by Judith Curry
A new article in the Economist responds to the recent article in The New Republic, discussing the policy implications of the ‘pause.’
The Economist has a new article on the ‘pause’, entitled A cooling consensus, that responds to the recent article by Nate Cohn of the New Republic. Excerpts from the new article in the Economist:
Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.
Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that “we cannot afford to wait”. More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.
Of course, if the consensus climate models turn out to be falsified just a few years later, average temperature having remained at levels not even admitted to be have been physically possible, the authority of consensus will have been exposed as rather weak. The authority of expert consensus obviously strengthens as the quality of expertise improves, which is why it’s quite sensible, as matter of science-based policy-making, to wait for a callow science to improve before taking grand measures on the basis of it’s predictions.
As a rule, climate scientists were previously very confident that the planet would be warmer than it is by now, and no one knows for sure why it isn’t. This isn’t a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus.
But [Cohn’s] attempt to minimise the political relevance of [the pause] is unconvincing. He writes:
But the “consensus” never extended to the intricacies of the climate system, just the core belief that additional greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet.
If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived. As it has been presented to the public, the scientific consensus extended precisely to that which is now seems to be in question: the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all.
We have not been awash in arguments for adaptation precisely because the consensus pertained to now-troubled estimates of climate sensitivity. The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the range of warming we can expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal.
JC comment: Houston’s article hits the nail on the head re the policy implications of the pause for policy and for the consensus. This statement struck me in particular:
Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all.
This statement reflects the folly of the ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach of climate change policy making, and danger of a manufactured consensus on climate change to the healthy evolution of climate science. We’ve lost decades in climate science by failing to pay adequate attention to natural climate variability. By failing to pay adequate attention to uncertainty and natural climate variability, the climate community is facing the following prospect:
If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal.
The Whole Story of Climate is a good summary of “natural climate variability” and also documents uncertainties in the geological record — climatewholestory.com.
About the only thing that is “very likely” when it comes to the pseudo-science underlying all AGW theory is that the UN can be expected to do its very best to ignore up-to-date, clear and convincing, statistically significant, scientifically relevant evidence about global warming. That makes pretty much everything printed after 2005 forbidden knowledge when if fails to support the secular, socialist agenda of taking over the economy.
Looks like somebody pissed in David Appell’s Wheaties. :-)
Does he understand that all real scientists are skeptical, that warming before 1940 accounts for 70% of the warming that took place after the Little Ice Age ended in 1850 and that there essentially has been no global warming in the US since the 1940s.except for perhaps that which has been teased out out of the temperature records is in the coldest and most inhospitable regions on Earth, such as in the dry air of the Arctic or Siberia where going from a -50 °C to a -40 °C at one small spot on the globe is extrapolated across tens of thousands of miles and then branded as global warming?
He reminds me of the secretaries in ‘Downfall’, they were not the architects of the madness, they just assisted in the madness.
Tell us — how much of 20th century warming is due to “natural variability?” Give a number. Give your proof.
A number? Bah, you are naive.
If, a la Muller, you attribute all of the temp rise since the LIA to anthroGHGs, then none, but that would imply a sensitivity high enough that those anthroGHGs have already averted a cooling catastrophe.
If you look at the same slopes of the three temperature rises in the last century and a half, then all.
So pick a number between 0 and 100 percent and you justify your number.
===========
JC: I think we should study natural variability.
DA: How much of 20th century warming is due to natural variability? Give a number. Give your proof.
Hopeless.
Kim: GIve a number.
Clearly you can’t.
Your claim is all bluster, and nothing more.
Sorry David, calling for a number is ignorant bluster. I’d be inclined closer to 100% than 0%, but then there is Arrhenius.
====================
David Appell
Agree with our hostess that we should clear up the many uncertainties surrounding “natural variability” (and forcing).
UK Met Office has told us that “natural variability” is a primary cause for the current pause in warming despite unabated GHG emissions and atmospheric concentrations reaching record levels.
We know that 1998, the warmest year of the 20th C, was largely caused by a very strong El Niño.
There were many El Niños during the 1980s and 1990s and NOAA has even estimated the warming each of these has caused.
So the same “natural variability” that is now overwhelming the GH effect in its negative (or cooling phase) could well have been a major cause of the late 20th C warming (in its cooling phase).
Plus there are other cyclical natural factors beside ENSO.
And I’d agree that it would be nice to clear this up.
Don’t you?
Max
David Appell | June 20, 2013 at 8:52 pm said: ”Tell us — how much of 20th century warming is due to “natural variability?”
There wasn’t any ”REAL” GLOBAL warming in the 20th century
BUT throughout the century was predicted 4 times global warmings / three times ice age is around the corner AND one ”Nuclear Winter for year 2000, because of CO2 dimming effect.
So, you should figure out for yourself; where to shove-up your loaded question!!!
kim: give a number, and justify it.
I’m not interested in your opinion, but in your science.
Max: I have cleared all this up, in my own article:
W[h]ither Global Warming? Has It Slowed Down?
David Appell — May 7, 2013
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/wither-global-warming-has-it-slowed-down/
David just give us your proof of how much warming is anthropogenic and we can just subtract that from 100%.
Cool how it works that way with dichotomies, huh?
There wasn’t any ”REAL” GLOBAL warming in the 20th century
Ice doesn’t melt, and the seas don’t rise, for no reason at all.
Your denial is laughable.
I gave two numbers, 0 and 100% each justified by climate scientists, Phil Jones and Richard Muller. So the best I can do is give you my long considered opinion: The IPCC has exaggerated, at their peril.
===============
WAAA WAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
The ocean ate my global warming!
ROFLMAO
David Appell | June 20, 2013 at 8:52 pm | Reply
Tell us — how much of 20th century warming is due to “natural variability?” Give a number. Give your proof.
______
If you want answers, don’t ask for proof.
Did you reject the Marcott reconstruction based up sea level reconstructions or do you have a reconstruction that shows a 6000 year decline?
I don’t know how much of the warming of the 20th century was natural. I only know that this reconstruction of gulf stream transport indicates an approximately 10% increase
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/fig_tab/ncomms1901_F5.html
And this model states a 15% increase in OHT can cause a 2C global temperature increase
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/91JD00009/abstract
Care to venture a guess on how much warming it may have caused?
It has been done a number of ways – eliminating ENSO, correlating the AMO with CET, averaging over longer periods,
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ensosubtractedfromtemperaturetrend.gif.html?sort=3&o=98
Kyle Swanson did it by eliminating ENSO dragon-kings in 1976/77 and 1998/99.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/rc_fig1_zpsf24786ae.jpg.html
The residual is about 0.1 degrees C/decade. Something like 40% of 20th Century warming as natural.
But if you look at satellites you have to wonder.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandLaken2013_zps73c516f9.png.html?sort=3&o=7
At any rate – warming seems unlikely for a decade or three yet. This is not trendology but solid oceanographic science that has been evident for a decade or more.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
Chief, those are short term oscillations lasting about 60 years. I am familiar with the papers discussing those. Here I am talking about a long term trend in OHT starting at about the 1750 time frame and ending in the last half of the 20th century. In other words, it is possible that it constitutes a major portion of the residual trend.
Rather irrational post. Please give your number, and your proof. Do you think that more than 0% of 20th century warming is due to natural variability? If so, how much, and what is your proof? If the answer, in your opinion, is 0%, what is your proof?
All of it, man is nature too. Joking aside, all of it is nonanthropogenic. No proof, sorry.
To repeat, Occam, it would be 100% per the identical rates of temperature rise three times in the last century and a half, as admitted by scientist Phil Jones, and it would be 0% per the scientist Richard Muller who attributes all of the temperature rise since the LIA to AnthroGHGs.
So, like with David, I’ll ask you to pick a number and justify it. It is clear that the IPCC’s number cannot be justified.
==============
At least 50%is possible, David Appell – since it killed the warming.
We know that Overpeck said Natural variability was totally dominated.
You checked all those possibles out over a decade ago, remember?
Proof: An ancient portage… think about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos
repetition, repetition…
Hope, this will help.
David,
Give us the number for the amount from human activity. Subtraction will provide you with a number.
What part of study the issue for another ten years do you not understand? This is they way science works. Figure out what you know and don’t know before you scream catastrophe.
Oh, sorry, Occam. This morning I thought you were talking to me instead of to David Appel.
===========
David Appell | June 20, 2013 at 8:52 pm | Reply
“Tell us — how much of 20th century warming is due to “natural variability?” Give a number. Give your proof.”
Sorry, but couldn’t find it in the thermometer record. :(
“This created such panic that the supporters of the IPCC set up an alternative facility to monitor the results at Remote Sensing Systems under the aegis of NASA and in the capable hands of Frank Wentz, an IPCC supporter. It was confidently believed that the “errors” of Christy and Spencer would soon be removed. To their profound disappointment this has not happened, The RSS version of the Lower Troposphere global temperature anomaly record is essentially the same as that still provided by the University of Huntsville. It is also almost the same as the measurements made by radiosonde balloons over the same period”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/21/nzclimate-truth-newsletter-no-313/
thisisnotgoodtogo | June 21, 2013 at 7:02 am |
“At least 50%is possible, David Appell – since it killed the warming.”
Best answer so far IMO. But we don’t know how long it killed it for yet. Which is why I advocate waiting until warming resumes before leaping to any more conclusions. If it resumes, that is.
David,
My attempt is to define it so that we can’t be wrong, but Appell SHOULD BE uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable about what? That NV may now be going against AGW,, leading to a apparent pause?
If this were 1880 (or 1970), not a single so-called skeptic would have believed that AGW + some NV would lead to 0.8 (or 0.6) C of warming by 2000.
David Appell said
“Uncomfortable about what? That NV may now be going against AGW,, leading to a apparent pause?”
Precisely. Your friends said it was not possible. Here’s Leading Edge Researcher Jonathan Overpeck. You know Jonathan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCVfQ-_MQXc
Natural Variation has been dominated. They checked out all the NV factors more than a decade ago, and they got their arms ’round it, and all those things…the sun…just impossible.
Maybe Jonathan is the only one of your friends who said those things.
But it still should make you uncomfortable that the skeptics were so badly misled by him.
And that he was misleading himself, to be sure.
And, Mr Appell, you might think of the warming as apparent, not just the pause.
“sides of the same coin” and all, don’t you know?
David Appell said
“If this were 1880 (or 1970), not a single so-called skeptic would have believed that AGW + some NV would lead to 0.8 (or 0.6) C of warming by 2000.”
That’s why I like to be right. However, your assertion will remain as unsupported as it is now, IMO, so it’s difficult to address. Climate Skeptics in 1880, and all – worried that scientific certainty would certainly be unwarranted and that you’ve misled the public time and again. It’s all in your head.
I just like to be right about you and your friends.
Thanks for all you’ve done for us over the years!
Mr Appell,
I think I should emphasize that your comment “apparent pause” really is useful in discussion.
When you say something about the warming, as you just did, try it with your modifier on that. From that we say , we see only “apparent” warming, and of course, this is consistent word usage – contrasting with your inconsistent word usage.
We see that the apparent warming is not the “real” warming, which could be reduced by half, using your convention.
Mistaken impressions about this apparent warming, could have been made plain, and your friends wouldn’t have made their claims, either.
Aaaand…you wouldn’t have implicitly made the claim just now.
But that was never a goal, was it?
David Appell
said things that open up a mind:
“Uncomfortable about what? That NV may now be going against AGW,, leading to a apparent pause? ”
“May”?
The alternative is an abortion of your CO2 lovechild.
Take yer pick, David Appell, but be sure to pick right.
thisisnotgoodtogo wrote:
“At least 50%is possible, David Appell – since it killed the warming.”
It hasn’t killed anything. The world has been warming since 1930. It remains about 0.8 C warmer than then, with most of the trapped heat going into the oceans — larger amounts lately.
As long as the oceans warm, as ice melts, as sea level rises, then the imbalance created by manmade GHGs carries little doubt.
David Appell said this:
” thisisnotgoodtogo wrote:
“At least 50%is possible, David Appell – since it killed the warming.”
It hasn’t killed anything. The world has been warming since 1930. It remains about 0.8 C warmer than then, with most of the trapped heat going into the oceans — larger amounts lately.
As long as the oceans warm, as ice melts, as sea level rises, then the imbalance created by manmade GHGs carries little doubt.’
David, remember that we were discussing the pause. You said previously:
“NV may now be going against AGW,, leading to a apparent pause?”
So that is not talking about from 1930, with AGW totally dominating all NV, is it ?
Either way you have the “killing” right in your own words, whatever pe you might try to move into now.
“going against AGW and producing non warming” as seen by global temperatures, is just fine to use, David!
The oceans rise and ice melt and everything else is not temperature trend, which is what is under discussion at the moment.
Please return to your inquiry about how much from NV. That’s what we’re discussing. We can’t discuss all and everything here and now.
Thank you
David Appell said
“The world has been warming”
…but for pauses it’s only “apparent” pauses. When it’s warming, it’s not “apparent”, it’s “real”. All of it.
David Appell,
I’m just trying to get some consistency in your terms.
If “apparent” means measured and seen in the measurements we are looking at, then it’s a good term to use consistently, isn’t that right?
So we have apparent pauses and apparent warming episodes.
Not apparent pauses and real warming episodes.
Consistency in word usage, please.
“At least 50%is possible, David Appell – since it killed the warming.”
David replied:
“It hasn’t killed anything. The world has been warming since 1930. It remains about 0.8 C warmer than then, with most of the trapped heat going into the oceans — larger amounts lately.”
I want to make clear, David Appell, that when cornered you changed the topic from temperature to the other items.
And that’s really all you can do at his point, isn’t it?
The IPCC AR5 is about to be released. Surely the time has come to revisit
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-7.html
and see whether the certainties that the IPCC wrote in the SPMs to the AR4 are, in fact valid. With The Pause piling uncertainty upon uncertainty, I would love to see a full discussion of this part of the AR4. I cannot see that there is any scientific basis to the probabilities assigned by the IPCC. They all seem to be just wishful thinking.
Jim Cripwell
Agree with you that this part of AR4 needs a complete re-write in view of the new evidence that has presented itself since it was written.
The failed projection of 0.2C warming per decade (plus what it means for longer term projections made in AR4) and the recent observation-based studies on 2xCO2 temperature response should also be addressed.
But will they be?
Max
Where exactly did the IPCC say surface temperature would rise 0.2 C each and every decade?
In which AR was that?
Yer a science righter, Appell? Is it past the kid’s bedtime who does your research for you? This took me 10 seconds to find. Google ipcc warming per decade. It’s the top hit.
Answer: AR4
Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis
Projections of Future Changes in Climate
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
Step up your game or go back to the junior league where you belong.
Bah, ‘each and every’ is the weasel. Watch Judy call the weasel a sucker above.
============
er, below.
======
They said the next two decades. They said it in 2007. Do the math. That’s each and every decade through 2027.
David Appell
David Springer has already cited the specific IPCC projection of 0.2C warming per decade for the next two decades.
This followed a similar prognosis in the earlier TAR report of warming between 0.15C and 0.3C per decade.
Problem is, it just didn’t work out that way, did it?
Max
You see David, it is hopeless,
You ask them for a cite that says “x” and they gleefully produce a cite that says “y” which is not “x”
But I’ll continue to harp on the importance of the word “about” and suggest that they read the technical parts of AR4 and not just the summary.
About that .2C SPM thingy.
These models http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/ are not the same as these models http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-2.html#table-8-1
Troubled times in the skeptical kingdom, I’m afraid.
Yes, it’s troubling. We’re beginning to be taken seriously. I’m not sure I can handle that.
===========
Bob Droege……
Please show the differences in the results of the two sets of models. Did Spencer pick a set of models that exaggerated the warming projections so that he could shoot them down? Or do both model sets predict about the same amount of warming, in which case you are just hand waiving?
Mike Alexander,
I would like to point out that Dr. Spenser did not take a representative sample of the models and compare it to a representative sample of the temperature data set.
Matching the trend lines to the same point in 1979 rather than matching the respective baselines makes the comparison look worse.
Bob Dreoge
You do understand he is using models AND actual observations of a very specific metric, that of tropical tropospheric temperatures. Your choice of models you think he should be using, considering he is talking about one specific aspect of temp predictions, would never pass muster because the real world observations he is using covers a specific region of the atmosphere, but your covers a much wider spectrum / region. Your conjecture would be equally invalid if he was comparing, say, the 200 year modeled projections of the temperature of Texas with the observed temp recorded in Texas, and you say NO, you have to use the modeling from the entire North American continent.
I’d wonder why he would use the AR4 list rather then the more up to date CMIP models.
Tendentious and desperate about covers it.
Quote, as our hostess has highlighted, “Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all.”
Isn’t this just what I, and the rest of us deniers have been saying for years? Yes, in all likelihood, adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global temperatures to rise, but no-one has the slightest idea of how great this rise is. It could be completely negligible, and until we have an actual MEASUREMENT, we will never be able to say how big the rise is.
It has always been about the ‘c’ in cAGW; for not buying catastrophe were have been called deniers.
“It could be completely negligible, and until we have an actual MEASUREMENT, we will never be able to say how big the rise is.”
Well that’s not true, we can say the chance of it being negligible is itself negligible.
lolwot, you write “Well that’s not true, we can say the chance of it being negligible is itself negligible.”
I know it is no use asking for a reference; there are dozens of peer reviewed references which support your statement. The problem is that ALL of them rely on hypothetical, meaningless estimations. There is not a single reference that you can produce which supports your statement on the basis of empirical, measured data.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 s3.4.4.1
In summary – if ‘real’ the impact of CO2 on recent warming is minor at best. Whoops.
@lolwot…
You can say all sorts of things. The fact is, the “authorities” you’re using for your statement have a chance of being very wrong: a chance that isn’t “negligible“.
lolwot,
“the chance of it being negligible is itself negligible” is not exactly a solid hook to hang policy on.
See this is why skeptics are unreasonable. You all want to pretend that zero warming from rising CO2 is a credible possibility.
Maybe it’s just that me and the scientists have the ability to weigh up evidence (?)
You all?
=====
Most of them don’t seem to (to me) but I do. Or rather, assuming that “climate sensitivity” actually represents a real-world object, I would say that the low end of the tail of the PDF, based on what we actually know, should cross into negative ranges.
lolwot, you write “Maybe it’s just that me and the scientists have the ability to weigh up evidence (?)”
I am sure you are correct. However, you are looking at the wrong evidence. You are looking at numbers based on hypothetical, meaningless estimations. I ONLY rely on empirical data. That is the difference.
However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in midlatitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic oscillation. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content
in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.
I’d suggest that cooling in response to warming is indeed possible. Either through ice sheets growing with the right insolation conditions or through increased melt and a slowdown of thermohaline circulation.
lolwot,
I for one have never stated I believe zero warming from increased CO2 concentrations is a credible position.
Until we actually understand how climate works, I consider it reasonable to assume the 1C per doubling of CO2, all other things being equal.
That seems unreasonable to you because you’ve convinced yourself that GCM’s and climate scientists perform like a Formula I race car when it comes to projecting future temperatures.
lolwot
Whodat “you all” (who believe that 2xCO2 warming = 0)?
Most of the skeptics here seem to agree that there could be some warming from added GHGs, including CO2, but (like Lindzen, Spencer, Christy et al.) they have concluded based on the data at hand that it will very likely be minor and not harmful on balance to humanity.
As a result, there is no need for “immediate action”, until all the many uncertainties can be cleared up.
Seems to be the tone of the lead article, as well.
Have I got that wrong?
Max
In what way does the study of paleoclimates not give an estimate of climate sensitivity?
Paleoclimate hints at sensitivity but is not robust enough to trust on its own.
Dang, Tom, I wuz gonna ask him for a measurement.
========
Paleoclimate hints at sensitivity but is not robust enough to trust on its own.
Who here would judge the Medievel Warm Period based solely on what happened from 998 A.D. to 1013 A.D.?
Or does the MWP look more involved than those 15 short, arbitrary years?
1C warming per doubling of CO2 is not negliable. It’s more than the total warming of the 20th century. It’s a highly significant amount of warming.
Why then are skeptics who accept 1C warming per doubling of CO2 defending skeptics who claim warming from CO2 is negliable?
Paleo climate didn’t have CO2 injected into the atmosphere by people. It rose naturally and almost certainly simply from outgassing of a warming ocean. It’s therefore not really comparable to the modern period.
Glad you asked.
CO2 is CO2, regardless of how it gets into the atmosphere and ocean.
Jeez, the level of scientific understanding here is very low. No wonder there is so much bluster.
The level of understanding is actually impressively high, but so is the level of speculation. This is the state of the science personified.
