the UN to Africa and then maybe they can do something and I will be among the first to waive farewell and godspeed.
Um…..are you for real??
UN chose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to serve on the UN Human Rights council. Think how much more anti-American they can be elsewhere. It’s time to set the UN free and let them be where they’re most needed. That would be anywhere other than in the US. We’ve got enough home-grown useful idiots of Marx and Lenin.
Kip Hansen
The best thing WHO has done for human health since its existence is to quietly lift the ban on DDT.
Max
Thought fer Today:
‘Should yer need an intelligence test ter get
a guvuhmint job?’
Beth
Ah thunk long ‘n hard ’bout yore kweshtun on in-telly-gents test te do gummint work.
Only gummint folks Ah ever see round heer are revenooers, ‘n they ain’t too bright, so Ah reckon there ain’t no test, ‘less its a stoopid test.
How is it down yonder where yew live?
Max
Times are tough and it may be hard to explain to our bosses in China why we shouldn’t cut the budget for the government scientists in the USDA who measure ketchup flow rates.
Peter Davies 9/1/13 @6.17 pm:
PETER, puleez, I have NO problem in enunciating ‘something.’
Tho’ I will admit I have a problem with some other things …)
Beth
In their adoption of AGW theory Western schoolteachers abandoned the human realm for the cosmic and abandoned humanity for liberal fascism.
Max,
I reckon it’s like this …It ain’t an ishoo in guvuhmint imploymint
whether yer too bright or not because if yer have publick service
tenyore, makin’ miss takes don’t really matter.
Beth
PS: Ahem, Max, yew spelt ‘guvuhmint’ wrong, It’s got a ‘ v ‘ in it.
I thought it was gubmint.
Beth
Ain’t it the trooth? In guvuhmint (got that spellin rite this time) im-ploy-mint Ah reckon yew kin keep frum gettin blamed fer makin miss takes by doin nuthin.
Max
OMG Jim D, cain’t any one around here spell?
Beth
Stefan Stefan CALM DOWN!!!!!!!!!!
Beth
Climate Etc, WUWT, Neven’s Sea Ice Blog, and even Climate Central all are moribund this week …
… but the Onion is killing it!
Good stuff!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffffee&fg=ff0088&s=1&c=20201002)
as science fiction perhaps
Fan
The national average temperature on that day was 40C. Most individual Australian records are not very old. The ‘average’ Australian temperature itself is a pretty recent innovation and is derived from a non constant selection of sites that now also include the hotter interior rather than the cooler coastal cities where records were first kept.
Here are the records from BOM; Note the hottest day;
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/extreme/records.shtml
The new Average record is 0.15C above that set in 1972 (taken from different stations)
By the way you do know that ‘The Onion’ is satire and that the first link didn’t go there but back to Climate Etc?
tonyb
There is a reference climate station network – intended to provide a consistent base of long term, high quality records and to contribute not just to a national but global network. Still – this is unlikely to be acceptably accurate earlier than the 1950’s.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
Here is Oodnadatta showing the influence of UHI – yeah right. Do they know where Oodnadatta is?
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/map/stations/017043.shtml
The conditions last week seem hardly unprecedented.
One of the issues with fire is that Australian ecologies are fire dependent. The outcomes of many thousands of years of firestick farming. Fire is unavoidable – and ecologically essential – but we could do a lot more to manage risk by much more cool season burning.
One doesn’t have to go to th Onion for satire, it’s available at government met offices – here’s BOM’s contribution after its first attempt at satire was threatened with an audit:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/boms-new-data-set-acorn-so-bad-it-should-be-withdrawn-954-min-temps-larger-than-the-max/
Did you catch that?
“BOMs new data set, ACORN, so bad it should be withdrawn (954 min temps larger than the max!)”
CRU, funded by big oil and the nuclear industry was created to corrupt temperature records right at the beginning of the scam to set the scene for the endless “hottest day on record” BS we’ve been inundated with. Besides the internal fiddling with figures at CRU where they now say they have lost the orginal raw data, Salinger went to New Zealand and fixed the records comply with this science fraud. BOM records were also corrupted.
Sturt’s, and others, recordings are real history of temperatures in Australia, collected by people whose only agenda was to be as accurate as they could be. The days of scientists with integrity. Now, as Delingpole so aptly puts it, we have the “climate fool gang” in their place.
In Britain the Met Office has been a bad joke for a long time, forcasting by the models predicting rampant global warming. These people are at best useless at and ignorant of their subject..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2259942/The-crazy-climate-change-obsession-thats-Met-Office-menace.html
“Without fanfare — apparently in the desperate hope no one would notice — it has finally conceded what other scientists have known for ages: there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening.
..
“For two decades the Met Office has acted as Britain’s foremost cheerleader for climate change alarmism. In 2007, its Hadley Centre for climate change research produced a briefing document for the Government claiming its state-of-the-art computer models left no doubt: man-made global warming was a very real threat which needed to be addressed urgently by policy-makers.
‘The Met Office Hadley Centre has the highest concentration of outstanding people who do outstanding work, spanning the breadth of modelling, attribution, and date analysis, of anywhere in the world,’ claimed an expert from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in the document.
“Many in the Government were impressed for, a year later, the 2008 Climate Change Act was passed by an overwhelming majority.
The act has been described by veteran journalist Christopher Booker as the most expensive legislation in history, committing the government to as much as £734 billion (£18.3 billion a year for the next 40 years) in extra spending to ‘decarbonise’ the economy.
It is also one of the reasons why our countryside is being ruined by ugly, noisy wind turbines.
..
“The Met Office has subscribed to this sort of stance since at least 1990, when it became politicised under its then director John Houghton — the fanatical believer in the great global warming religion, who was also responsible for setting up the IPCC.
Under Houghton’s stewardship, it became an article of faith that not only was man-made global warming real and dangerous, but that it was the primary job of the Met Office to spread the alarmist gospel.
Dr Whitehouse notes that this is a sad betrayal of the Met Office’s traditional role: ‘When it comes to four or five-day weather forecasting, the Met Office is the best in the world,’ he says. ‘The tragedy is that, for the most part, the Met Office thinks weather forecasting is beneath it. Climate change is more glamorous — and brings in more money.’
And the Met Office’s obsession with climate change has wreaked havoc with its medium to long-term forecasting. That infamous ‘barbecue summer’ and its inability to foresee last November’s floods were the result of the same major flaw in its system: its computer models are all programmed on the assumption that as global CO2 levels increase, so will global warming.
This means they’re continually predicting warmer weather, in contradiction of all the real world evidence.
For two decades, the Met Office has abused its position of trust, authority and taxpayer-funded privilege to promote green ideology at the expense of scientific integrity.
Never mind the mere £200 million we pay a year to fund the Met Office’s dodgy, Mystic Meg prognostications: the real bill for its incompetence runs into the billions. ”
This is decades of science fraud enriching cronies at the expense of the taxpayers.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/09/uk-rainfall-2012-the-report-the-met-office-should-have-produced/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100194951/global-warming-not-a-snowballs-chance-in-hell/
As temperatures plunge in the Norther Hemisphere Americans prepare for a disastrous climate disaster known as winter. News at 11.
The paradoxical problem of weather forecasting say with ECMWF is that the error has doubled as models have become more complex, eg Nicolis and Nicolis 2009
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/File:Butterfly_Fig1.png
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Butterfly_effect
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