It suggests that CO2 is a symptom, not a cause, of global warming. There were no SUVs in the previous interglacial period yet it got warmer than the Holocene. Sea level in the previous interglacial peaked 9 meters higher that it reached so far in the Holocene. Again no SUVs were around 100,000 years ago. Logic is not your strong suit, Appell.
David,
You fail to consider the paleo events where CO2 increased in the atmosphere due to extensive and long term volcanic eruptions.
David, you see that David’s understanding is rather weak in this area.
lolwot,
Why do you continue to make claims that just are not true.
First you claim that all skeptics “want to pretend that zero warming from rising CO2 is a credible possibility.”
Then you claim that “skeptics who accept 1C warming per doubling of CO2 defend(ing) skeptics who claim warming from CO2 is negliable?”
It is garbage.
Oh, regarding your statement that 1C is more than the increase in the 20th century. Lack of comprehension is a terrible disability lolwot. The 1C figure is for a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm (i.e. before the start of the 20th century).
David Appell,
“Jeez, the level of scientific understanding here is very low. No wonder there is so much bluster.”
If true, one can’t claim your presence is raising it any.
“The 1C figure is for a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm (i.e. before the start of the 20th century).”
No it’s ANY doubling of CO2. How many doublings above 280 will there be? How high will CO2 go? add in the other gases, what have you got?
A number that dwarfs natural variability.
Bob Droege | June 21, 2013 at 10:00 am |
“You fail to consider the paleo events where CO2 increased in the atmosphere due to extensive and long term volcanic eruptions.”
I think you’re confusing volcanic aerosols with volcanic CO2. Point out the study showing CO2 rise due to volcanic eruptions anytime in the last two glacial cycles and I’ll be happy to consider it! Good luck.
David Appell said:
“….those 15 short, arbitrary years?”
Not arbitrary. It’s being taken from the latest date with data, going back.
It’s not arbitrary.
If we picked a span going from “X” to , say , 2005,. we’d be like Michael Mann on tour, his data ending but his claim ongoing.
We leave ourselves open. Not like you. You’re not conducting yourself in a manner consistent with good logic or science.
David Springer,
Why do you restrict to the last two glacial cycles? Is it because you know that volcanic events prior to that have resulted in CO2 increases and resultant increases in temperature and warmer climates.
David Springer wrote:
It suggests that CO2 is a symptom, not a cause, of global warming.
No it does not.
Unless you can explain why the modern temperature change of 0.8 C has lead to +120 ppmv CO2, while the 6-7 C from a glacial to an interglacial lead to about +100 ppmv CO2.
That immediately falsifies your hypothesis.
“If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived.”
Welcome to reality.
It will be very interesting to watch the mutual throwing under a bus competition as the sciency facade of climatology breaks down.
Will the modellers blame the paleo guys for exaggerated certainty or the CRU types for not adjusting recent temperatures up enough?
Or will the sacred shibboleth of ‘peer-review’ take a hit as inadequate and allowing weak papers through. Maybe it’ll be seen as the final proof in their demented minds of the Big Oil Funded Denier Conspiracy – for how could ‘climate scientists’ ever be incorrect?
Perhaps it really was Kev Trenberth – and he frightened the heat away?
and so on..the permutations for back-stabbing are endless.
I plan to buy shares in popcorn companies. ….
And maybe , just maybe, when the current generation have faded away, there has been a period of reflection and time enough for fresh blood to enter, there might just be a revivial of a true ‘science of climate’.
With observations and data at its heart – not theories and models. One that does actually check its work and keep sound records and publishes its methods and welcomes replication. – and does all the million and one other things to demonstrate their integrity that today’s ‘climatologists’ so conspicuously and arrogantly fail to do.
But I doubt the general public will ever take much notice. Like Roger Daltrey sang many years ago.. ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
+100
Latimer, you write “But I doubt the general public will ever take much notice.”
But will the learned scientific societies, led by the American Physical Society, The Royal Socidety, and The World Meteorological Organization, take any notice? That, surely, is the 64 trillion dollar question.
@Jim Cripwell
In the big scheme of things, the ‘learned societies’ can huff and puff as much as they like. But they don’t have control of the stuff that really matters – money. That control lies with the politicians.
And eventually and imperfectly they have to listen to what their voters say. It may take 20 years, but if the practical effect of any ‘global warming’ continues to be ‘none at all’ the voters will stop wanting to pay the enormous bills to guard against a non-existent risk.
‘Climate change’ is pretty much bottom of every poll about voters concerns already, and I suspect it is just momentum that keeps the train on the tracks right now. But day by day, prediction failure by prediction failure, business collapse by business collapse, scandal by scandal, the wheels are coming off.
From the height of warmist influence just before Copenhagen it’s been downhill all the way.
Latimer Alder,
Dead right. And here is some evidence, a UN poll ranking sixteen priorities puts action on climate change dead last: http://www.myworld2015.org/
Dead right on that statement too. Interest in climate change is now just 10% of what it was at the Copenhagen conference, and is now dying at an increasing rate (see the Activity chart here: http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?#activitytimeline )
Latimer Alder
Yep. It’s been downhill all the way.
And at an accelerating pace.
And the wheels are starting to wobble.
But the multibillion dollar CAGW big business still has lots of momentum, with all sorts of players lined up at the trough for a chunk of the taxpayer money before the trough runs dry.
Max
“It may take 20 years, but if the practical effect of any ‘global warming’ continues to be ‘none at all’”
Well it ISNT ‘none at all’ even now, and I seriously doubt it ever will be in the next 20 years. You are only deluding yourself.
How will you cope when it becomes obvious warming hasn’t stopped?
@lolwot
Perhaps you’d like to remind us all of what you consider to be recent practical effects of ‘global warming’
A theory that the big big big cold oceans have become a microdegree hotter in their hidden and unknowable depths doesn’t count as a ‘practical effect’.
But perhaps you can list all the things that you think ‘warming’ has done since the last time it manifested itself in the common usage of an increase in atmospheric temperature.
Which was about 15 years ago from memory…
Your belief that warming stopped 15 years ago is cute, but wrong.
Practical impacts include:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Peer-reviewed-impacts-of-global-warming.html
@lolwot
Surely you can do better than some old papers quoted by the manically mistitled ‘skeptical science’? Point us to some real things that have actually affected our day-to-day lives.
Very very very few people are going to shell out big chunks of moolah because some poor benighted grant-chasing climatologist published a paper in 2006 and got his mates to ‘approve’ it.
Or does the phrase ‘practical effect’ have no meaning in your academic cocoon? That the only reality that counts is what it says in the ‘pal-reviewed’ literature?
We need an honest cost/benefit calculation. The Stern Report is a farce, and look at the tragedy it has spawned.
===============
Endlessly repeating outright lies and motivated distortions does not make it so.
Why don’t you talk some science instead of boring us with this nonsense.
Oh that’s right – you are utterly clueless.
That was for Joshua – I’ll find the right spot.
It is prisoners dilemma; the ones who jump first get the biggest payback. However, don’t forget that a huge number of younger modelers will want chairs soon, they can go for either a ‘don’t rock the boat’ or ‘burn the house down’ strategy.
Boat is sinking, house falling down. They may just have to clear the ground and begin new construction.
=======================
Who wants to bet that Josh will be among those claiming it is Judith Curry’s fault for being on the bus?
Joshua is likely to hint that JC is driving the bus.
Her role has actually been more important…
I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
All along, I have said that I respect Judith’s work to better quantify uncertainty.
That doesn’t excuse her selective reasoning w/r/t the debate about the debate. Manifestations of that selective reasoning on her part is how she simultaneously/alternately:
(1) says she’s only interested in what the scientists have to say,
(2) praises the input of non-scientists (which, btw, I see nothing wrong with),
(3) dismisses what scientists have to say (when it is “skeptical” scientists being tribalists),
(4) dismisses what non-scientists have to say (when it is “skeptics” being tribalists,
(5) decries what scientists have to say (when it is “realists” being tribalists – nothing wrong with her doing that, IMO),
(6) decries what non-scientists have to say (when it is “realists” being tribalistic – nothing wrong with that, IMO).
(7) Recognizes that “consensus” can be problematic and should not be considered dispositive (nothing wrong that that) and lists some occasions when the “consensus” was wrong without putting them into perspective.
(8) Ignores the long list of times that the “consensus” has been right and ignores that it is only rational to consider prevalence of “expert” opinion to be relevant in evaluating probabilities
(9) Appeals to authority (when the “authority agrees with her).
(10) Considers respect for authority to be fallacious (when the “authority disagrees with her).
(11) Devalues the input of non-authorities for their lack of authority (when the non-authorities disagree with her).
(12) Fails to define “skeptic” and exploits the uncertainty in her terminology and/or actively uses the term in contradictory ways for partisan purposes.
(14) Criticizes the work of others when for failing to quantify and validate evidence/undertainty,
(13) Fails to quantify and/or validate the evidence/uncertainty w/r/t many of her assertions.
(14) Acknowledges the influence of phenomena such as confirmation bias (in the work of others).
(15) Fails to acknowledge or account for the influence of phenomena such as confirmation bias (in her work or the work of “skeptics.”)
Judith is not unique in any of those aspects. Such selective reasoning is ubiquitous in the debate – on both sides. Based on what we know about human reasoning, it is folly to pretend otherwise.
Heh. I really need to work on my math skills.
Endlessly repeating outright lies and motivated distortions does not make it so.
Why don’t you talk some science instead of boring us with this nonsense.
Oh that’s right – you are utterly clueless.
Josh,
You forgot the mommy, mommy.
Maybe if Joshua had all those flaws he’d be as wise as Judy.
============
Latimer I have a better prediction. The world will continue warming, but the climate scienitsts won’t be vindicated.
Instead climate skeptics will pretend they expected the warming all along.
“Warming stopped? No that was some other skeptics”
If you are suggesting the skeptics who post here are intellectually dishonest, I have long suspected that myself.
@Max_OK
‘If you are suggesting the skeptics who post here are intellectually dishonest, I have long suspected that myself.’
Any evidence for this charge? Are the sceptics the guys who refuse to publish data? Do they game the peer review system? Fake graphs? Obtain documents by deception? Refuse to publish their methods? Evade the law of the land with FoI? ‘Lose data’ in office noves?
The sorry history of ‘climatology’ shows those who so risibly declare ‘Trust Us, We Are Climate Scientists’ is littered with examples of such misbehaviour. See, for example, Climategate, Peter Gleick, The Hockey Stick Illusion.
PS – did I forget Gergis et al, Marcott, Lewandowsky – all of which show that despite all those scandals nothing much has changed in the grubbier corners of this ‘science’.
Max_OK
Shame on you for suspecting others of dishonesty.
That’s a negative trait.
Max_CH
Latimer Alder,
Add: Michael Mann obfuscating for several years giving McIntyre false data and not providing the methodology
@peter lang
Thanks for the addition.
There are so many examples of ‘low-integrity actions’ by climatologists in the recent past that Mr Mann’s decade old debacle had escaped me temporarily.
No doubt others will be able to remind us of any other unhappy incidents that stick in their minds?
But for me it is all summed up – in all its sham sciency tattiness – by Phil Jones giving evidence before the UK Parliament
‘The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. “They’ve never asked,” he said’
200 papers to his name and nobody has ever checked – or even seen – his work?
What an utterly pathetic ‘science’ it is.
Ref ‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/01/phil-jones-commons-emails-inquiry’
“If you are suggesting the skeptics who post here are intellectually dishonest”
I would put it down to ignorance myself. They have compartmentalized their brains on the subject allowing them to believe contradictory ideas driven by a deep seated bias to attack the science, which is rather very good.
So we see Latimer attacking climate science, just as creationists will attack biologists. It’s easy to snipe when you don’t do any work yourself!
Whenever skeptics have put the work in they’ve broken their own rules (Watts publishing by press release for example, or continuing to cite results that have been adknowledged as in error).
@lolwot
‘ It’s easy to snipe when you don’t do any work yourself! ‘
Yep. It’s shocking that ‘climatology’ is so unscientific and corrupted an enterprise that even I – armed with little more than a couple of chemistry degrees and thirty years experience in the commercial world – can see its flaws. And along with many others can expose them so much to your discomfort.
But we are just the amateurs. Doesn’t say much for the standards \nd abilities of the ‘professionals’ does it?
PS: If there is any difference in intent between your little homily and ‘Trust Us, We’re Climate Scientists’ – that well known self-contradiction of five years ago – it has escaped me.
Max,
Another gem.
From the guy who has stated he comes here to stir folks up. This comment shows you to be both intellectually dishonest and a hypocrite.
lolwot,
“I would put it down to ignorance myself. They have compartmentalized their brains on the subject allowing them to believe contradictory ideas driven by a deep seated bias to attack the science, which is rather very good.”
Did you happen to be looking in the mirror when you wrote this? You like to do the dualing graphs thing. How are you any different from the folks you duel with? You have compartmentalized all “skeptics” into a single homogenious mold. You make unsupported claims about how dangerous even a 1C rise would be.
You really are starting to sound desperate.
Remember Napoleon and the erring enemy. This guy is worth his weight in gold to the skeptical side.
=============
Gotta say that lolwot and max_ok are great straightmen.
They deliver such wonderful entrance lines & cues for us sceptics.
And with no apparent realisation that they are doing so.
I propose that they are wrapped in cotton wool, guarded by armed security men and protected from all possible harm. They are great (if unwilling and unconscious) allies
All you demonstrate Latimer is that some skeptics make up dirt and other skeptics ‘fool’ for it.
You claim this sums everything up:
“‘The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. “They’ve never asked,” he said’”
That question asked to Phil Jones betrays a lack of understanding of what peer review is. I am not even a scientist but I know this.
Peer review involves reading over a paper and checking the methodology and logic make sense and that the subject is relevant enough for publication. It doesn’t require replication of the work itself.
Replication is essentially performed outside of peer review by other studies looking into the same matter. For example the error in the UAH satellite record was not uncovered during peer review because no reviewer is going to look that deeply into the algorithm. It was uncovered when another group RSS did similar work and found a different answer. Different enough to dig deeper.
And this is how science works, messily along, one paper burying the last.
It’s quite likely that Phil Jones’ papers are sufficiently well documented that reviewers don’t need to ask for methodology. And they wouldn’t ask for code and raw data because they aren’t required to be replicate the work. They can of course do so if they want, but that’s not the purpose of peer review. Therefore the “They’ve never asked” answer Phil Jones gave to the question is not at all “startling”.
Nor is any of this unique the the field of climatology. That’s just another misleading tactic of skeptics to pretend something different is going on in climatology.
The quote uses the phrase “most startling observation”. This little phrase at the start is likely not a coincidence but is engineered to fool laypeople into thinking something shocking has been done before they get to Phil Jones answer. Or am I really supposed to believe the people who crafted the questions were genuinely clueless about how peer review works and were genuinely startled by the answers they yielded?
And of course all the skeptic blogs with their OCD-like tendencies at inspection didn’t manage to correct the record. Which is ironic isn’t it? You could say skeptics have failed to peer review their own arguments.
As for saying:
“But for me it is all summed up – in all its sham sciency tattiness – by Phil Jones giving evidence before the UK Parliament”
That at least shows you are one of the ones who has been fooled rather than one of the ones fooling.
@lolwot
The first thing to note is that the quote is from journalist Fred Pearce, not from me, and it was published in the Guardian.
You can think of Fred as being the Andy Revkin of UK environmental journalism…a good journalist but with a strong ‘green’ tendency. And the Guardian is the UK’s most green-leaning newspaper by a considerable distance. It is the natural MSM home of all AGW activists.
For Fred to publish those words in that paper shows just how surprising his testimony was.
And the surprise came because the disconnect between what peer- review actually does in practice and how it has been sold to the public was so huge.
For many years they had been led to believe that peer-review was the ultimate gold standard for a scientific paper. That if it had overcome this high hurdle, then it was near unchallengeable as a piece of scientific ‘fact’.
But the reality is of course very different. Peer-review may tell us nothing at all about the quality of the paper.and in climatology tells us a lot about the affinities and loyalties of the reviewers and the reviewee. That a ‘researcher’ as prolific as Jones can have had over 200 papers published with not a single reviewer asking to look at any detail of his work is indeed shocking to those of us who were asked to believe in the supposed rigour of the process.
Twenty five years of publication and nobody to even cast a cursory glance at the arithmetic..let alone the validity of the methods or the computations. You too- my dear lolwot -have failed to understand what he confesses.
You write
‘Peer review involves reading over a paper and checking the methodology and logic make sense’
Yet Jones says that nobody has ever looked at his methodology. Even the minimal checking you claim to be a part of peer review has not been done. And this from a man who self-confessedly needs external help to use EXCEL to plot a graph – a task that shouldn’t be beyond a reasonably competent O level maths student.
But I guess we shouldn’t have fallen for the trick in the first place. Like so much of climatology, ‘peer-review’ is a lot of flim, flam and sham hiding very little content. It claims to be a rigorous ‘Quality Control’ mechanism, but in reality is little more than a mutual back-scratching operation designed to ensure that ‘The Literature’ is unpolluted by dissent from orthodoxy.
You can continue to believe in the peer-review myth if it makes you happy. But increasingly few do.The potentially much more searching all comers realtime review possibilities offered by the internet are rapidly overtaking it.
And in a few years time the idea that a mate bought you a pint, you spent ten minutes reading his paper, suggested a couple of wording changes and looked forward to doing the same thing in reverse constituted any sort of rigorous review will be laughable.
It really doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
More tendentious nonsense as usual from numbnut.
Jones refused to share with people who were only trying to prove him wrong and then lost the data.
Data – and these days code – need to be archived to enable access and replication by others. Science without this is pointless. No one asked? I like Pearce wonder why.
“Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models,” I would add, while at the same time abandoning with extreme prejudice the idea that “consensus” is a fit substitute for empirical observation.
What we see now is exactly, what could be expected, when the most visible scientists are also activists. I have written before that I cannot condemn the morality of scientists who let their activist side affect, what they are saying, but that their behavior is stupid and acts against their goals, and at the same time it’s also very bad for the science more widely than just for the climate science.
There’s no doubt that some scientists have presented rather unlikely and extreme alternatives as most likely, and in a way that makes many to think these outcomes are virtually certain. They should have understood that their approach is virtually certain to lead to predictions that fail to materialize. Now we can see where that approach leads to.
Scientists should stay as objective as possible, and they should not hide the caveats. That may feel ineffective, but that’s the only effective approach in the long run.
Pekka, you write “There’s no doubt that some scientists have presented rather unlikely and extreme alternatives as most likely, and in a way that makes many to think these outcomes are virtually certain. They should have understood that their approach is virtually certain to lead to predictions that fail to materialize. Now we can see where that approach leads”
You have missed out the most important aspect of what you have so correctly described. What was the rest of the scientific community doing sitting on their hands on the sidelines and not saying anything?. Yes it is wrong to have “presented rather unlikely and extreme alternatives as most likely”, but surely it ought ot have been the dutry and responsibility of the learned societies, led by the RS, the APS and the WMO to cry “FOUL”. Instead of which, these learned bodies cheered from the sidelines and actually encouraged, and participated in, such reprehensible behaviour.
Recently Kurt Schilling was not elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in the wake of the steoroid scandal. When asked about it, he said WTTE. “The decision was the right one. We knew what was going on, and we did not do anything about it”.
Not true, there are honourable individuals who have put up with all sorts of abuse (think Judy and Joshua) for not holding the line.
Doc, you write “Not true, there are honourable individuals who have put up with all sorts of abuse (think Judy and Joshua) for not holding the line.”
I just dont agree with you. If you are referring to our hostess, and our Joshua, then niether of them has stated in clear words, that CAGW is undeniably wrong
I think he meant the abuse that Judith gets from Joshua.
Judith has said quite explicitly that there is no ‘existential threat’ from the revised rates of warming. Although the rates of warming and cooling change all the time and really there is no certainty about how warming or cooling will change in future. The past suggests that it could well be catastrophic and happen in a decade or less.
I meant look how much abuse Judy gets from evangelical warmista’s like Joshua
This is hilarious – what a bunch of drama queens.
I write blog comments criticizing Judith’s selective reasoning.
This counts as “abuse” in your books? Sorry, but you boyz trivialize actual abuse with your pearl-clutching.
I respect your chivalry and loyalty – but I never harmed Judith one tiny little bit, and she’s quite capable of taking care of herself. Maybe you should consider how condescending your chivalry is?
Yet more evidence of a complete lack of due skeptical scrutiny.
What makes me an “evangelical warmista” Doc?
Do you even know what be beliefs are w/r/t climate change? It is obvious that you don’t,, because you are quite certain of a completely wrong conclusion\. Just because I point out flawed reasoning among “skeptics,” such as that you just displayed, does give you evidence to support your categorization.
Why is it so hard to find a real skeptic at Climate Etc.?
Heh, it’s getting harder to find a real warmista at Climate Etc.
============
Josh,
If we are drama queens, then you’ve become a hanger queen who wishes they were capable of a dramic role.
We know who and what you are Joshua. The only question is why you think that your repetitive and trivial nonsense is of any interest to anyone. Your were mentioned as an example of a warminista troll – not to elicit more of your egregious idiocy.
Abuse from Joshua? That’s a little like saying when a puppy piddles on the floor he’s abusing his owner.
No wait. It’s a lot like saying that.
well said Pekka.
But then you have always been one of the more reasoned commentors here.
I agree, marvelous comment from Pekka. Now, if he’d only recognize the activist in himself.
===========
Jesus Pekka, you have been consistently the most vocal support of warmist methodologies and conclusions and have always attacked, by argument from authority, any other views. Indeed, when ask about the physics of , say, the absorbance and latent/sensible heat ratio of IR meeting saline you have scoffed at the possibility that this has not been already known.
You, along with the dumb bunny have given cover to all manner of explanations and models, that are failing.
Are you jumping ship too?
Doc, this has been a consistent view of Pekka. He has never been an advocate of scientists acting as activists and has commented in the past about the detriment to climate science by over zealous predictions connected to policy.
John –
Don’t let facts and complexities get in the way of Doc formulating conclusions with complete confidence. If he (or anyone else here) were interested in those facts and complexities in reference to Pekka’s perspective, he would easily have seen found comments as you just described.
What would be interesting to see, if Doc reads your comment, is whether he feels a sense of accountability so as to acknowledge how his tribalism biased his reasoning.
Consider this a test, Doc.
Pekka
You make good points about scientists not exaggerating their data for purposes of fear mongering.
But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened, under the pressure from IPCC and its forced “consensus” process.
This is now the result when reality has set in.
Max.
Pekka Pirila,
This is a rather strange comment from you.
You have been an CAGW activist all along. You’ve been defending the orthodoxy and directing snide remarks to those who are not in the orthodox camp.
Are you trying to get off the bus before it crashes?
The moving Weasel prevaricates; and, having weaseled, slinks on.
Pekka,
As usual there is a lot substance and integrity evident in your comments. Fortunately better scientists and people of character usually have little patience for charlatans that hide the caveats. You objectivity is appreciated.
Nice job of keeping it simple,”They should have understood that their approach is virtually certain to lead to predictions that fail to materialize. Now we can see where that approach leads to”.
The caveats won’t be hidden should they end up proven wrong. In fact there will be studies showing that 97% of all papers that projected dangerous levels of global warming had caveats.
‘Callow science’, heh. Not hallowed.
===========
One thing that will be interesting will be to see how President Obama’s proposed new GHG emissions limits for existing power plants are viewed when they are rolled out in the coming days/weeks.
What will be the answer when someone asks- What is this going to cost and what specific benefit will result from the expense? If CO2 levels are at 440 ppm in 2050 vs 442 ppm was the expense worth the cost? Do we implement government policy because it makes us feel like we are doing something positive or do we implement policies that can be demonstrated to accomplish specific positive results?
FERC testim0ny about the possible impact to grid reliability was ignored. It just may take a major multi state outage traced back to coal plants taken off line to shine a light on who the EPA has acted. But I do not hold out hope. When an agency’s own Inspector General makes a determination that the agency failed to follow its own standards and protocols regarding its finding on CO2 and nothing happens, how can we expect integrity out of it? And I believe most here know about the unparelled transparancy in the EPA’s behavior under the current administration.
I was one of Inhofe’s infamous 400. Was this my 15 minutes of infamy? It came about from talking about natural variability for the past decade. This was quite obvious in hydrology since the late 1980’s and in global surface temperatures from early this century. That there are still people disputing this comes under the heading of dinosaur science. For the most part disputation – as opposed to rationalization – doesn’t emerge from science but is a product of scientific illiteracy informed by ideological commitments. A measure of the psychopathology of groupthink is probable.
Natural variation extends to modification of the planetary energy budget over decades at the very least. Very little recent warming can be unambiguously attributed to carbon dioxide – it is unlikely to warm for decades – and this inevitably creates the conditions for a political backlash in which political AGW will cease to have any influence.
Thus my fears are realised. The political impetus to decarbonisation evaporates while like some Diogenes futilely pushing his tub around Athens – I insist that decarbonisation is still essential. We have lost 20 years to green overreach and now risk losing another 20 years to skeptical triumphalism.
We need to take the next step and understand the chaotic nature of the system we are dealing with. This creates mathematically certain risks that I don’t want to overstate but that suggest that reducing carbon emissions – and other emissions – is indeed the prudent course. A course – btw – that needs to be relentlessly practical and pragmatic.
” … reducing carbon emissions – and other emissions – is indeed the prudent course. A course – btw – that needs to be relentlessly practical and pragmatic”
The Achilles Heel of the whole imbroglio
After 200+ years of the best and brightest the world has ferreting away at this issue, we still have only hydro and nuclear as reliable, decarbonising base load alternatives. These technologies are subject to constant hysterical abuse by “stridently moralising” meeja (quoted phrase from the The Economist article above)
And none of that touches the transport aspects
Hi Ian,
The best and brightest have suggested reduction in black carbon, tropospheric ozone, methane, sulphates and nitrous oxides. I did a post recently on soil carbon. About 100 GtC can be sequestered usefully in grazing lands while reducing costs and increasing productivity. That’s about 10 years emissions. Social development – economic growth, education, health, safe water and sanitation act to reduce population pressures. Conservation and restoration of ecosystems has multiple benefits.
The cost of solar panels is getting reasonable – and seems to be cost effective in some applications. Cheap solar could be a transformative technology in many places as is micro-hydro. Modular nuclear designs are well advanced with commercial deployment this decade or next. There are many interesting technologies.
I can’t really see that there is much of a problem at all – but would like to see more progress made on conservation and restoration of ecosystems and agricultural land and on economic and social development.
Chief Hydrologist, it’s probably natural that I think this comment is brilliant, as I agree with it 100%. But Plus One anyhow.
Me too, but I consider him just a little too worried about carbon sequestration.
=========
I’m just naturally thrifty – or is that cheap?
Chief
+ a whole bunch (hey, everyone else has already claimed all the numbers)
Thank you for the article.
To your comment, “We’ve lost decades in climate science by failing to pay adequate attention to natural climate variability.”
Yes billions wasted and all sunk costs now. How much will we save if we just cut out all the R&D?
I see change is in the air… The House of Representatives just cut the Dept. of Energy renewable energy budget by 50% and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) took a 80% cut (but still has $50 million budget). The cuts were used to boost spending on DoD nuclear programs so the government still spent the money we “saved”. If we really need more nuclear weapons right now then studying climate variability is pointless.
Hey Sparrow,
You wouldn’t be the writer “Sparrow” would you? Highly unlikely, but on the other hand it’s pretty uncommon name..
Oh course he’s the writer sparrow. He wrote and signed it “sparrow”.
The flying sparrow writes; and, having writ, Flys on.
“I have been told repeatedly that “we cannot afford to wait”. More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.”
There’s nothing like bucking the party line no matter how reasonably, to get a harsh lesson in the anti-intellectual tyranny of many warmists. It’s a national disgrace that Obama’s still out there making speeches about how the earth continues to warm even faster than the most dire predictions.
Katie Couric ought to ask Obama what *he’s* reading these days. Because it sure seems like he’s not keeping up.
What an odd fellow Obama is. He wanted to slow the rise of the oceans when they’d already slowed their rise – around 1870. Katie’s odd too. She thinks people will get smarter if they read the NYT and the WaPo. That’s like trying to manipulate climate and sea levels. Just not going to happen, is it?
Very odd people, who believe the most extravagant things – yet they head governments and major media. It’s kids-in-the-kitchen, everywhere you look these days.
All very odd. Need some adults, people.
Probably the same articles as Jin Yeung Kim over at the World Bank.
Heh, both teleprompted.
=======
Ironically just as solar panels became affordable….well they were until the EU stuck a tax on them.
Just to introduce some figures into the argument:
The 00’s were on a decadal basis some 0.16C warmer than the 90’s.
It’s too early to say whether the 10’s will, or will not, be warmer than the 00’s.
Judith should know better to encourage the idea that the so-called pause is in any way real.
Forget temperature, the pause is in policy will. I could chart a negative trend line if I knew my axis from my ordinate.
============
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since.
Hang in there tt – we are absolutely certain you know what you’re talking about.
Don’t forget to mention the impacts from that .16C rise.
Here in the Pacific NW Doug firs are being crowded out by palm trees. East of the Cascades orchard owners are chopping down apple, cherry and pear trees and replacing them with orange and olive orchards.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates are looking into building new homes up on Cougar Mt, as the fuel bill to pump the water from rising Lake Washington is beginning to tax even their vast fortunes.
Sea levels around here have risen so much that the Seattle Mariners are changing their name to the Seattle Submariners. And lets not forget the impact to our shell fish industry. We now have to fly the larva to Hawaii so they can reach a point where they are capable of withstanding our now highly acidic waters. Unfortunately the oysters are finding they like Hawaii and are refusing to come back.
We are having to cope with a huge influx of new climate refugees. Alaskans and Pacific Islanders have replaced Russians as the fastest growing demographic. (We won’t mention the positive impact this is having on the housing market, as we all know there are no positive impacts from a warmer world.) In fact many of the Russian immigrants are returning home, fueling a land rush to acquire dachas on the Barents Sea coast.
The list of impacts from this 0.16C rise goes on. But I’ll refrain from continuing, as I don’t want to depress anyone.
timg56
Pack a bag.
Max
Sorry manaker,
I like it here just fine.
PS – too bad I don’t have a photo of my new neighbors. A Vietnamese family bought the lot next door, tore down the small house on it and built what is referred to around here as a McMansion. Really nice place. They planted 3 palm trees (and a Sitka spruce) in the front yard. It would have provided a nice touch to my post above. “Proof” of the disasterous impacts from global warming.
tempterrain
Don’t know what you’re smoking, but the pause is real.
How long it will last is unknown.
Our hostess has stated on another thread that it could well last another decade or two, but this is uncertain of course.
Max
David Appell | June 20, 2013 at 9:24 pm said: ”So far this decade-to-date is about 0.06 C warmer than the last decade-to-date”
that’s urban heat, you idiot; nobody monitors the whole GLOBAL temp, to know even what was the global temp last year. the end is nigh, for bigots!
The datasets account for urban heat; the satellite datasets easily exclude it.
David Appell, you are not using trend. Why? We know why. You’re weaseling.
As The Better David would say, write that down
@Appell
Satellite data sets don’t exclude UHI. They dilute it by obtaining true averages of the entire globe. UHI can be a problem because most ground stations are somewhere near where people live and that’s usually in or near a city. Worse, since most airports are staffed 24/7 and already have rudimentary weather stations, there was a great migration of ground stations to them. The thing about airports is they don’t look much like the surrouding terrain. They’re bulldozed flat, planted with grass where not covered with tarmac, and have all sorts of localized heat production from engine exhausts and hangar/terminal HVAC systems.
Satellites manage to avoid the problem by giving no extra weight whatsoever to the tiny fraction of earth’s surface that is subject to significant UHI effects.
Write that down, David Appell.
You’re right that the science, and just basic knowledge, in the blog comments here is scary low but your inclusion moves the average down not up.
Satellites manage to avoid the problem by giving no extra weight whatsoever to the tiny fraction of earth’s surface that is subject to significant UHI effects.
That’s because it is tiny. Like I said, satellites give a UHI-independent temperature. They have lots of other issues to deal with, but this isn’t one of them.
Hi tempterrain. As Joe Romm is going to owe me $1,000 in a few years, I think you should be over at Climate Progress encouraging him…
So far this decade-to-date is about 0.06 C warmer than the last decade-to-date.
In 2011 and 2012 the global temperature anomaly has been hovering between 0.1C and 0.2C above the 1979-1998 average GAT.
FYI the zero line in RSS satellite temperature product is the average of the 20 year period from 1979-1998. They chose the period because it excludes significant El Nino and La Nina events. Given the average year of the RSS average period is 1990 then in the last few years it’s fair to say that after 20 years there’s been less than 0.2C warming. That’s not enough to be statistically significant according to Phil Jones at Hadley CRU and the other usual suspects. Take any multidecadal period you like and if the trend over that period does not exceed 0.10C/decade then it’s statistically insignificant. Indeed, a continuation of 0.10C/decade means it will only be 1C warmer in the year 2100 than in 2000 and that is not an alarming number. Given the history of civilization over the course of 1C warming since the end of the Little Ice it would be fair to say that warming of that amount would be welcomed especially when it involves fertilizing the atmosphere with plant food and through the same mechanism decreasing the amount of fresh water required per unit of agricultural output. Perhaps you’d care to discuss C3 and C4 photosynthetic pathways and the response to increased CO2 partial pressure?
David A, do you really believe we are measuring global temp to a hundredth of a degree?
David S. How does including 1998 exclude significant El Ninos when the big one occurred that year?
We — i.e several different scientific groups — are measuring facsimilies (i.e. models) of global temperature to 0.01 C, with the uncertainties they have indicated. (GISS and Hadley do a better job of presenting their uncertainties than do the others.)
Have to say that David’s comment about how we are measuring global temps to 0.01 degree with models is a classic.
David, you have my respect for having guts . Maybe one day we can discuss accuracy and precision.
David Appell,
Are they really scientists if they make such a claim?
Are you a scientist if you believe such a claim?
“Just to introduce some figures into the argument”
shhh you’re ruining their little ‘pause’ myth
At least the polar bears are okay. The Left’s endless campaign against Americanism has at least been good for them — Junk Science Week: Now we have too many polar bears?
Wagathon | June 20, 2013 at 6:25 pm |
There’s one quarter as many polar bears today as there were 100 years ago
.
Of the 19 remaining polar bear populations, half that had been growing in the five decades since the end of unlimited hunting have stopped growing.
Of the other half that had been growing rapidly in the five decades since the end of unlimited hunting, two thirds are declining moderately, and one third are growing slightly.
How is that okay?
Does insulting the intelligence of everyone who reads what you write give you a secret thrill?
Are you nuts? Anyone can look up the facts. You should try it sometime.
Wagathon | June 20, 2013 at 6:25 pm | Reply
Crossthreaded here:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/21/week-in-review-62213/#comment-335701
Here’s the difference between a nut and a skeptic: the nut is the one who accepts what they read online without checking for themselves.
There is no expert claiming polar bears are ‘okay’.
Polar bears counts may or may not be increasing, depending on who you ask, but their health and prospects are generally agreed by both official experts and experts who often dispute their methods and conclusions to be poor, threatened or uncertain compared to a century ago.
Certainly, polar bears are doing better in the wild than lions or tigers or than most whale species, than perhaps any other megafauna and likely than any large predator other than humans, than about one eighth the avian population of the world, and than most amphibians.
But there was an international agreement in 1973 signed to restore polar bear numbers. Polar bear numbers had been over 100,000 a century ago. Polar bear numbers are 25,000 or so now.
How are our agreements being met?
How is it okay for international agreements to be ignored?
There are nearly 25 polar bears today for every polar bear 100 years ago and that does not include polar bears in the San Diego Zoo. But, anyone can find that out for themselves and when they do, what exactly do you feel you have gained by persisting in utter nonsense about polar bears? Is it something we can relate to or do we need degrees in psychology?
Bart,
polar bears are doing fine by most accounts. Reports that they are not are concentrated in 3 guys, ar least one if which has displayed questionable integrity
one of the quickest ways to exhibit you have caught the true religion bug is to talk about the poor polar bears.
Junk Science Week: Now we have too many polar bears?
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/06/12/junk-science-week-now-we-have-too-many-polar-bears/
Wagathon | June 22, 2013 at 3:37 pm |
What the heck are you talking about? Whose numbers claim 25 times as many polar bears as there were a century ago? Link? Reference? Cite?
If you’re claiming there were only 1,000 polar bears alive a century ago, you’ve got some explaining to do, because hunts were reporting 600-6,000 polar bears taken between 1916-1967 annually. Polar bear litters are one to three a year — three being extremely rare — and polar bears survive to adulthood in the wild about 1 in four times. Your claim is simply staggeringly unbelievable.
timg56 | June 22, 2013 at 11:25 pm |
Most accounts? Most accounts of whom? Susan Crockford, the arctic canine specialist? Literally laughed out of the room last I heard of her attempting to give a lecture to grad students. Iain from U of A in the 1990s? Taylor? That’s three accounts. Dubious and with inflated levels of certainty not backed by evidence.
Are polar bear populations currently plummetting at the same rate as they had between 100 and 50 years ago? No. Is that ‘doing fine’?
The treaty agreed to restore the numbers, and maintain a census.
Do you see a valid census?
I don’t.
Is 25,000 greater than 100,000?
No.
I’m not about the cute cuddly wuddly bears. The cuddly wuddly bears are a ton of razor-blade-tipped muscle with a land speed of 40 mph and the ability to track tirelessly for three days. They’re dangerous, unpredictable and best kept well away from.
This is not about sentiment or some sense of alarm that they’re verging on extinction.
This is about utter failure of a 40-year-old treaty, and its implication for commercial properties that were intended to be recovered to the level for sustaining a harvest and maintaining healthy levels to among other things control seal populations — which in case you haven’t been keeping track, are out of control.
One of the quickest ways to establish that you’ve lost sight of your own interests is to make excuses for trade partners to let down their end of a bargain. Why you don’t care about your own interests is not my problem. My problem is, if you can’t trust these guys in something small like polar bears, how can you trust them for anything?
Polar Bears.
Whatever the population 100 years ago vs now, in more recent history, even the uber-green WWF now concedes “most populations have returned to healthy numbers”.
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/arctic/wildlife/polar_bear/population/
Seems (a) there was once a genuine crisis, but (b) it’s now over.
The WWF does though still try to milk the but-the-ice-will-disappear angle.
Sheesh… how typical — the magic of giving a number or a name to something to artificially inflate the gravity of something –e.g., a century ago, or in the 1900s, or in here or there, “there were 100,000″ … wild tigers, cheetahs, Tibetan antelopes, elephants, polar bears, rhinos, Grizzlies, slaves…
There were a lot more cowboys carrying six guns on their hips in the 1900s… probably, 100000 of them. And, 100000 years ago there were 1ooooo ice fairies created by 100000 abominable snowmen in Montana.
All of this typical Wagathon pro-foreign-government soft-on-enforcement perversion-of-treaties argument.
We know where it leads.
Oooh. Who cares if they agreed to restore 100,000?
Isn’t 25,000 ‘healthy’?
Isn’t 25,000 just the same as 100,000?
No. 25,000 is not the same as 100,000.
No, not producing a valid census is not the same as producing a valid census.
No, cutting and running from international treaties is not the same as upholding the honor of the nation.
Hi Judy – Thank you for another excellent post.
There is also another major implication of the pause for policy. If the models cannot even achieve skill at predicting changes in the global annual averaged heat content, they certainly are not going to be able to skillfully predict changes in regional climate statistics on multi-decadal time scales. Yet huge amounts of money (and time) are being spent (wasted in my view) on providing such regional projections to the impacts and policy communities.
Roger Sr.
Roger,
Please include the ocean heat content when you refer to “annual averaged heat content”. The very steady to increasing 0.5 x 10^22 joules per year the oceans down to 2000m have been adding over the past 40 years or so far outweighs anything the troposphere even could add. There has been no actual pause in the accumulation of energy in the total Earth system, and so the actual discussion should be about the “perception” of a pause brought about by a myopic focus on the lower atmosphere.
So the oceans are accumulating energy at the rate of 0.5×10^22 joules per year?
That would add to the 1×10^27 joules already there then.
So what’s the effect, other than to raise the temperature by 0.0016 degrees per year?
Found the missing heat?
Predominantly it seems the source is changes in Earth albedo.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=77
So the oceans are accumulating energy at the rate of 0.5×10^22 joules per year? That would add to the 1×10^27 joules already there then.
It does not make physical sense to talk about the absolute amount of energy in the ocean — only changes in energy (i.e. heat flow) make sense.
The callow ones were lured to the Gingerbread House, deep in the dark woods. But don’t worry, Judy dropped a trail of crumbs.
===================
“Bad things happen all the time in life, but to live your life fearful? That would suck.” ~Evelyn Stevens
The myth at work here is that there’s been some ‘pause’ in global temperature for the last 17 years. Some even exaggerate that to 20 or beyond.
This is how it works. Take the a trend since 1995 of 0.093C +- 0.108C/decade
Skeptics would claim this is a ‘pause’. But it isn’t is it. The range above covers substantial positive trend, as much as 0.2C/decade. So why are people claiming there IS a pause?
Even worse the trend from 1970 to 1995 is 0.146C +- 0.071C/decade.
So the post 1995 trend heavily overlaps the 1970-1995 trend. So how can people even claim the warming has slowed down, let alone paused? Oh sure you can say the range has reduced, but if we are going to be sticklers for 95% significance then we cannot say there has been a slowdown.
In fact the given the two ranges the post 1995 warming could have been faster than the prior warming, ie warming has sped up!
As far as I see it ‘skeptics’ have the whole concept of statistical significance backwards.
You’re just asking for thermometer duty.
==========
lolwot
Sounds like you’re running a fever.
Cool down.
Max
You jumped the shark long ago lolwot, from apparently sincere if deluded alarmist, to full-fledged troll. I don’t even bother reading your comments any longer. Utter waste of time.
no need to lie pokerguy. We both know you read my comment. Others can probably guess.
Ok, I won’t lie. I do read them sometimes. But I try not to. It’s akin to how one can’t help looking at some terrible wreck on the highway.
Dang, I thought you read mine and worked back up out of uncontrollable curiosity. That’s usually how I keep getting re-exposed to Joshua.
==========
kim –
Just because you often fail to exercise due skeptical diligence, you shouldn’t assume that attribute to be so common in others.
There is plenty of evidence to show that the statement above is far from being accurate. Just look at the previous thread. Your statement would fail to pass skeptical scrutiny.
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
The trend is quite irrelevant. There is no datapoint post 1998 that is higher than February 1998 to any significant extent. Science says that this ‘hiding’ of the warming may continue for decades hence.
“The trend is quite irrelevant. There is no datapoint post 1998 that is higher than February 1998 to any significant extent.”
January 2007
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998
live by the single datapoint, die by the single datapoint
The error is 0.15 degrees C. The 2010 datapoint is well within this range and there are certainly no points that are 0.2 degrees C higher.
Significance implies statistical significance.
So you are demanding a month be 0.15C higher than the most extreme month of the 1998 el-nino-of-the-century.
Or….?
what’s happens if there is no such month? what are you implying that means? that there’s been no super el nino since 1998?
lolwot
Here’s your graph with the trend for the past decade added.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend
As you can see, there is no warming trend for the past decade.
How long this observed “pause” in warming will last is anyone’s guess.
The Chief says “one to three decades” is a distinct possibility.
Our hostess has stated it could last for another decade or two.
I’m just hoping it doesn’t turn into a significant cooling trend.
Max
lolwot
BTW that cooling trend over the past decade (HadCRUT4) is less than 0.1C per decade, so it is NOT considered to be a statistically relevant cooling trend – just a “pause” in the statistically significant warming trend (~0.15C per decade) of the previous two to three decades.
Just to clear that point up, lolwot.
Max
A “pause” of a decade is climatologically meaningless.
It has happened before. It will happen again.
Only suckers pay attention to such short time periods.
“Suckers” who want to know what might happen in the next 10 years might be mightily misled if they followed the IPCC ‘projection’ of 0.2C increase per decade in the early part of the 21st century. Statistical significance or not in terms of a trend is not the issue here.
Do I really need to post the skepticalscience escalator graph?
curryja: the IPCC does not make decade-by-decade predictions.
Eould you judge the Medievel Warm Period by what happened between 1002 and 1013 AD? Of course not, it would be absurd. Yet that’s what you’re doing to today’s climate change.
The IPCC explicitly said that warming would continue at 0.2 degrees C/decade for a few decades. And this is not a matter of a decades cooling – but oceanographic science that suggests decades of cooling. As in the NASA link.
Initialised models are increasingly relevant.
Our results highlight that an initialization of the upper-ocean state using historical observations is effective for successful hindcasts of the PDO and has a great impact on future predictions. Ensemble hindcasts for the 20th century demonstrate a predictive skill in the upper-ocean temperature over almost a decade, particularly around the Kuroshio-Oyashio extension (KOE) and subtropical oceanic frontal regions where the PDO signals are observed strongest. A negative tendency of the predicted PDO phase in the coming decade will enhance the rising trend in surface air-temperature (SAT) over east Asia and over the KOE region, and suppress it along the west coasts of North and South America and over the equatorial Pacific. This suppression will contribute to a slowing down of the global-mean SAT rise. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1833.full
You need to stop posturing David and catch up with the science.
The IPCC said no such thing, ever. The error is yours.
For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emissions scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all GHGs and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected. Afterwards, temperature projections increasingly depend on specific emissions scenarios.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms3.html
I don’t think so David.
David, David, David, everybody from Judy on down sees your little weasel trick. The error is the IPCC’s.
============
1980-2000 had a warming rate of at least 0.2 degrees per decade, so it is known to be possible, especially after a pause. You just have to look at the record to see this.
Let’s exclude the 1998 El Nino. The residual warming rate was about 0.1 degrees C/decade as I said above.
Chief Hydrologist | June 20, 2013 at 7:56 pm |
You’re trying to have your one-month statistical cake and eat your 17-year trend too.
This is what all ‘pause’ arguments come down to, one way or another.
They leverage a short-term trend — though few are so brash as to appeal to a single month statistic outright — and then switch reference period to the long-term trend. This is simply lying with statistics. Or, as some call it, lying.
If you resort to monthly trends, then you must note that months are too short a period for valid global comparisons. The globe is asymmetric North-South, so the minimum valid timescale is one full year. Smooth 1998 to one full year, and February 1998 is no longer meaningful to the context.
But then, individual years are not independent. Years tend to either be very similar in runs, or to be polar opposites due significant flips, such as seen for example in ENSO or volcano-impacted years. Either way, this dependency demands smoothing, generally to at least five years, unless we’re examining things like frequency of hot vs. cold years, or frequency of flips, or variability.
If we count frequency of hot years, we see figures like 9 of the 10 hottest years all happening, or 10 of 11, or 11 of 13, or 12 of 14, or 13 of 15, and so forth. Even when some of those warmest ever years are La Nina years — an unheard of anomaly. If we count frequency of flips, we also find unusual concentrations lately. If we count volcano-affected spans — which are generally half-decadal or so — we count several that still are unusually hot years overall. In short, every valid variation on statistical analysis shreds claims of pause, lull, hiatus, plateau, drop, deceleration or end of the underlying trend.
If we stick to five-year smoothed temperature trendology, we see a continued aggressive rise to 1998, then one to 2007, then one to the present day. Each rise is higher than the previous rise. While this is an utterly invalid rubbish basis for statistical trendology on climate, it also happens to be the opposite of the claims you make.
The valid reading, the one based on comparing two non-overlapping 30 (0r better, 32) year spans?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:384/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1948/to:1980/trend
Just stop repeatedly cutting and pasting irrelevancies and pretending they matter. You’re embarassing Australia.
You put the “about” in
You take the “about” out
You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about
The decline since 1998 is based on the fact that surface temperatures haven’t exceeded that of February 1998 in any significant sense. Difficult concept I’m sure. Although the trend since 2002 is as anticipated.
The theory is that climate shifted in 1998/2001.
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. ftp://starfish.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/pub/ocean/CCS-WG_References/NewSinceReport/March15/Swanson%20and%20Tsonis%20Has%20the%20climate%20recently%20shifted%202008GL037022.pdf
It seems to involve a change in the nature of ENSO – a cool Pacific decadal mode – and cloud. And seems likely to last another decade or so at least. If you know of any science that contradicts this – please no trendology from wood for dimwits – I’m all ears.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandLaken2013_zps73c516f9.png.html?sort=3&o=7
And just for Jan – http://www.benlaken.com/documents/AIP_PL_13.pdf
Although if they are stuck in denial about temperature – well you get the point.
Chief Hydrologist | June 22, 2013 at 3:29 pm |
You just circled around nonresponsively repeating the same bogus argument.
The 2007 peak could not plausibly have happened under your hypothesis.
The failure of any year since 2001 to dip below the highest year before 1998 despite La Nina’s and high altitude volcanic eruptions could not plausibly happen under your hypothesis.
These are insurmountable objections to your claims.
Your argument is a stuck record repeating the same worn out track that wasn’t worth listening to in the first place.
Move past it.
Bart,
I always try to mix it up – quote some science – link to papers and reputable sites – that sort of thing. The problem is that the same old – same old – stream of consciousness, pull it out of your arse, post-normal science keeps coming back around like some horrible nightmare where you run faster and faster and never get anywhere.
You are especially adept at stream of consciousness, pull it out of your arse, post-normal science. Honed to garrulous perfection, almost rising to coherence, rabid, laced with subtle and not so subtle sleights.
I would suggest you actually reference some old fashioned science but that would detract from the perfection of – for instance – 100,000 polar bears in 1900AD.
When in doubt, look at the data; rate of temperature change from 1851 to April 2013 (HADCRU4) and rate of change over 97 months.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/HADCRUT4monthly_zps575cf5ba.png
You mean
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:384/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1948/to:1980/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1914/to:1947/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1881/to:1913/mean:101/mean:103
Why engage in sewing doubt, when the data is so incredibly clear?
Dueling trendology? Trendology from wood for dimwits is somewhat less than convincing.
lolwot,
“Take the a trend since 1995 of 0.093C +- 0.108C/decade”
It also allows for a (very) slight cooling of 0.015C/decade. That’s like saying that when you walked out your door this morning you had on shirt, pants, shoes and socks, but oh, you also could have had on a hat, fleece vest, jacket and raincoat. When in reality there was a fair chance you walked out missing your pants.
It means you can’t say there is a pause.
OK, I can acknowledge that pause might not be the best term. But the more accurate description of saying temperature rise has been statistically insignificant still stands.
Do you want to argue climate or terminology?
Still not getting it. There is no point in applying significance tests to data. If I flip 10 heads in a row, that’s a 100% chance that I’ve seen 10 heads. The pause is a streak of data. Unless you want to go to super-Watts levels of doubt about the thermometry, there is simply no point in saying the pause isn’t “real.”
Now, if you want to ask what are the chances that the coin is fair given 10 heads in a row, that’s another question. But don’t mix up your model of data generation (fair coin hypothesis) with data.
After a flip the observation is 100% certain to be either a head or a tail.
With a single temperature measurement there is an uncertainty with respect to what the true temperature is, that is where your analogy fails.
No, that is not what is going on here. You are invoking what would be the “super-Watts” level of thermometry skepticism I mentioned originally, but in fact the “no significant pause” crowd is not appealing to thermometer error. They are fallaciously appealing to theoretical “random” or “unresolved” sources of true climate “noise” and trying to fit AR1’s and such to the data.
None of the “no significant pausers” are saying that the thermometer data have too much error in them to be sure of what’s going on–that argument would prove way too much and endanger the entire temperature trend that has everybody worried in the first place.
At last, people are coming round to see the merit of my conceptual climzte model which is not at all surprised by the present and previous pause (see my website underlinrd above). The previous pause was actually a fall in average global temperature, 1940 to 1970, which the IPCC ignored, to our planet’s cost.
Yes, we did have AGWin the 20th century 1910 to 1940, 0.5C, and this was a permanet rise, althogh it stopped in 1940. It now seems more likely that the subsequent rise, 1970 to 1998 was merely the 1940 rise after it had worked its way through thr transport delay of the ocrans (about 30 years)
The remaining question is whether we have now reached the end of the heating cycle, simply because we have now reached the lowest excitation state that the CO2 molecule can support at tropospheric temperatures.
lolwot —
The change in pattern took place starting around 1997 – 2000. It’s hard to give a precise starting point, because 1998 was an unusually warm year. However, the change didn’t start as early as 1995. Splitting the data on that year doesn’t reflect the puzzling change in temperature pattern.
Also, note that the trend since 1995 of 0.093C +- 0.108C/decade adds up to just under 1 degree Celsius per century. If warming is this slow, then it’s not a crisis. We have plenty of time to refine our models and to devise plans to cope with this gradual change in climate.
“However, the change didn’t start as early as 1995.”
So why do skeptics claim it did? eg: http://www.infowars.com/there-has-been-no-global-warming-since-1995/
“The change in pattern took place starting around 1997 – 2000”
Trend from 1980 to 1997 is 0.109 +- 0.116C/decade
Trend since 1997 is 0.045 +- 0.121C/decade
Those two ranges overlap, so how can you claim there was a change in pattern?
“Also, note that the trend since 1995 of 0.093C +- 0.108C/decade adds up to just under 1 degree Celsius per century.”
The uncertainty range covers 2C per century, but it wouldn’t be wise to extrapolate a short-term trend like this over a full century anyway.
Temperature since 1995 are not higher in any statistically significant sense.
The turn of the century climate shift was placed by Swanson and Tsonis at 2001/2002.
The next climate shift is perhaps decades hence.
lolwot
You’re in a hole.
My advice: Stop digging.
Max
if you spent time in England then you would understand what an ‘uncertainty range’ was. Snow at Easter and blazing sunshine at Christmas
Really oughta read Robert G. Brown over at Watts’ somewhere and in the comment section at the Bish’s Economist thread. Moderately eloquent, heh.
==========
It’s kind of buried now at Watts’, deep in the comments of a thread ten back, but it’s in the first column of comments at the Bish’s. You’ll be sorry if you miss it.
=============
this one? seems confused
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/06/a-duke-goes-to-town-at-wuwt.html
Your blogger skipped the best part of Brown’s rant, and please check Briggs’ update. Not great news for unverified models.
=================
Brown is now headlined at the Bish’s. Briggs’ update is the bottom line and not happy news for modelers, but he criticizes Brown’s statistics as too frequentist. It is the non-statistical part of Brown’s rant that is particularly compelling.
==============
“it wouldn’t be wise to extrapolate a short-term trend like this over a full century anyway.”
I agree. And, I certainly wouldn’t extrapolate a small, short-term trend into a high long-term trend. But, this is reportedly what IPCC 5 is poised to do. Although the 15 year trend is near zero and the 35 year trend is around 1 degree/century, IPCC 5 is apparently going to project a 100 year trend of around 2.5 degrees, little changed from IPCC 4..
The IPCC projections are not based on extrapolating short-term trends.
Wow!
The “consensus” is falling apart.
(And CAGW was such a beautiful theory…)
Max
Not matter how you backpedal now, before the pause you warmists were contending the rise in temperature would track the rise in CO2. Well, you were wrong, it doesn’t. And there is a good bet you are wrong about the H2O feedbacks, too. You sure are screaming louder, though.
1) the data doesn’t show a statistically significant pause.
2) surface and satellite data is compatible with continued warming.
3) Ocean Heat Content continues to rise. Tracking the rise in CO2.
Satellite data from CERES shows warming as a result of less cloud.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=107
Longer term?
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=5
lolwot
That data (surface and satellite) do not show a statistically significant warming since 1998, and certainly none for the past decade (since 2002).
Prior to that there was a strong warming signal of around 0.15C per decade, since the 1970s; this warming trend has stopped (i.e. the “pause” in warming).
This is the indicator commonly used by IPCC and others to express “global warming” caused by anthropogenic GH gases.
OHC measurements only started in 2003 (ARGO). These first showed slight cooling and now (after some corrections) show slight warming. But since this is measured in thousandths of a degree C, it is still a dicey number.
Them’s the facts, lolwot.
Max
“That data (surface and satellite) do not show a statistically significant warming since 1998, and certainly none for the past decade (since 2002).”
Yes, the trend (hadcrut4) since 1998 is 0.038 +- 0.134C/decade. since 2002 it is -0.047 +- 0.18C/decade.
“Prior to that there was a strong warming signal of around 0.15C per decade, since the 1970s.”
Yes for example the trend from 1970-1998 is 0.156 +- 0.06C/decade.
“this warming trend has stopped (i.e. the “pause” in warming).”
No, you’ve got the numbers right but your conclusion is wrong.
The numbers do not support the idea that the warming trend has stopped. A pause or stop is a trend of zero. Yet the trend since 1998 is 0.038 +- 0.134C/decade. That’s not zero. It’s an uncertainty range that covers up to 0.17C/decade warming. You can’t just pick out zero from that range and ignore the other possibilities.
Also note that the trend from 1970-1998 overlaps with the trend since 1998:
0.156 +- 0.06C/decade
0.038 +- 0.134C/decade
Therefore we can’t even say the warming trend has slowed down. Afterall the uncertainty range in the trend from 1970-1998 covers 0.15C/decade warming while the uncertainty since 1998 covers a higher value 0.17C/decade. That wouldn’t be a slow down.
lolwot: Do your trend uncertainties include autocorrelation?
I’m guessing not.
That makes them useless.
You simply can’t make statistically meaningful conclusions about such short time periods.
Judith Curry ought to know that.
yes they include autocorrelation, not that I calculated the trends myself though.
I am not making conclusions, I am arguing against other conclusions, namely the argument:
1. data over some period has a trend of eg 0.1 +- 0.2C/decade
2. therefore the trend over that period is not statistically significant
3. therefore warming stopped at the start of that period
You know David Appel and others, Lucia has some interesting recent posts on this issue of recent trends and the climate models and when we can falsify the models. Getting pretty close to the edge of the Hansen doctrine that if you run a weather model on a course grid that gives nonsense in the short term, somehow all those errors go away and you get sucked into the allmighty attractor. She also takes on Trenberth’s cherry picking on this issue.
yeah david, remarkable insightful guesswork like “Of course we can’t be sure what Trenberth is really rebutting or claiming because his blog post is utterly vague about precisely what he is claiming or what he is rebutting”
but we’ll do it anyway?
“You simply can’t make statistically meaningful conclusions about such short time periods.
Judith Curry ought to know that.”
wrong. you can make all manner of statistically meaningful conclusions about short time periods. In fact you can make an infinite number of them.
It all depends on the null you want to test.
You can’t make them about monthly, autocorrelated temperature data,
“David Appell | June 21, 2013 at 12:18 am |
You can’t make them about monthly, autocorrelated temperature data,”
Yes you can.
Take the last 10 years of monthly autocorrelated temperature data.
Test the null hypothesis: the trend is greater that 1 million degrees C per decade.
Result: the null is rejected.
As I said David you can make ALL SORTS of statistically meaningful statements about a 10 year set of monthly autocorrelated data. an infinite number of them.
You can also test a null that the trend is 0. You will get a confidence factor associated with that statement. Its a meaningful statement.
Steven Mosher wrote:
Test the null hypothesis: the trend is greater that 1 million degrees C per decade.
With ridiculous examples like that, I rest my case.
PS: Science rarely proves or disproves the null hypothesis.
David.
here is your claim
“You simply can’t make statistically meaningful conclusions about such short time periods.”
I showed you how you can make statistically meaningful conclusions. You are mathematically wrong. The question isnt one of statistics. The question is can you make statements that are
1. statistically meaningful
2. relevant to the climate change issue.
That is far more difficult than you make it out to be
Chief Hydrologist | June 20, 2013 at 8:41 pm said: ”Satellite data from CERES shows warming as a result of less cloud”
when is cloudy, days are cooler, BUT nights are warmer – overall it cancel itself. Scared to get out off the box you have being put in?
fellas, Chief said that emus are using rocks as their dentures; so he decided to use rocks for his brains… go away Chief, stop driveling!!! .
you and Jim D are the most prolific crappers, clogging the broadband, slows down other people’s computers…
Many birds eat rocks which accumulate in the gizzard and help grind food down. No Stefan – they are not eating rocks because they are hungry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o99sz7iomOs
If you ever looked at data rather than spouting anything that emerges from your fetid little brain – it would be the first time.
As a result of some of the above comments, I did a comparison with a 2001 IPCC forecast. You’ll be very surprised (as I was) at the results. http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-well-are-ipccs-temperature.html
Uh you are wrong:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1990/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1990/trend
Sorry, Lolwot, not wrong. The IPCC was not forecasting a trend, they were forecasting a comparison to the year 1990. There has been no net warming when you compare 2013 to 1990.
Now, do I think that is a good methodology? No. But, it is the methodology the IPCC chose to use. By their methodology, their forecast is falsified.
The IPCC were not forecasting individual years. So no you can’t compare single years to 1990 like that.
Lolwot, I gave you the benefit of the doubt in my first reply. Now, it appears you are just wanting to move the goalposts. Read the caption on the graph and read the description in the text (link at my blog). It is clearly a comparison to one year, 1990. You may not like that, but it is what it is.
But it’s not meant to predict specific years. Also you haven’t even calculated the value for 1990. You’ve just stuck a huge box covering about 0.3C. No wonder you can’t see the warming if your error is as high as 0.3C.
hadcrut3 1990 was 0.255C (annual average). 2012 was 0.405C.
The warming trend since 1990 is statistically significant.
It’s not zero.
lolwol — The satellite-based temperature has the advantage of not being distorted by the urban heat island effect. If you look at the satellite-based temperature at http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ you can see that today’s temperature is very slightly above 1990. The latest month’s deviation is +0.07 degrees. The average for 1990 appears to be about -0.05. That’s a growth of 0.12 in 23 years, which projects to hal a degree per century.
Maybe that rise is statistically significant, whatever that means. But, it’s certainly small. If global temperature grows at half a degree per century, then it’s simply not a threat.
The surface-based temperature has the advantage of not being distorted by orbital decay of satellites.
orbital decay versus rural decay, Hmmm? I’ll stick with the oceans.
Not the dataset I was using. You are using the variance adjusted data. I am using the unadjusted data and have consistently used it since I started covering global warming. I have intentionally not varied from that because I didn’t ever want to be accused of changing data sets to match a hypothesis.
Go get the unadjusted HADCRUT 3 and you will get a different value the last 12 months.
I am using the unadjusted data
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT3-gl.dat
It shows 2012 was far warmer than 1990.
You are correct and I will correct my blog entry.
That said, the forecast is still wrong. The value of 0.15 is outside of the 95% confidence range.
Wow. Appell is getting desperate and shrill. Global warming narrative is dying, his credibility as a science writer is dying with it, and he’s going through the five stages of grief.
I’d love to say it’s funnier than phuck watching this schit go down and seeing the careers of the alarmists go up in smoke.
So I will.
It’s funnier than phuck watching this schit go down and seeing the careers of the alarmists go up in smoke.
I’d like to say I hope Appell has some other way to pay to the bills but I’d be lying so I won’t.
calm down dear
If I’m not calm you can tell by me using CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
There were none in the missive you reference ergo I was quite calm.
On the subject of the political orientation of the sides of the global warming debate, as Mosher has already noted the Lewdoofsky “survey” was just more BS piled higher and deeper (PhD in his case.) Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say a good number of global warming skeptics are UK classical liberals, libertarians in the US, and/or conservatives.
That being said, let’s take a sneak a peek at the pro-AWG’ers. Most of them are nothing more than useful “save the Earth and the Children” idiots to the lyin’-spyin’, election-riggin’ Obama and his gang of sneaky, socialist, AR-15 totin’, ammunition hoggin’, SS jack booted Dimowit thugs. When it comes to science the only reason being they know the difference between a pound and a kilogram is because they spend 80% of their useless waking hours on this Earth stoned out of their teeny gourds.
So stuff that into your hippie-fired clay pipe, stoke it up, and enjoy.
you too dear lol
It just occurred to me that Dr Curry is putting the word pause in quotes. Eg:
The Economist on The New Republic on the ‘pause’
Perhaps the quotes indicate that Dr Curry hesitates to accept the pause is real. Otherwise why put it in quotes?
It’s kind of telling that you and your kin haven’t trotted out Hansen’s it’s-easy-as-ABC chart lately.
We’ve given up trying to get skeptics to understand it. Skeptics are stubbornly stuck on insisting that we should compare observations to Hansen’s scenario A, even though actual emissions fell below scenario B. Generally skeptics say “ah look Co2 followed scenario A!” but ignore that CFCs and methane didn’t.
No amount of explaining it works.
You can have a go understanding it if you want.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction-advanced.htm
Right, lolwot. Even the tortured hadcrut3 dataset is following scenario C and becoming more divergent as time goes on. I can see why it’s an embarrassment.
That’s the other thing, Hansen’s model had a sensitivity of over 4C per doubling.
The amount that the prediction has undershot the observations implies climate sensitivity is lower, about 3C per doubling.
Of course skeptics don’t like that idea, they think we should just ignore the results if it doesn’t match perfectly.
It’s kind of sad that people can look at this graph and not understand how remarkably good Hansen’s prediction was.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/hansen121.jpg
Considering it was made in 1988 when both the temperature records and the models were in their infancy. He had no guarantee that the world would warm from 1988 to present. Indeed skeptics were still arguing in the early 2000s that there hadn’t been any warming since 1979.
It’s a remarkably good piece of work from a good scientist.
@lolwot
‘It is a remarkably good piece of work from a good scientist’
Just one thing he got wrong. The predictions.
And if the entire raison d’etre is to make predictions – and they turn out to be wrong, it rather negates the whole purpose n’est-ce pas?
Please will you and Mr. Hansen accept the sound of one hand clapping from me.
Hansen claimed regional skill for his model in 1988, something it still doesn’t have.
============
lolwot – I’m not sure what an “implied” climate sensitivity is. I would rather know the explicit one.
lolwot – I give you Hansen’s talent. But we are dealing with climate, not weather. Personally, I don’t see that 30 years is enough to elucidate a climate trend, empirical and Mosher be damed :) , or to figure out what factors are playing a dominate role. More and more it is looking like there was a large temperature spike in the nineties which were jumped on by Al Bore and some climate scientists. It has taken over a decade to reveal the folly in that. So, I still say we wait at least 30 more years. In the meantime, putting together a sane nuclear program that includes small nukes and Yucca Mountain (Harry Reid be damned as well), and we would have the best “no regrets” policy around.
Didn’t Hansen predict the water would be halfway up the side of Manhattan Island by now. I think he predicted in 1988 that the island would be completely underwater within 40 years.
Spanking good science, I’d say. How about you lolwot?
kim wrote:
Hansen claimed regional skill for his model in 1988, something it still doesn’t have.
Where/when did Hansen say that? Seriously, I’d like to know (and need a source or citation.)
lolwot wrote:
That’s the other thing, Hansen’s model had a sensitivity of over 4C per doubling.
Exactly. The point of models — like the point of any calculation in science — is to make better models.
They aren’t holy writ, and those who interpret them as such (who aren’t the modelers themselves) are responsible for their misunderstanding.
David Appell, at the time of the hearing, Washington, D.C. and the Southeast were undergoing a heat wave, the one the despicable Colorado Congressman, Tim Wirth?, opened the windows for, making the hearing room stifling. That hornswoggling son of a sea monster later crowed to the news his act of deception. During that hearing James Hansen claimed that the Southeast heat wave was a consequence of global warming and his model showed it, or words to that general effect. I don’t have a transcript, but hope you do.
He was claiming regional skill, something the models still don’t have. As a matter of fact, they don’t even have global skill.
Where can we go to get our economy back?
=================
BTW – If you want a possible way to avoid Obama and his prying pals, try these instead of Google.
https://us2.startpage.com/eng/
https://www.ixquick.com/
Hey David. I read your blog about people on blogs talking about climate that know no science.
I, David Springer, challenge you, David Appell, to a closed door general science quiz. No electronics. No notes. Just us and our brains. The test to be composed on the fly by random selection of end-of-chapter quiz questions from college level science textbooks. Putz. Pretend to not see this.
As someone who would like to prove to us that AGW theory is more than simple conjecture perhaps he can tell us, what is the null hypothesis?
I am willing to put up my education and experience up against David appell regarding science credentials.
though I bet he will kick my ass if it is just a physics test.
Prof.Curry: I know that it is a bit pedantic, but the author of the article is Will Wilkinson. Houston is the city where he writes…
David Appell commented : ”Ice doesn’t melt, and the seas don’t rise, for no reason at all”.
Ice seats on a sea salty water / salt is and always was melting it; it’s up to how much availability of raw material to replenish itself every season
2] seas rise because of billions of cubic meters of sediments washed into the sea every year PLUS the dryer / bigger the deserts gets = more water into the sea PLUS: Aral sea is getting empty, lake Chad has 25% of the water than it had 50y ago, all that extra water gone into the sea.
You didn’t allow the real factors; because it doesn’t suit the misleading propaganda
numbnut | June 20, 2013 at 8:53 pm |
So you are demanding a month be 0.15C higher than the most extreme month of the 1998 el-nino-of-the-century.
Or….?
what’s happens if there is no such month? what are you implying that means? that there’s been no super el nino since 1998?
Most months to date are well below that. I would suggest that the 1998 El Nino was the first half of an ENSO ‘dragon-king’ – extreme variability associated with a critical transition. A climate shift. Climate transitioned into the cool mode of the Pacific Decadal Variation in 1998/2001. A cool PDO and more frequent and intensive La Nina for 20 to 40 years – a slightly different estimate than the one in the NASA link I quoted earlier.
This is not about the statistics of surface temperature – but the oceanographic significance of these patterns. It is about science and not trendology.
This latest economist article seems to be one more confirmation of the collapsing confidence in the climate scientists’ and their advocacy of CAGW. The trend is confirmed by the Timeline chart showing the collapsing interest in climate change in the English media worldwide: news articles, news stories, blogs, twitter and YouTube videos. Interest has more than halved in the past year and is no about 10% of what it was at its peak in 2009. Interest seems to be declining at an increasing rate.
http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?
This UN poll (running now) is also interesting: http://www.myworld2015.org/
Climate change ranks as the lowest priority of the sixteen priorities.
[Australia seems to be and exception where it seems the voters are comprised mostly of the young, idealistic and gullible, and the inner-city elites, because the Australian voters ranked climate change as the 6th highest priority. I guess, in most cases, only Labor and Greens supporters bother to fill in such polls.]
The ‘skeptics’ accept the pause and they accept natural variability, but they don’t accept that the pause could even possibly be natural variability on top of background warming.
The last century has been faster-than-expected warming interspersed with pauses. Have we not learned that this is a superposition of natural variability and steadily increasing global warming?
You can expect what you like. I’ll do my own expecting.
Jim D
It’s dangerous to make proclamations regarding what (you believe) others think.
Because in this case you are wrong.
As a skeptic, I
– accept the pause
– accept that it could be due to natural variability
– accept that there might even be a smidgen of background warming concealed by it
Satisfied now?
Now let me ask you
Do you
– accept the pause
– accept that it could be due to natural variability
– accept that the natural variability has overwhelmed the greenhouse warming despite unabated GHG emissions and atmospheric concentrations reaching record levels?
If so, Jim, we’re on the same page.
Max
Actually the pause has several causes that could explain it, including natural variability in the ocean circulation and sun. By themselves these causes should lead to cooling, so we have evidence of a warming background even here.
Jim D
Believe it or not, it looks like we are on the same page.
The current “pause” is real and natural factors (variability, forcing, whatever) appear to have overwhelmed a warming trend that may have been at least partly a result of human GHG emissions.
Right?
Max
TSI changes are minor as we have discussed before – and the sun is at the cycle peak. But this should decline over the next hundred years – and certainly to 2020. The big factor is these ocean changes – which are at a 1000 year high.
Jim D puts his finger on why the models trend high. Now move your finger and take a look.
============
As I mentioned above, history tells us that the pause will be followed by faster-than-expected warming. 0.2 C per decade would be a minimum to expect.
Bets are off, Jim D, since the IPCC’s 0.2 deg C/dec counted on little input from the oceans and the sun. It is inconsistent to persist with that and also acknowledge the role of the sun and the seas.
================
Chief Hydrologist | June 21, 2013 at 12:55 am said: ”the sun is at the cycle peak. But this should decline over the next hundred years – and certainly to 2020. The big factor is these ocean changes – which are at a 1000 year high”
chief this comment of yours it ”the mother of all top of the head drivels”
you are trying to outsmart even the emus, but the emus know that: Brisbane is cooler during the day than Birdswille, because of the proximity to the sea, Yes Brisbane is warmer at night; but because night temp for all you zombies inside the box is not existent… emus one V chief zero
Natural variation will again augment warming? Perhaps. What history actually says is that these ocean patterns in the 20th Century were quite unusual.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=61
Could decline, not should, over the next century.
================
kim, the oceans warm and cool 0.1 C around the mean in decadal averages, so we won’t see much more than that net effect. The sun can cool us 0.5 C if it goes towards a Maunder Minimum. This extreme case will offset half of the warming we have seen so far, and so may delay CO2 warming by a couple of decades, but won’t stop it.
Most of the recent warming seems likely not to not to be CO2.
There are many others factors involved where warming may lead to abrupt and significant cooling. One of these is an open Arctic leading to cold and much more snow in the NH. I cite Judith for this. This can lead to ice sheet growth if the insolation conditions are right – or increased runoff and a reduction in THC if not.
You seem to think you can predict things with a simple narrative. It is delusional nonsense that is largely without any relevant science and with pulling numbers out of your arse. Which I have complained about before.
Heh, now you’re up to 0.25 deg C/dec. Hey, the skies the limit.
===============
In the critical period of 1976 to 1998 – most of the warming occurred in a couple of ENSO events at the end points. Most of the rest seems associated with changes in reflected SW in the satellite data. But I know you think that is 2.4 W/m2 warming and 0.5 W/m2 LW cooling feedback form a theoretical 0.5 W/m2 LW CO2 warming. Let’s say I am a bit skeptical.
kim | June 21, 2013 at 1:14 am said: ”Pick a climate sensitivity that frightens you. Now calculate how much colder we would now be without AnthroCO2”
Kim, reverse psychology only works on honest people with common sense; not many of them here. Fanatics like Jim D &the chief have two mouths each, but no ears… . .
Jim D | June 21, 2013 at 12:27 am mislead: ”The ‘skeptics’ accept the pause and they accept natural variability, but they don’t accept that the pause could even possibly be natural”
WRONG! The Fakes accept, not the genuine Skeptic.
there wasn’t any warmings; didn’t need to pause – the ”pause” is referred to: too many people started scrutinizing the warmist doo-doo
Jim D | June 21, 2013 at 12:44 am said: ”. By themselves these causes should lead to cooling”
If CO2 prevented cooling as you are saying; the big polluters should be awarded, instead of ripped-off!!!
Pick a climate sensitivity that frightens you. Now calculate how much colder we would now be without AnthroCO2.
====================
kim, that’s easy, at any climate sensitivity we’d likely be about 0.5C cooler than present. Ie 1950s level of temperature.
See not a problem. CO2 hasn’t “saved us” from some cold hell. The 1950s were perfectly fine.
But if sensitivity is 3C per doubling of CO2 that implies the world will warm about 6C in total due to man over the next 200 years. If it’s 2C per doubling then about 4C. The total warming due to man should be about double the sensitivity under a ‘do nothing’ about emissions scenario.
Obviously this is far higher than the 2C safe level of warming, which itself is not guaranteed to be safe, it’s just a guide. The world doesn’t naturally warm up by more than a few tenths of a degree over a century. That’s not part of it’s operating pattern. The 20th century rise of 0.8C was highly unusual.
Don’t be complacent about the great terraforming experiment man is performing. When people look back at our generation there will be three types of people. Those who are ignorant of the problem, the majority. Those like me who understand the risk and spoke out, and those like you who knew the risk but willfully and wrecklessly ignored it.
All this discussion is being recorded on the internet for future generations to look back on.
Sorry lolwot, the higher the sensitivity, the colder we would now be without AnthroCO2. How you came up with the ’50s is mysterious, and you are inconsistent in attribution.
I’m not afraid of your curses. CAGW has been ‘An Extraordinary Popular Delusion and Madness of the Crowd’ that has already damaged future generations by the vast lost opportunity costs of this magnificent boondoggle. I’m also of the mind that AGW will be net beneficial.
==========================
“Sorry lolwot, the higher the sensitivity, the colder we would now be without AnthroCO2.”
No, because the warming has only just started. It’s same reason you can’t calculate ECS simply taking the surface warming to date and dividing by the forcing to date but in reverse.
If you want to short-cut all that, just take a look at this graph:
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/images/models/modeled_and_observed_temperature.gif
Warmists don’t accept that the ‘background warming’ is natural variability too. The long 10 ka trend is cooling.
the long 10ka trend is irrelevant on human timescales as it’s so shallow
Not really, if the longterm cooling is about to continue, which is very likely.
I looked it up, the longterm “cooling” turns out to be about 0.006C/century. I wonder if it’s even statistically significant.
How do you expect that to overwhelm the FAR bigger influence of man?
I am not convinced of any influence of man. The longterm cooling consists of many multi-decadal/centennial ups and downs. The downs are more pronounced, otherwise there would be no longterm cooling. After the warming since the LIA, a down is likely.
Yup. In the urge to get rid of the MWP and the LIA, the millenial scale changes were neglected. The millenial scale changes will not return the favor and neglect us.
======================
The millennial scale changes are small, a few tenths of a degree.
http://www.carbonvirgin.com/cotent_images/files/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
lolwot, those days are over – nobody’s buying it anymore. go back to school – it’s basic geography. Don’t deny climate change.
“We’ve lost decades in climate science by failing to pay adequate attention to natural climate variability.”
Yes, but one of the obstacles, besides paradigm paralysis, which is now weakening, is that many scientists want to have exact physical mechanisms that influence global climate change before they can accept it. That’s not sensible because we may not figure out exact mechanisms for many decades and much longer, but we can still detect correlations and patterns (solar, orbital…), and predict future climate change (multidecadal and longer).
Elephant in the room of course
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
ARGO is paused(heh), deeper heat is imagined, sea level rise rate hasn’t changed, and if there is deeper heat it will warm us at the end of the Holocene. Mice scared off your elephant.
==========
Interview with Hans von Storch in der Spiegel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html
Dang, ya beat me.
========
Watts Up has an interview with von Storch, called by some Germany’s Judith Curry. He says that in five years ‘at the latest’ climate modelers will have to acknowledge fundamental problems with the models if the pause continues.
He also admits the two most likely possibilities for the fundamental problems, undervaluation of natural effects and overvaluation of the CO2 effect. No wonder moshe likes him so much.
=========
Watts Up commenters are keying on von Storch’s ‘instinct’ comment. Hey, is that what trillion dollar decisions have come down to?
============
I think the guy was speaking colloquially. And carelessly. It’s pretty obvious to me he realized he over-stepped with the “certainly” and tried to walk it back. it damages an otherwise stunning interview. He’s also shooting from the hip on the “5 year” thing. To borrow from Seinfeld, the pause is real, and it’s spectacular. That the MSM is reporting it now is devastating for most of these guys. I don’t imagine Mann is getting much sleep these days.
Speaking of sleeping, someone ought to wake up the peacefully slumbering Obama with his pleasant dreams of climate certainty.
R. Tol thinks the word von Storch used in German is closer to probably than certainly.
========
Hi Kim, I wondered about that too. The language thing. It just seemed strange that he’d suddenly do that 180. I was relieved so see him walk it back. Otherwise he struck me as measured, frank, and refreshingly willing to own up to mistakes. The anger and arrogance that characterizes so many alarmist scientists was entirely missing…
I loved the part where he says, (words to this effect). “why should it be bad for climate science? This is what science is… a series of mistakes that we work to correct.”)
The activists are like ‘Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning’. The rest of us poor sods are like Mr. McWilliams.
‘One after another of those people lay down on the ground to laugh–and two of them died.’
H/t S. Langhorne C.
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Lol.
The deep oceans are warming. Van Storch just agreed.
That means during this paws to date the ever enhancing enhanced GHE has been working by an enhanced amount each and every new day.
If the heat ever comes out of the deep ocean in significant amounts, it means there is a TOA imbalance typified by more energy going out than energy coming in, which is not going to do the end of the Holocene much good at all in terms of it being a comfortable temperature outside. It would be, I think, a race to space. Cold energy (remember it’s cold in the deep dark oceans) heading up through a cold sky to escape into even colder space. Brr.
Reading through everything swirling around The Pause, I cannot understand why the warmists, our hostess, lolwot, Steven Mosher etc. cannot bring themselves to say four little words “We just dont know”. It is becoming abundantly clear that Physics cannot tell us anything QUANTITATIVE about what happens when we add more CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels. That is the plain and simple truth.
CAGW is a perfectly viable hypothesis, and no-one can prove it is wrong. By the same token, no-one can prove that it is right. I wonder how many scientists, warmists and skeptics both, would agree with that simple analysis.
simple. all knowledge is uncertain, except perhaps 2+2=4. All science is uncertain. So its always the case that we don’t know, but we can limit our ignorance. For example. We know that lambda is positive.
lambda = the change in termperature for a change in forcing. we know that if more watts come in the temperature will go up. The exact value of lambda– .1, .3, .75 1… may be unknown, but we know its not 0. and we know its not 10000. So, we always dont know, but at the same time we know our ignorance is bounded. In your world ignorance is unbounded. You think that because you can’t know precisely, or because you cant know in your preferred way of knowing, that you know nothing.
Tell me Jim. Do you know how much you weighed at 9:53 pm, august 21 1930? do you know nothing about this or something? is your knowledge complete or limited? can you put boundaries on it
Can warming lead to cooling? If an open Arctic creates conditions for colder and snowier winters in the NH – as Judith has suggested – there is the potential for ice sheet growth in the right insolation conditions or increased melt and a slowdown of THC – as everyone is suggesting.
In the dynamically complex system that is climate – sensitivity is both temporally and spatially variable and can indeed be negative.
“lambda = the change in termperature for a change in forcing. we know that if more watts come in the temperature will go up. The exact value of lambda– .1, .3, .75 1… may be unknown, but we know its not 0. and we know its not 10000.”
Therefore does a pause mean that no more Watts are coming in?
curious,
You are engaging in the fallacy of thinking words actually mean what they are defined as meaning. Warming can mean cooling. Measure means estimate. Global warming can include no warming whatsoever. Dictionaries are not allowed in the climate debate.
“In the dynamically complex system that is climate – sensitivity is both temporally and spatially variable and can indeed be negative.”
not really, lambda is defined for the entire space. temporally, we arent interested in short time frames.
But go ahead and amaze me. show that we could triple the watts from the sun for 100 years and have temperature go down.
“But go ahead and amaze me. show that we could triple the watts from the sun for 100 years and have temperature go down.”
Why would anyone do that? I thought the postulated forcing is fractional in percentage terms?
And speak for yourself about lack of interest in short timescales.
Steven, you write “lambda = the change in termperature for a change in forcing. we know that if more watts come in the temperature will go up.”
Yes and no. What do you mean by “more watts come in”? If the solar constant increases, then, I agree, more “watts come in”. But if all that happens is that the amount of CO2 increases, then “more watts” do not come in; the watts stay the same. More watts are hindered from getting out, but in the end they do get out. So all forcings are not the same. I can understand that if more watts actually come in, then temperatures must rise. But if the watts stay the same, I can see no a priori reason why temperatures must rise. The atmosphere has many ways of overcoming a forcing caused by the hinderance of watts getting out, which we do not undertstand. Can you explain, please.
Steven Mosher | June 21, 2013 at 11:10 am | Reply
“lambda = the change in termperature for a change in forcing. we know that if more watts come in the temperature will go up.”
We only know beyond reasonable doubt this happens on airless rocks. On earth we have a ocean with an average temperature of 4C. It’s easily possible that more power into the system changes thermohaline circulation such that the deep ocean and mixed layer temperatures come closer together. Given the deep ocean volume is 10x the mixed layer a small amount of deep warming translates to a great amount of mixed layer cooling. Greater energy input to the surface guarantees greater potential energy available to accomplish work where the work is horizontal and vertical currents. I believe the Gulf Stream is observed speeding up. This also explains the pause.
Another possibility is more heat into the ocean produces more snowfall over land and that this diminishes continental temperature through albedo increase while leaving the ocean alone to stay warm because it’s albedo is unchanged. That’s a decent explanatory factor in what brings an end to interglacial periods. Eventually the buildup of glaciers reduces the area covered by ocean through locking up water in land-based ice. Snow stops but the reduced surface area of the ocean is insufficient to keep sea ice depressed and zingo-zango it takes 100,000 years of lowered snowfall to wear away the glaciers and increase ocean surface area.
A water world changes everything. Write that down.
“In the dynamically complex system that is climate – sensitivity is both temporally and spatially variable and can indeed be negative.”
not really, lambda is defined for the entire space. temporally, we arent interested in short time frames.
But go ahead and amaze me. show that we could triple the watts from the sun for 100 years and have temperature go down.
Perhaps more realistically is that an more open Arctic warming leads to more snow and subsequently increased melt, freshening of the Arctic seas and an abrupt change in thermohaline circulation. But then you’re not known for being realistic are you Mosh.
[T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for “customers” or “gamblers”-in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government’s selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy. ~Ian Plimer
Uh, a word of warning to some of the skeptics crowing about the pause. Or how a continuation will cause the whole consensus to collapse.
Skeptics don’t know what the future climate will be any more than the climate scientists who have been predicting imminent thermageddon. In fact, if was the over blown predictions of the warmists following the period of perceived significant warming, culminating in the 1998 el Nino, that gave the CAGW political movement such momentum. Their assumption that it wouid continue unabated, and particularly their saying so to try to drive policy, has come back to haunt them.
So it is indeed true that the pause in reported temperatures has helped keep the wind out of the sails of the great ship Decarbonization. But it would only take a couple of years of serious warming for that to change. And the warming would not even have to be global.
This is about politics. In particular, it is about politics in western governments with primarily democratic governments, where the real money is. You don’t see a lot of time and effort being spent trying to get the Chinese communists to change their ways.
So if there are a series of years in which western voters experience hot summers and milder winters, they will be more likely to believe that “the pause is over – the climate is coming to get us!” And they will allow the progressive politicians who still control virtually all of the governments much greater leeway in policy.
Skeptics by and large think natural variability drives climate, not human activity. Skeptics also generally believe that we don’t really understand the climate enough to model it or predict it with any accuracy. And pretty much everyone agrees you can’t predict with any accuracy for a short time period.
So I would just advise caution in throwing the victory party too quickly. Everybody thought the battle was done after Copenhagen collapsed, and here we still are.
Oh, and don’t forget, those temp records so many skeptics like to quibble over on tenths of a degree one way or another, are still all, as far as I know, produced by CAGW true believers.
Garym
Absolutely correct. We don’t know.
I noted the sharp drop in CET over the last decade here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
My guess is that a trend established over 350 years will continue eventually and this decade will look like a blip. However, the longer the drop continues and the more pronounced it becomes the more you think this might be different to other reversals, but the plain fact is we don’t know.
tonyb
i’m expecting the sun to get into the act with its Cheshire Cat sunspots and it scares the bejesus out of me. Years ago I said that if we are wrong-footed into mitigating a warming catastrophe that isn’t happening rather than adapting to a cooling catastrophe that is happening, there will be Hell to pay.
Faust anyone?
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We are in a cool mode and these last for 20 to 40 years in the proxy records. So it could change relatively soon or persist for decades and there is no way of telling.
There is no way of telling either what the next climate shift will bring. Major cooling seems possible in a decade or less. We have entered the danger zone of NH insolation. Changes to THC seem entirely possible.
Global warming alarmist should be eating crow. Skeptics are not crowing about a cooling trend. Humanity is not causing it. Humanity cannot do anything to stop it. And, the same thing goes for global warming. We all will have to see what nature has in store for us.
No, it’s just his way of avoiding rude people and (as I said before) wastes of time.
I keep checking in to see if DA has accepted DS`s challenge to a sit down science quiz. But please not a closed door event. Do it for charity. I will be glad to pay 3000 rubles for a seat and pretend it is a good chess match. Based on DA`s limited knowledge here maybe he better decline. Maybe his failure to respond is his way of saying nyet spasiba.
Since there is no doubt that the future scenario will be business as usual, unless we nuke China and India, then I will beleive the alarmist thesis when I see the temperature rise by between 4 to 10°C.
Where is my four degrees dude?!
ie sorry
What I see is that Judith Curry uses political opinion articles to seek confirmation for her assertions about scientific questions, instead of seeking and/or providing the scientific evidence for her assertions about the scientific questions.
My assertions about scientific questions is that the ‘answers’ that we think we have are actually highly uncertain.
So then why do you post political opinion articles?
Perhaps merely to engage with the politics, rather than seek confirmation as Jan said?
If so, then wouldn’t stand to reason that there would be reasonably close balance in the political perspectives you present. Is there?
Or do you more or less selectively seek out those political opinion articles that are in-line with one side of the debate only?
‘Cause it would seem to me that to do the later would be an awful like advocacy (and of course, we know how much distaste you have for mixing advocacy and science, right?) Personally, think that mixing advocacy and science can be problematic, but I don’t think it should be demonized and I don’t think it can be avoided. What can be avoided is a one-sided approach to advocacy, eh Judith?
Judith, you write “My assertions about scientific questions is that the ‘answers’ that we think we have are actually highly uncertain.”
It is this sort of statement that I have difficulty with. I can understand that when one makes a measurement one always gets a +/- accuracy, which can make that actual value “uncertain”; but the uncertainty is defined. But I dont think that you are talking about measurements. So that brings me, once again, to the question as to how much the “uncertainty” that there is, impacts with the IPCC assessments at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-7.html
Aleatoric uncertainty, aka statistical uncertainty, which is unknowns that differ each time we run the same experiment. For an example of simulating the take-off of an airplane, even if we could exactly control the wind speeds along the run way, if we let 10 planes of the same make start, their trajectories would still differ due to fabrication differences. Similarly, if all we knew is that the average wind speed is the same, letting the same plane start 10 times would still yield different trajectories because we do not know the exact wind speed at every point of the runway, only its average. Aleatoric uncertainties are therefore something an experimenter cannot do anything about: they exist, and they cannot be suppressed by more accurate measurements.
Epistemic uncertainty, aka systematic uncertainty, which is due to things we could in principle know but don’t in practice. This may be because we have not measured a quantity sufficiently accurately, or because our model neglects certain effects, or because particular data are deliberately hidden.
Both exist in the climate field.
Yes, this is one of your assertions. The answer to the question whether it is true or false what you assert won’t be found in articles of the Economist or in any other political opinion articles.
Amazing what a set of blinders will do to what one sees.
Media entities are talking about pause and uncertainty. Why? Where are they getting their information from? It couldn’t be climate scientists, could it? Because we have already been told there is 97% consensus. There is no uncertainty and certainly no pause.
The debate is over. Now is the time for climate action. If you don’t believe me, ask any of the 1000 or so loons who plan to walk across the country demanding it. I’ll bet you’ll get 1005 consensus from them.
Thunderstorms are going to vacuum up the water, return it to Earth as cold rain, and send the heat to outer space.
The policy implications of a pause are overwhelmingly obvious. The facts of the pause are based on quite broad based science and are not in dispute – as opposed to post hoc rationalization – other than by the cognitively dissonant. The expectation from many sources is that the pause will continue for a while yet.
The unanticipated pause – well some of us anticipated it – http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html – creates the justification for a political backlash against green overreach. Unfortunate in my view. Uncertainty is contrasted to a certainty that has failed – but uncertainty seems less of a reason to abandon caution than otherwise.
But we have yet more irrelevant, misguided and ignorant nonsense from Joshua that misses the point again. It seems more like that the only point he is interested in or capable of expressing is the point he reiterates time and again. It gets a bit boring.
The political motivations for both Jan and Joshua to mischaracterize the discussion are evident and hugely and tediously trivial.
Chief Hydrologist, you make quite a bold claim:
The facts of the pause are based on quite broad based science and are not in dispute – as opposed to post hoc rationalization – other than by the cognitively dissonant.
So, tell me, what are the “facts of the pause” in global warming, which were not in dispute and based on “quite broad based science”. It should be easy for you then to tell me those facts and name the scientific references where the evidence has been laid out, which makes the claims about the “pause” “facts”.
I think it should start with a definition of “pause”. What are the scientific criteria to diagnose a “pause” in global warming?
Otherwise, I would said you are resorting to a fait-accompli fallacy.
Seriously? Start with NASA and drill down.
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
Chief Hydrologist,
How does the link answer my question? I didn’t aks for press releases where someone talks in general terms about natural variability patterns, like the one related to El Nino/La Nina, and that they overlay the global warming trend. That is really not news. I wanted to know what the alleged “facts of the pause” in global warming were, which you are claiming, what scientific references you have to offer for it, and what the scientific criteria are to diagnose such a “pause”. Are you saying every temporary wobble coming from natural variability against the longer-term trend was a “pause”, even if the wobble wasn’t statistically significant at all? Well, one could define “pause” in this way. It’s just quite pointless then. And I wonder what’s all the fuss about, since no one has claimed anthropogenically caused climate change was a straight line.
“These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
This seems quite clear cut. These decadal variations added to warming in from 1976 to 1998 and cooled the surface since.
To quote myself.
Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.
The implications are wide ranging. The residual warming in the most recent warming period (1976 to 1998) is at most 0.1 degrees C/decade – not concerning in any sense this century. I discussed this somewhere in response to one other of your idiot questions.
The satellite data indeed shows that other factors were dominant in recent warming. I quoted the IPCC – but here is the original reference – http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf
This latter shows quite clearly that most warming in the most recent warming period was quite natural. Now you might question the accuracy of the data – but it is what it is and says what it says.
You seem quite confused. What else would we categorize as a pause but natural variation that ‘hides the warming’ over decades? You ask for science and I link to NASA quoting reputable scientists on something that has been evident for a decade. Something for which there is an immense amount of science – start from NASA as I suggested and Google it. Yet you insist on defining it as something other than natural variability. What do you imagine I am talking about – divine intervention?
I think you are a bit of a dill.
CH – i don’t recall the H2O feedback part of global warming being verified in any way. The CO2 warming is reasonable, but the H2O bit is lacking.
If the atmosphere is at a higher temperature and water is available then the Clausius–Clapeyron equations show that a higher water vapour content is reasonable. Models assume a constant RH for this reason. There are a number of factors involved in water availability especially over land. For me – the question is still attribution of warming.
Chief Hydrologist wrote:
So you assert the surface had cooled from 1998. Let’s do some fact checking:
Surface trends and 2 sigma intervals in Kelvin/decade since start of 1998 (http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php):
GISTEMP: +0.057+/-0.142
NOAA: +0.033+/-0.130
HadCRUT4: +0.038+/-0.134
No estimated cooling trends in any of the three major surface data sets. Instead, some positive warming trend, although nothing statistically significant.
Or let’s check land only data:
BEST: +0.144+/-0.276
NOAA: +0.101+/-0.221
A larger trend than for the global average. Land warming according to BEST has been statistically significant with at least 1 sigma. NOAA not quite yet.
So, in summary, a higher probability of warming than cooling since 1998, and this despite the Super El Nino right at the beginning of the trend analysis period, and a dominance of La Ninas in recent years.
The surface cooling since 1998 must have happened in your “skeptic” fantasy land.
I asked for scientific references. Your self-quotes don’t fall in this category. They are rather the opposite. But let’s check out the one scientific reference that you bring in there:
Why would I question the accuracy of the data? Here is, what the paper really says:
2) The ocean heat storage and net radiation data, while showing relatively large interannual variability, are consistent with heating predicted from current state-of-the-art coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models (Barnett et al. 2001). The anticipated change in anthropogenic radiative forcing over the next few decades is estimated as 0.6Wm^-2 (decade)^-1 (Houghton et al. 2001). The interannual variability in net radiation is of similar magnitude (0.7 Wm^2). Note that the ocean heat storage dataset for single annual-mean values has a sampling uncertainty of 0.4 W m^2 (1 sigma) so that the larger range of variation in ocean heat storage is more likely due to its larger sampling noise. The radiation dataset has a larger mean bias uncertainty (absolute calibration) but smaller sampling error than the ocean heat storage data. The 10-yr average of ocean heat storage is about 0.6 W m^2, similar to the levels predicted by current climate models for anthropogenic global warming scenarios (Houghton et al. 2001; Hansen et al. 2005).
Thus, the paper actually says something very different compared to what you are asserting about the paper. It’s says the results are consistent with warming from anthropogenic forcing as predicted by the climate models. Not a word in the paper about the warming being “natural”.
You just keep making things up, aren’t you? You seem to be one of those people who try to give their “skeptic” fantasies more weight by referencing to scientific papers, which allegedly support the assertions, but if one checks what the papers really say, it’s something very different. But perhaps I jump to conclusions after only three examples I have seen so far presented by you.
What “decades”? Plural? Are you talking about recent decades? How many decades? More fantasy.
Chief Hydrologist claims:
I ask you to please provide a source for your assertion that the models assume a “constant RH” in their code. It seems to me I have seen you have been making this assertion before.
Thanks.
In most computer models relative humidity tends to remain fixed at current levels. Models that include water vapor feedback with constant relative humidity predict the Earth’s surface will warm nearly twice as much over the next 100 years as models that contain no water vapor feedback.
Using the UARS data to actually quantify both specific humidity and relative humidity, the researchers found, while water vapor does increase with temperature in the upper troposphere, the feedback effect is not as strong as models have predicted. “The increases in water vapor with warmer temperatures are not large enough to maintain a constant relative humidity,” Minschwaner said. These new findings will be useful for testing and improving global climate models.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040316073820.htm
It’s a bit still relevant. I have actually read the study – if you doubt the interpretation by all means go to the source.
You can find this out for yourself without making silly protestations about something or other. What prompts you question this – utter ignorance?
Models certainly do not assume a constant RH. Here is a description of the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 3.0):
http://hanson.geog.udel.edu/~hanson/hanson/CLD_GCM_Experiment_S11_files/description.pdf
Go to section 3.1.18, “Semi-Lagrangian Tracer Transport,” and you will see the forecast equations for water vapor specific humidity.
And Lacis et al explicitedly show the change in water vapor in a model experiment where they zeroed out all the noncondensing GHGs and aerosols. Note the blue line in their Figure 2.
Lacis, A.A, G.A. Schmidt, D. Rind, and R.A. Ruedy, 2010: Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature. Science, 330, 356-359.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/la09300d.html
Chief Hydrologist wrote:
This is really badly phrased. I see where the misunderstanding can come from. The writer of the article misunderstood something him/herself, or wanted to say that the relative humidity tends to stay about the same in simulations with most models, not that it was assumed/prescribed to be like this.
That’s the problem with information from second or third hand, instead from the original sources.
What prompted me? My knowledge about climate models. Which you don’t seem to have. Otherwise you would have noticed that this wasn’t right. So much for “utter ignorance”.
So you assert the surface had cooled from 1998. Let’s do some fact checking…
The surface cooling since 1998 must have happened in your “skeptic” fantasy land.
I assume this is an accurate presentation of the HADcrut4 – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990
The monthly surface temperature has not statistically been exceeded since February 1998. Monthly temperatures have been consistently below this. Trends for such short periods are quite misleading and quite unnecessary.
I asked for scientific references. Your self-quotes don’t fall in this category. They are rather the opposite.
I quoted Anastasios Tsonis – on decadal variability in the 20th Century. Your quibbles are utterly meaningless.
But let’s check out the one scientific reference that you bring in there:
Is that one better than you? But I have in fact referenced a number of studies in this discussion. You – none. Why should that surprise me?
Why would I question the accuracy of the data? Here is, what the paper really says…
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 s3.4.4.1
I suggest that the IPCC is far more savvy than you. That’s a surprise as well.
You just keep making things up, aren’t you? You seem to be one of those people who try to give their “skeptic” fantasies more weight by referencing to scientific papers, which allegedly support the assertions, but if one checks what the papers really say, it’s something very different. But perhaps I jump to conclusions after only three examples I have seen so far presented by you.
I thought there was only one? But your selective quote from Wong et al has been shown to be peripheral to the core of the study. Do you have problems with reading scientific papers? Here’s a hint – the core findings are usually found up front.
What “decades”? Plural? Are you talking about recent decades? How many decades? More fantasy.
I refer you again to the NASA discussion and Tsonis. The science is readily available – e.g.
‘If as suggested here, a dynamically driven climate shift has occurred, the duration of similar shifts during the 20th century suggests the new global mean temperature trend may persist for several decades. Of course, it is purely speculative to presume that the global mean temperature will remain near current levels for such an extended period of time. Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained.’ ftp://starfish.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/pub/ocean/CCS-WG_References/NewSinceReport/March15/Swanson%20and%20Tsonis%20Has%20the%20climate%20recently%20shifted%202008GL037022.pdf
You seem typical of cult of AGW groupthink space cadets – disingenuous, dishonest, foolish, desperate, tendentious, quite hopeless.
Jp says What prompted me? My knowledge about climate models.
Hmm lets test that knowledge shall we.
What is the dimension of a state of the art GCM?.
The climate feedbacks in coupled ocean–atmosphere models are compared using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate change experiments. Water vapor is found to provide the largest positive
feedback in all models and its strength is consistent with that expected from constant relative humidity changes in the water vapor mixing ratio.
Climate models exhibit a large range of sensitivities in response to increased greenhouse gases due to differences in feedback processes that amplify or dampen the initial radiative perturbation (Cubasch and Cess
1990). Although the analysis and validation of these feedbacks are crucial tasks in climate change research, there has never been a coordinated assessment of climate feedbacks in models used for global warming projections. As a result, the relative magnitude of different feedback processes and their contributions to the range of climate sensitivities remain uncertain.
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/bjs0601.pdf
AOS models are widely used for weather, general circulation, and climate, as well as for many more isolated or idealized phenomena: flow instabilities, vortices, internal gravity waves, clouds, turbulence, and biogeochemical and other material processes. However, their solutions are rarely demonstrated to be quantitatively accurate compared with nature. Because AOS models are intended to yield multifaceted depictions of natural regimes, their partial inaccuracies occur even after deliberate tuning of discretionary parameters to force model accuracy in a few particular measures. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.long
I made a simple statement that models assume constant relative humidity. If models departed from that assumption they would be corrected – but until they are validated against nature it remains an assumption.
It is all tendentious and ingenuous. I am a numerical modeler – you seem to be a wanker.
>> I made a simple statement that models assume constant relative humidity.<<
And you're wrong.
Shorter Chief = I was wrong but won’t admit it.
David – you don’t seem to understand the concept of relative humidity yet you pontificate.
Maybe David Appell can tell us what his expectations for RH are in a warming world.
I’ve showed you two models where water vapor content is calculated, not “assumed.” You have yet to show one where RH is assumed. You appear impervious to facts.
Within these constraints, the model does predict that there will be a net increase in the water content of the upper troposphere as the Earth’s surface temperature rises, but not so much that the relative humidity remains constant. That means that water vapor will cause the Earth to warm, because the feedback is positive, but it won’t warm as much as it would if constant relative humidity were maintained—a result that contradicts the assumptions put into big global climate models. “I don’t think too many people would have expected a simple model like this to give a result other than the one that people have been assuming will happen,” Sherwood notes.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WaterVapor/water_vapor3.php
This has been a bizarre little sideline – the ignorant egging on the uninformed.
“Q: Do models assume a constant relative humidity?
A: No…. this is a derived result, not an assumption.”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/
Chief –
Quit while you’re behind. Stop digging.
You’ll still be the same person you were before you made your mistake. Your family will still love you. Your friends will still like you. Admitting to your error won’t make you more or less likely to make other such errors in the future.
The scar is already inflicted. Trying to cover it with a bandage won’t promote healing. Let it be open to the fresh air. Otherwise it will just fester and get infected
This is a pattern with you – like when you reach false conclusions about me or my beliefs – even though you’ve never met me and have insufficient evidence. Think of how you refused to acknowledge error in those many situations.
It’s like that time you weighed in to correct someone else on that graph of public opinion – when in fact it was you that was reading it wrong, in a sloppy and careless misplaced self-confidence. Remember how you refused to acknowledge error.
Relax. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Everyone makes errors. True, not everyone falls victim to an inflated sense of self-importance as often as you, but you only exacerbate that problem by being so afraid of admitting error.
It doesn’t take much brains or scientific understanding to see how you were wrong. It is a matter of simple language and your pathetic attempts to hide it are fooling no one but yourself.
We’ll all continue to love you, Chief. You needn’t wrap up your self-esteem in such a trivial error in the one of thousands of blog posts you write in a week. Sit back, have a beer, and show some accountability.
You’ll feel better for it, I promise you.
Chief –
Here’s the question you were asked:
And here’s your
duckanswer.Heh.
You can run, my friend, but you can’t hide.
It is not my answer Joshua – it is a quote from NASA. You are truly a motivated idiot with a line in psychobabble that is lost on me because frankly I stop reading.
I quoted NASA a couple of times. But from first principles – the assumptions are built into the math. If you have any math experience at all – which leaves Joshua out. This is the nature of math which is validated from observation – in this case it really needs to be satellite based validation. Which was the origin of one the quotes. It seems the assumption is not quite correct.
>> the assumptions are built into the math.<<
It is not. It a *result* of solving the mathematical equations that specify the model.
Where mathematics begins with a set of axioms, physics begins with some assumptions about the nature of the real world. Once these assumptions are cast into mathematical form, we can apply the methods of mathematics to derive consequences of the assumptions. The mathematics will tell us that these consequences are logically true, given our assumptions. However, physics then requires us to take these logical consequences and see if they correctly describe the real world. If they do, then it is evidence that our original assumptions were valid, and we can continue to derive further consequences from them. If at some stage we discover that the logical facts we derive from our assumptions do not match what we find in the real world, then we realize that our original assumptions must have been wrong. We therefore need to make some different assumptions, derive some more consequences, and check their validity with the real world. http://physicspages.com/2010/12/29/14/
I guess you don’t have a clue either David.
It was a quote you provided, Chief, and it isn’t an answer.
You were asked a question point blank. The whole point is that you didn’t answer – you ducked.
Look – I care about you Chief, and I’m just trying to help you out. It’s certainly your prerogative to turn down my advice. I have learned that the best thing to do is give people the tools to better their situation and let them learn from their experiences how to use those tools on their own. Sometimes people just have to bottom-out. It’s clear you haven’t reached that point yet. No worries. I’m sure you’ll get there some day. I have faith in you Chief – perhaps more than you have in yourself.
… because frankly I stop reading.
You’ve made these sorts of comments before, Chief, and just as before it is obviously not accurate now. I don’t think you’re a liar so I’ll just assume that you’re so committed to maintaining your fragile edifice that you need to maintain these elaborate fantasies. It’s all part of the same phenomenon. You’ll get past it one day. I promise. Just know that whenever you’re ready to accept some help, I’m here for you.
In his defense, CH might have been using the 2nd meaning of “assume”, but it doesn’t fully make sense that way, i.e. it attains constant relative humidity given long enough.
Verb
1. Suppose to be the case, without proof:
2. Take or begin to have (power or responsibility):
The quotes from NASA are correct – do you dispute them? And no – I switch off as soon as you morph into dimwitted psychobabble – usally by the second line. Why would you retain the delusion that any of it is interesting enough for me to read? You are just so relentlessly stupid.
Within these constraints, the model does predict that there will be a net increase in the water content of the upper troposphere as the Earth’s surface temperature rises, but not so much that the relative humidity remains constant. That means that water vapor will cause the Earth to warm, because the feedback is positive, but it won’t warm as much as it would if constant relative humidity were maintained—a result that contradicts the assumptions put into big global climate models. “I don’t think too many people would have expected a simple model like this to give a result other than the one that people have been assuming will happen,” Sherwood notes.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WaterVapor/water_vapor3.php
Again – this has been a bizarre little sideline – the ignorant egging on the uninformed.
Blah, blah. I know what an mathametical “assumption” is, and I know what a consequence is. Near-constant RH is a consequence of solving the dynamical equations — it is certaintly not an assumption, and no amount of wordplay on your part will change that.
I know admitting one was wrong is difficult. That, with you inability to respond to anyone without ad homimen insults, means this discussion has now become a waste of time.
Chief –
I suggest that you read again:
Think about it, Chief. Mull it over.
Maybe if you calm down, spend some time with a loved-one, gain a little confidence that your world won’t fall apart if you admit error, you’ll be able to read that again with a renewed commitment to open inquiry.
Or maybe not. Anyway, time to hit my sack. Catch you on another thread.
David – this discussion has been an utter waste of time since it started. And if you begin by characterizing me as impervious to facts and persist in repeating the obviously stupid – then I suggest you can take a flying leap.
On the other hand, Arrhenius did assume constant RH as a final equilibrium state, but he said that was because most of the surface was water, so Clausius-Clapeyron applies for the thermodynamics of water vapor. These days, models don’t have to make that assumption, but they do have Clausius-Clapeyron thermodynamics because that is just basic physics. In a transient climate, the land warms faster and doesn’t have to have constant RH, and it could even drop at first in the models (Iess clouds, less rain, which I would call a positive feedback of the dry kind.).
Yes, I dispute the NASA page. It was probably written by a PIO, whereas the RC page was written by an actual climate modeler.
Furthermore, in their 2004 J Climate paper, Minschwaner and Dessler write, “The water vapor feedback shown in Fig. 3 is also weaker than that found in a number of general circulation models (GCMs), where relative humidity is found to be nearly invariant throughout the troposphere (Cess
et al. 1990; Soden et al. 2002),” again showing RH is calculated, not assumed.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017%3C1272%3AWVFITT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
That is, GCMs are calculating RH, not assuming it is an invariant.
So it looks like the NASA page is incorrect. It happens.
Correcting bad science is never a waste of time. Correcting someone who propagates it in a bullheaded, insulting manner is icing on the cake.
Within these constraints, the model does predict that there will be a net increase in the water content of the upper troposphere as the Earth’s surface temperature rises, but not so much that the relative humidity remains constant. That means that water vapor will cause the Earth to warm, because the feedback is positive, but it won’t warm as much as it would if constant relative humidity were maintained—a result that contradicts the assumptions put into big global climate models. “I don’t think too many people would have expected a simple model like this to give a result other than the one that people have been assuming will happen,” Sherwood notes.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WaterVapor/water_vapor3.php
Yet again – this has been a bizarre little sideline – your are a dimwitted little troll as usual Joshua. You have no clue about what you are talking about and yet continue to attempt to patronize and pontificate. There is no denizen who is more absurd than you with your irrational and trivial babbling.
hmmm.
Well now, this does look like a direct answer to the question:
That would suggest that it is written into the code. Hopefully, Jan will clarify.
Oh God – I thought you had called it a day David. Promises – promises. You still deny the reality of how maths and physics works? Can’t really say I am surprised. It seems that you have so little maths and physics background generally.
Jan has yet to demonstrate any competence at all – and if you didn’t actually read the article linked to it is typically pathetic.
I have more math & physics background than you, and have no need to get in a pissing match about it. I know what an assumption is and what a calculation is. The excerpts here from actual modelers show that RH is calculated, not assumed, and that the PIO-written NASA page is inaccurate on that score.
Joshua, that would apply to the long-term equilibrium state, and not how we get to it. This assumption is basic physics for a surface dominated by water. It may be a long way in the future because the ocean warms very slowly.
Chief –
It is true that I assumed that in providing a reference in answer to a question, you would provide an excerpt of the part of that reference that actually answers the question. Looks like I over-evaluated you, Chief.
The quotes you provided didn’t actually answer the question. Even that other quote is a bit ambiguous, but clearly more on point that what you quoted:
I’ll wait for clarification from Jan – I have no way to judge his track record on accountability. You, on the other hand, do have a track record, and it ain’t pretty.
Ok – I’ll really hit my sack this time, I promise.
In most computer models relative humidity tends to remain fixed at current levels. Models that include water vapor feedback with constant relative humidity predict the Earth’s surface will warm nearly twice as much over the next 100 years as models that contain no water vapor feedback.
Your self serving dissimulations are utterly pathetic Joshua. I am right and yet still subject to your poisonous calumny. I still can’t of anyone who is more dishonest or self deluded as you.
And David – refusing to acknowledge the nature of maths and physics makes you look a fool or a liar. Which is it?
In most computer models relative humidity tends to remain fixed at current levels. Models that include water vapor feedback with constant relative humidity predict the Earth’s surface will warm nearly twice as much over the next 100 years as models that contain no water vapor feedback.
Your self serving dissimulations are utterly pathetic Joshua. I am right and yet still subject to your poisonous calumny. I still can’t of anyone who is more dishonest or self deluded as you.
And David – refusing to acknowledge the nature of maths and physics makes you look a fool or a liar. Which is it?
Better close the italics or I will be accused of plagiarism.
Damn – try again
In most computer models relative humidity tends to remain fixed at current levels. Models that include water vapor feedback with constant relative humidity predict the Earth’s surface will warm nearly twice as much over the next 100 years as models that contain no water vapor feedback.
Your self serving dissimulations are utterly pathetic Joshua. I am right and yet still subject to your poisonous calumny. I still can’t think of anyone who is more dishonest or self deluded as you.
And David – refusing to acknowledge the nature of maths and physics makes you look a fool or a liar. Which is it?
Where mathematics begins with a set of axioms, physics begins with some assumptions about the nature of the real world. Once these assumptions are cast into mathematical form, we can apply the methods of mathematics to derive consequences of the assumptions.
And Jim you are babbling off the top of your head again. Approximately constant RH occurs in the short term. It is a robust feature of the atmosphere.
Now I have to rush.
The upshot of this seems to be that regardless of whether the GCM’s “assume” that relative humidity is constant, they do produce a humidity that is too high and thus overestimate the water vapor feedback. So, Appell, this narrow technical dispute is a side issue, it seems to me.
And David – refusing to acknowledge the nature of maths and physics makes you look a fool or a liar.
You are the kind of commenter who ruins the Internet for everyone.
The upshot of this seems to be that regardless of whether the GCM’s “assume” that relative humidity is constant, they do produce a humidity that is too high and thus overestimate the water vapor feedback.
How is that the upshot? Because one paper written 10 years ago about a fraction of the atmosphere and badly translated by NASA says so?
What would you do differently?
You yourself gave me the quote, Appell, above
Furthermore, in their 2004 J Climate paper, Minschwaner and Dessler write, “The water vapor feedback shown in Fig. 3 is also weaker than that found in a number of general circulation models (GCMs), where relative humidity is found to be nearly invariant throughout the troposphere (Cess
et al. 1990; Soden et al. 2002),” again showing RH is calculated, not assumed.
Here’s another one for you Appell.
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200805/marchmeeting.cfm
“One usually doesn’t find climate science at a physics meeting, session chair John Wettlaufer of Yale University said in a press conference on the topic. Physicists have a unique perspective that is relevant to the study of climate, he said. Several scientists reported their latest results and described how physics methods can be used to study climate.
For instance, Annalisa Bracco of Georgia Tech has used simulations to study turbulence. Ocean and atmospheric flows have large Reynolds numbers and low viscosity, but most climate models, which have limited resolution, use viscosity higher than is found in nature, she pointed out. Bracco used simulations to explore how large-scale circulation depends on Reynolds number. The simulations, which required three years of computation, could result in better climate modeling, she reported. ”
It seems that GCM’s are not too accurate in many ways. By the way, I scanned your reference for the NCAR model and it confirmed what is said above as well as a number of other problems, such as the use of the leapfrog scheme with a filter that Paul Williams has shown is far too dissipative. And a spectral spatial discretization which pretty much guarantees unphysical wiggles if there are sharp fronts. There were a number of other things that seemed to me to be “the best methods of the 1960’s” Numerical solution of PDE’s has come a long way since then.
I think everyone except CH agrees that there is a difference between the models getting the RH too high by calculation versus assuming it remains fixed. In fact they can get it too high if the ocean warms too fast in the models, which appears to explain the bias. If the land warms twice as fast as the ocean, RH would decrease, especially over that warm land. The models predicted land warming faster, but not as much as it is in recent years.
Current climate models invariably support the estimates of the strength of water vapor feedback obtained from the simplest assumption that relative humidity remains unchanged as climate warms. These numerical models are simply tools we use to generate the climates consistent with our hypotheses regarding the relevant physics, including our hypotheses as to how best to treat unresolved scales of motion. If one has a coherent idea for a mechanism that might reduce climate sensitivity, one should be able to incorporate the idea in an idealized and tentative way into a comprehensive climate model. This would enable the community to quantitatively evaluate competing theories about the strength of water vapor feedback, rather than relying on qualitative arguments. If a weak water vapor feedback climate model could be constructed, climate modelers could then analyze it systematically to see if its fit to data is comparable to or better than other models. No such model currently exists.
http://www.dgf.uchile.cl/~ronda/GF3004/helandsod00.pdf
Let me reiterate. I make an innocent statement about relative humidity staying approximately constant in models. This is a fact and it arises from assumptions that are qualitative and far from derived from 1st principles. This is the conventional way to think about it regardless of whether some numerical representation of the relevant hypothesis is used. Some numerical representation is inevitable or the model would screech to a halt.
The hypothesis appears to be not quite in accordance with reality.
Appell & Perlwitz chime in with a hand waving assertion that – no – relative humidity is not deemed to be constant but calculated to be constant. For some reason this seems to be a hot button topic. Utter nonsense that they persist with for unknown reasons and with a patronizing demeanour and superior manner typical of cult of AGW space cadets. It is a symptom of groupthink. Space cadets take it as a moral outrage if you disagree. Appell complains that I am impervious to facts – and complains further when I tell him to go jump. Go figure. He hand waves about realclimate – but dismisses the NASA page as written by a press flack. Ironic I know. I suggest he check the name of the NASA rep on the page.
The scientifically illiterate Joshua chimes in with his usual motivated idiocy and inevitable psychobabble. Someone tell me how this amounts anything other than incredibility.
Jim D adds to the mélange with his thought bubbles inevitably pulled straight out of his arse and all without the benefit of actually researching the facts. Jim’s space cadet proclivities are well known.
It is all tendentious and ingenuous – and as David Young says – a complete irrelevance. I seem to have stumbled on a crazy space cadet hot button topic.
Chief –
Let me once again illustrate why I love you so much:
You were asked a simple question point blank. You didn’t answer the question and then continued on at length in the discussion without answering the question. You did so in an abusive and insulting manner.
And then you complain about how you are treated, blame other people for the actions you took, blame other people that you took your time to take those actions, blame other people for you engaging in actions you deem trivial, and then most ironically, use the attributes of the very actions you yourself took, to characterize other people. Man up, Chief, and accept responsibility for your own behavior.
And to top it off, you, being a blog exchange participant who almost invariably peppers his comments with a stream of insults, get the vapors and start crying “calumny,” merely because I’m laughing at your comments.
You’re a work of art, Chief, and a thing of beauty, but you really should take yourself a little less seriously. I mean it’s fun to watch and all, but you really might consider being less of a drama queen.
Chief Hydrologist wrote:
Really. You dismiss statistical trend analysis, and present what as superior method? Some colored graph without any information about confidence intervals, statistical significance. What is the method based on which you present “cooling” as fact, asserted by you? Eyeballing.
Estimating the trend and the sigma-interval is helpful in this case, even if it only shows that it is not possible to make a conclusive statement about the global temperature trend at surface since 1998, since the noise is simply too large over the limited time interval. On the other hand, we have other indicators for a continuing global warming, instead of “cooling”, like the continuing increase in ocean heat content, the continuing melting of the ice at Earth polar caps, or the continuing rise in the global mean sea level. This is why I think a cooling trend in the next decades has a low probability. The continuing warming of the oceans is much more important for the energy budget of the whole climate system than the lower troposphere/surface. Whatever decreased the energy flux between the oceans and the lower troposphere keeping the lower troposphere temperature anomaly relatively equal for some years, while the oceans have been warming, the tendency will be to restore the equilibrium, i.e., the troposphere is going to catch up with the ocean warming at some point. This is my expectation.
Your claims about “cooling” since 1998 are not based on any scientific evidence.
What I think is more conceivable, is a somewhat slower warming trend compared to the trend from 1997 to present. This is more a possibility instead of a cooling. However, conceivable is also a larger warming trend in the future, if some positive feedbacks kick in, which don’t play such a role yet, like through additional greenhouse gas release from thawing of the permafrost soils, leading to more warming, accelerating the thawing of the permafrost.
(e.g., Schaefer et al. Tellus B (2011), doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2011.00527.x, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2011.00527.x)
An acceleration could also come from a continuing thawing of the Arctic sea ice through the ice-albedo feedback, another positive feedback.
Joshua wrote:
The study by Minschwaner and Dessler, JC (2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)0172.0.CO;2 indeed makes following statement in the abstract:
“The analysis suggests that models that maintain a fixed relative humidity above 250 mb are likely overestimating the contribution made by these levels to the water vapor feedback.”
So, firstly, they are talking about pressure levels above 250 hPa, and, secondly, it is not really clear whether they actually refer here to atmospheric circulation models, specifically. I rather doubt it, since they use a radiative-convective model in their own study, not a GCM, and they compare with other radiative-convective models:
“By specifying details of the profile of Mc, previous radiative–convective model studies of the tropical water vapor feedback did not incorporate the full coupling of Eqs. (1)–(3) into their analyses.”
On the other hand, they write about GCMs:
“The water vapor feedback shown in Fig. 3 is also weaker than that found in a number of general circulation models (GCMs), where relative humidity is found to be nearly invariant throughout the troposphere (Cess et al. 1990; Soden et al. 2002). In comparison to the equilibrium model of the tropical UT presented here, GCMs are confronted with a substantial number of complexities, such as the need to account for surface fluxes, precipitation, evaporation, and long-range transport of water vapor. A detailed discussion of the parameterizations used to represent the physics of moist convection in GCMs is beyond the scope of this paper [some of the more popular schemes are discussed in Emanuel (1994)], and specific causes for the different behavior are difficult to pinpoint. Sun and Held (1996) have postulated that relative humidities in general circulation models may be overly constrained by the strength of vertical mixing that occurs during convective adjustment.”
One cannot “find” something, if it is just assumed to be like this, and whether the relative humidities are “overly constraint” or not by some physics in GCMs, this statement would be meaningless, if relative humidities were just assumed to be constant. The relative humidities need to be calculated to be “overly constraint” by the “strength of vertical mixing” in the model convection schemes.
I can’t exlude the possibility that there have been some GCMs, at least among the older generations, which prescribe the relative humidity at upper troposphere and stratosphere levels. I don’t know all the models in such a detail. The burden of proof to show such a model would be on the one who says it exist. I objectively can’t prove non-existence, like I can’t prove non-existence of invisible pink unicorns.
Sherwood et al., JGR (2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009JD012585 studied the relative humidity change in a warmer climate in a whole bunch of CMIP3 models. This would be impossible, if the relative humidity was just assumed to be constant in these models. And it disproves the assertion by Chief Hydrologist about it at least for those models.
Or here is a description of the GISS ModelE:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/sc05200y.html
The relative humidity is also calculated in ModelE. If one goes in the paper and does a search for relative humidity, one will find what other processes depend on it.
And here are some animations with the relative humidity evolution in a GCM:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2012/09/01/31-relative-humidity-in-gcms/
Certainly not constant in there.
Specific humidity and temperature are independent predicted variables in GCMs, so obviously RH which is a function of both is not going to be fixed. With fixed RH you could not predict cloud distributions or motion, or much if any precipitation. It would be a ridiculous constraint to have. I think most people get this, so I just stated the obvious.
These numerical models are simply tools we use to generate the climates consistent with our hypotheses regarding the relevant physics… op cit
How difficult is this to understand? As I say obviously a space cadet hot button topic.
The decline since 1998 is based on the fact that surface temperatures haven’t exceeded that of February 1998 in any significant sense. Difficult concept I’m sure. Although the trend since 2002 is as anticipated.
The theory is that climate shifted in 1998/2001.
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. ftp://starfish.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/pub/ocean/CCS-WG_References/NewSinceReport/March15/Swanson%20and%20Tsonis%20Has%20the%20climate%20recently%20shifted%202008GL037022.pdf
It involves a change in the nature of ENSO – a cool Pacific decadal mode – and cloud.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandLaken2013_zps73c516f9.png.html?sort=3&o=7
And just for Jan – http://www.benlaken.com/documents/AIP_PL_13.pdf
Although if they are stuck in denial about temperature – well you get the point.
And Joshua – another long winded and utterly disingenuous and tendentious post? Didn’t read it but you’re very amusing anyway.
Thanks, Jan –
Still seems a bit ambiguous to me. Your points taken, but based on that one quote that references “the constant-relative-humidity assumption places extra water in the equation.” And even beyond the ambiguity of even that statement (I mean equations or code can’t “place” anything. ) it certainly seems reasonable to question how applicable that statement would be to GCMs more generally.
I notice that Chief continues to substitute insults for an answer to the question.
Funny, that.
I see that Chief’s self-delusion/struggle with basic logic continues. Amazing how he can describe something he “didn’t read.”
What’s fascinating is that he has such low respect for others that he assumes they have the such struggles with simple reasoning as he.
Didn’t note the question mark Joshua? I can assure you I didn’t read the comment – but all of your comments repeated endlessly and are tedious, self serving and tendentious so they are easy to describe. I don’t generally read your comments – perhaps at best 1 in 20 – it is simply a waste of my time otherwise.
Really – I need more trivial psychobabble, scientific illiteracy and idiocy? Don’t kid yourself.
Chief,
Toggweiler NOAA 2001:
“Manabe and Stouffer have projected that a four- fold increase in atmospheric CO2 would increase the hydrological cycle sufRciently that the Atlantic thermohaline circulation might collapse. This would lead to a substantially deeper thermocline and a shift in the heat exchange between the hemi- spheres.”
My question: has the Hydrological Cycle increased? Is there now more precipitation to cause freshening and THC standstill?
I read an article a year or so ago, I can’t find the reference right off the bat, that stated the Atlantic THC is at least stable if not increased.
The Toggweiler NOAA 2001 piece said that temperature was most of the reason for the THC and that salinity was 10 to 20%.
So, I am interested in your statement: “We have entered into the danger zone of NH insolation. Changes to the THC seem entirely possible.”
As I usually loose a lot of content in my own translation of things, would you mind educating me?
Thank you
Globally-averaged land-based precipitation shows a statistically insignificant upward trend with most of the increase occurring in the first half of the 20th century. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/faqs/climfaq05.html
It is perhaps not rainfall but snowfall that is of more direct significance.
However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in midlatitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic oscillation. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.
This might increase melting and runoff – and slow THC. Models show an average of 25% reduction in THC this century but with little confidence that larger and more abrupt changes can’t occur.
Thermohaline circulation is driven by the sinking of cold, salty water at high latitudes. Fresh water flowing into the North Atlantic Ocean from rainfall or the melting of ice and permafrost can make the ocean water less salty, and therefore less dense. If it becomes “light” enough, it will not sink any more, possibly slowing or shutting down global thermohaline circulation. Indeed, during some of the abrupt events in Earth’s past climate, scientists find evidence of large catastrophic flows of fresh water into the North Atlantic from the melting of glaciers and ice caps, and due to flooding from glacier-dammed lakes. Without the large-scale sinking of salty water in the North Atlantic the influx of warm water to replace it from the tropics would not occur, effectively switching off the thermohaline circulation. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/abrupt-climate-change.html#off
Or accumulate and build ice sheets in a runaway feedback.
Here is why climate science in its present manifestation is dangerous. Politicians are leveraging it for stupidity raised to the idiot power. If climate scientists have any integrity at all, they will speak out against this.
“Senator Brian Schatz’s (D-HI) filed an amendment for the immigration bill Wednesday that would allow stateless people in the U.S. to seek conditional lawful status if their nations have been made uninhabitable by climate change.
The Senate’s immigration bill currently recognizes that people who come to the U.S. may have no country to return to for a variety of reasons and allows them to come forward to apply for legal status as a stateless person. But one cause for displacement that is overlooked in current law is how climate change has caused people to lose their homes and their nationality. ”
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/06/20/2187831/climate-refugee-immigration-bill/?mobile=nc
Global warming hasn’t displaced anyone. It cannot be demonstrated to be true, but here we have a Class A idiot trying to make law on it. In fact, all the law based on the idea that CO2 is bad is the height of lunacy.
Let’s not and say we did.
The thrust of this article is spot on. Look at how most of the worlds meteorological departments are getting their long term predictions wrong. They mostly look at past conditions to predict the future but miss the added impact of solar output. Low solar has changed the atmosphere, we have different conditions that alter the path of the jet stream as well as creating more low pressure systems along with blocking highs.
This area of research will gain momentum as we realize we are stuck with these conditions for the next 30 years.
What “low solar,” and in what ways had it changed the atmosphere?
You mean apart form the obvious?
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001/
You really seem to be a chubby little space cadet with plummeting credibility. You drop silly little one line snarks and then complain that I make the internet unpleasant for you. Thank you…thank you very much. A pleasure to help out.
I can’t believe this guy thinks silly little one line snark is effective.
==============
Had a quick look at your site Geoff – made me wonder if I should correlate Law Dome ice core salt content (an ENSO proxy) with cosmogenic isotopes.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=61
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/newc141.jpg
Chief hunts the elusive mechanism.
======
The truly sickening thing is that governments are killing their citizens by making it too expensive for them to heat their homes. Governments would rather tax you to death than wait for you to die of natural causes.
+1 Eve
… fer yer comment, not the effects of guvuhmint taxes on carbon..
Beth-the-serf.
Australia after the federal election in September could be the first country to get rid of a carbon tax.
Yea+++
blouis79 | June 22, 2013 at 5:39 am |
I’m no expert in Australia.. but isn’t that what they said last election?
Didn’t it happen the opposite way, then?
I mean, I don’t care who runs Australia. I have no dog in that race. And frankly, I have yet to meet anyone not an Australian who claimed to care, either.
But if you’re going to tell lies about your country, can’t you at least make them interesting? Or.. different from the last lies?
Oh, and for the record, the government that brought in the BC carbon tax, I hear they’ve been re-elected twice. With increasing majorities each time.
blouis79
Just 85 days to go until we get rid of the worst government Australia had in at least 60 years, perhaps ever.
Then a decade or so to undo the damage the Labor-Green-independent ‘Progressive’ government has left.
What a disaster ‘Progressive’ government every every time they get into government (largely by a mixture of lying and just plain incompetence).
But we may even change Prime Minister again before the election. We may recycle back to ‘Rudd the dud’. He’s a bit like the WikiLeaks guy, Julian Assange. They share some similar characteristics.
Bart admits ignorance and then alleges persiflage.
===============
Interestingly Australia hasn’t collapsed yet from carbon taxes. So much for that prediction.
kim | June 22, 2013 at 7:39 am |
Bart admits ignorance and then alleges persiflage.
See, here’s your problem. You have trouble distinguishing between the various degrees, types and areas of expertise and ignorance and persiflage.
It doesn’t take a great expert in Australia to remember the huge confidence of the Australian contingent crowing last time there was an Australian election about how the carbon tax would lead to the route of the government. It doesn’t take any expertise at all to know they were simply wrong in their claims.
Do I predict what will happen in Australia? No.
But then, I also don’t have a track record of being completely wrong about Australian elections, or expressing irrational confidence in future outcomes. And they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
Wash your hands when they’re dirty.
You can’t know they’re dirty by looking at them as germs are microbes, and microbes — as the name implies — are too microscopic to see.
So wash your hands. More often.
And stop touching your face.
And stop touching strange surfaces.
And stop shaking hands palm-to-palm. A fistbump will do.
And cover your mouth with your elbow when you cough. And don’t touch strange elbows.
And wash your hands.
The evidence for cold-related increase in susceptibility to infection is controversial. The valid evidence for unheated homes increasing deaths is nonexistent.
People die in winter because germs last longer in cold outdoor environments and people don’t adjust their hygiene habits to resist the greater threat from germs that last longer in the environment, or spread more among people who have been outdoors in colder weather.
How are you going to heat all outdoors?
People die in winter because they’re visited by dirty, touchy, inconsiderate ignorant slobs.
Oh.. and the biggest tax expenses in most countries: health costs and lost wages due to illness..
Truly sickening things are germs. Use some soap. And stop blaming your government for your mother’s inability to teach her children cleanliness.
Herd immunity is your friend.
==============
“The truly sickening thing is that governments are killing their citizens by making it too expensive for them to heat their homes. Governments would rather tax you to death than wait for you to die of natural causes.”
Poverty is always going to exist and there will always be a large number of people who cannot afford to heat their homes.
What should happen morally is that the government (ie taxpayer) picks up the heating bills of the poor.
Now interestingly those who bleat the loudest about how climate change legislation will make energy too expensive for the poor tend to be the same people who strongly oppose state welfare support for the poor.
But this is not hypocrisy. It’s actually quite shocking exploitation. Climate skeptics acting concerned about the poor not being able to afford to heat their homes not because they give a damn about the poor, but because they think it makes a useful argument about doing anything about emissions.
lolwot seeks in his own mind the motives of others, and projects.
===========
I advocate a minimal socialist system that ensures every citizen has sufficient heat during winter to survive.
It’s government haters like you kim who are happy with the alternative of people freezing if they can’t afford heating.
Although that said I can sympathize with your libertarian free-market point of view. Why should YOU have to pay? What about those who game the system? Sure, I can see your point of view, but I just think people not dying is more important.
Which is why to witness you and your brethren feigning concern that decarbonization will make heating too expensive and kill the poor makes me angry.
lolwot – I like your minimalist government idea. Have you ever read “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek? Really good book. In it, he advocates for welfare as a stabilizing mechanism for society. This can be taken care of by a minimalist negative income tax-like approach. Anyone below the poverty line gets money from the government. If they get a job, the government gives them less (but does not cut them off) such that the money from the government plus money from the job is more than they had without the job. This maintains an incentive to work, for those who can. Special circumstances like being (truly) disabled or being old and feeble, would merit more support. This system also promotes small government, as it would not require a small army of bureaucrats to administer.
jim2, You say…
“This system also promotes small government, as it would not require a small army of bureaucrats to administer.”
The historical model suggests that they will ‘promote small government’ to the voters; however in the end it takes, a large army of bureaucrats.
Tom – there are very few if any Hayek-like governments. Whenever voters can, they vote for more benefits. Originally, the US government was set up so that the states elected senators. This was one more way to have a representative democracy, yet limit it in meaningful ways. You can be sure we wouldn’t have unfunded mandates from the Federal Government to the States if Senators were elected by State Legislatures. I would like to see the US move toward the Hayek ideal, and yes, I know it isn’t well defined, but, hey, outside of mathematics, what is?
Put more simply : governments would rather tax.
That’s mainly what drives government climate science to come up with reasons to tax.
.
BFJ | June 22, 2013 at 4:10 am |
No government prefers to tax.
Taxes are immensely unpopular.
The democratic government that imposes or increases a tax gets booted out of office.
Governments that tax by growing a debt so huge it drags down the economy like a hidden tax don’t much like that, either, unless they’ve got a carefully manicured media campaign and a gullible Tea Par.. er, patsy.
Governments don’t mind much taxing the sorts of businesses that won’t make much noise about it, but those are getting pretty scarce. Heck, governments will obediently cut taxes on some businesses or even subsidize them under threat that the businesses will tell the public they’re being overtaxed and just passing on taxes to consumers.
Governments don’t much mind selling off royalties, but they typically sell them far below value for the above reason, to private interests that out-negotiate, and then startlingly hire the people they negotiated with once they leave office. That’s one of the cosy deals ‘government’ rather sells royalties.
The last thing any government wants is to come face-to-face with a sound argument to impose anything remotely tax-like.
Perhaps you mean, government would rather spend?
But then, it’s not like government wants to be yoked to practical and necessary spending. Government rather would spend on making friends and influencing voters.
But perhaps you want evidence that you’re simply wrong.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/environment/Federal+government+planned+strong+campaign/8561763/story.html
There you go, a free-spending government eager to sell royalties to subsidized interests, then spend tax money abroad promoting them.. and collect taxes from the income of the company employees.
See, if you’re a smart government, you don’t need to tax more. You just need to shuffle the money around so you tax the gullible more while rewarding your friends.
Governments love to tax like there is no tomorrow. Empirical evidence testifies to that fact.
“No government prefers to tax. Taxes are immensely unpopular. ”
Except of course where there just happens to be an apparently watertight argument why the tax is needed. Even if it just happens that the apparently watertight/consensus argument was one government itself politically engineered, using some other taxes they took from us.
But a carbon tax is the one they can sell to people feeling guilty about their environmental impact.
blouis79 | June 22, 2013 at 5:41 am |
That would be total malarky.
The most carbon taxes that get ‘sold’ are the ones that accompany overall tax cuts, or that target unpopular sectors like big business interests.
I’m no expert in Australia, but their carbon tax followed that model.
British Columbia, likewise, I’m no expert, but they cut their taxes heavily at the same time as imposing their revenue-neutral carbon tax.
So, no.
Your claim is baseless.
AGW scientist at work…
“Lets think it through together. What would have to happen for this conspiracy theory to be true? A whole bunch of totally unbelievable stuff, that’s what.”
Have a nice day.
“That’s mainly what drives government climate science to come up with reasons to tax.”
Oh please.
And skeptics claim they are not conspiracy theorists!
It’s nuts. Do you guys even think through these theories? They are so childishly absurd it beggars belief.
Lets think it through together. What would have to happen for this conspiracy theory to be true? A whole bunch of totally unbelievable stuff, that’s what.
At a minimum some politicians somewhere in the 80s would have to be holding a meeting discussing ways of generating more tax…in the 21st century…Just sitting there thinking about that. Who called this meeting? Why did any of them turn up? Are these secret meetings titled “Conspiracy Meeting in Room 7b”? How do skeptics know about them then? Is it politicians job to hold such meetings? What personal benefit do they get from it?
Lets just pretend this absurd situation actually happened and move onto the next absurdity. For what idea did these supposedly sly politicians come up with? Was it something simple, quick and obvious like increasing taxes under the guise of supporting a war? or increasing taxes under the guise of reducing the deficit?
No we are supposed to believe the best idea they came up with was a ridiculously elaborate plan spanning decades involving the manipulation of an entire scientific discipline just so at the end of that period they (no not even them! their successors!) could argue for a tax based on an engineered scientific result.
A plan so absurd that only climate skeptics could believe it with a straight face.
But the absurdity doesn’t stop here. No this is the tip of the iceberg or absurdity. New absurdities just keep popping up.
For example how do the politicians manipulate the scientific field? Are politicians calling up scientists saying: “look you know we can get you more funding if you push idea X”.
And when a political party loses an election, before they leave office do they make a quick call to the opposing victorious party:
“Hey, yeah well done for winning the election, by the way we have this elaborate conspiracy set up that might net us some extra taxes in 50 years time. Keep it going will you?”
And at no point are there any whistleblowers.
F*** me this is absurd isn’t it! So easy for climate skeptics to make dumb**** claims like “That’s mainly what drives government climate science to come up with reasons to tax”
It’s hard to believe that even the most desperate and dim-witted alarmist would resort to the tired old “conspiracy” strawman ever again; but, sure enough, here lolwot has descended to the challenge.
In terms of his mindbogglingly idiotic naivete, it’s a “conspiracy” when an organization pursues its self-interest, and does what everyone anyway expects it to to. No doubt he imagines corporations have a “conspiracy” to make a profit. And lolwot himself no doubt has a conscious “conspiracy” to support himself and generally advance his interests, in the process making decisions about which dentist to use etc etc.
Nonsense of course, but that’s his own idiocy applied to himself. The reality is that, like anyone else, governments included, lolwot makes his spending and other decisions so to advance his self-interest. Noone questions this, nor thinks it’s a “conspiracy”.
Government stands to greatly expand its power over society if it can finance ideas that suggest such a move is warranted. And that of course it exactly what government-funded climate science has done. You really do need to be moronic to not see the connection. (Or, perhaps, just be a big-government advocate trying to deny the obvious so as to foment a more totalitarian outcome).
“No doubt he imagines corporations have a “conspiracy” to make a profit”
No, that’s called a legitimate purpose. It’s a purpose that is expected of corporations and is out in the open.
What you are claiming is that politicians and scientists are working in concert for an illegitimate purpose. That’s called a conspiracy and by suggesting it, like it or not it makes you a conspiracy theorist.
Conspiracy theorists don’t like being named as such sure. Just as 9/11 truthers don’t like being called truthers and birthers hate being called birthers. You want to lend your conspriacy theories a legitimacy they don’t deserve and therefore you get grouchy when someone like me points out what your claims are.
Like most conspiracy theorists you start and end with a claim of motivation for an illegitimate end, in this case that government would benefit from a carbon tax. But you don’t put any actual thought into the chain of causality from this motivation to action. If you did you’d realize it was nonsense.
“Government stands to greatly expand its power over society if it can finance ideas that suggest such a move is warranted. And that of course it exactly what government-funded climate science has done. ”
See like a typical conspiracy theorist you’ve come up with a simple claim of motivation that is designed to fit some inconvenient observation (that scientists accept manmade global warming) and all you do is ask us to ASSUME this is the explanation.
Just like a conspiracy theorist might say:
“The police stand to greatly expand their power if there is more crime. Therefore the police have been encouraging crime to increase”
or
“The medical industry stand to greatly benefit if there is more sickness in society. Therefore they have suppressed cures for many diseases”.
These are easy claims to make, and the impossibility of proving a negative makes them impossible to absolutely refute. Which is why conspiracy theories can survive.
Too easy. Conspiracy theorists don’t actually follow through and explain how it works. Like you when challenged they just throw out some waffle about how it all just happens magically due to “interested parties”. Just as 9/11 truthers will not explain how exactly the government could plan such an elaborate conspiracy without anyone finding out.
You suggest that this can be done without any individuals conspiring. Go on then, explain how.
Again the “conspiracy” strawman. And strawman-makers like lolwot really don’t like being called out for what they are.
And, as above, go on to try and deny government’s blatantly obvious vested interest in preferantially financing scientists who come up with apparent excuses to raise taxes and bureaucracy.
And actually, the only real conspiracy theorists here are lowot’s lot, who would have us believe there is a secret cadre of people working for government, who place truth and the general welfare of people above the interests of government. Some mythical angelic types, involved in some conspiracy of goodwill. Who’d never hide data, fake hockey sticks, hide declines, and never ever criticize those who do.
So government working to advance its self-interest and reach is a ‘conspiracy’ now?? Where do they come up with this stuff?
“government’s blatantly obvious vested interest in preferantially financing scientists who come up with apparent excuses to raise taxes and bureaucracy.”
Vested interest isn’t enough to justify your wild stories. I pointed out how doctors have a vested interest in there being disease, how the police have a vested interest in there being crime. Your approach seems to be that therefore the police and doctors must be encouraging crime and disease, but you’d insist that wasn’t a conspiracy theory because somehow they do it unknowingly!
It’s easy for you to fantasize up some vague story based on “vested interests”, but how does it actually work in practice? Start from the beginning, work it through. Be specific. Start with politicians standing for election, winning election and going into office. Explain how the chain of funding between politics and science can be influenced so that politicians unknowingly end up financing scientists with apparent excuses to raise taxes and bureaucracy. Explain how the science funding boards end up complying unknowingly.
The world of politics and science is a bit more complicated than some Disney cartoon.
Ok, we’ve at least established that government has a monumental vested interest in financing the climate scare-stories that it does (outspending everyone else put together by perhaps four orders of magnitude).
The burden is now on you to demonstrate why your Disney Cartoon notion of honest government science should be believed – your conspiracy of honesty theory – where public ‘servants’ have a notion of integrity.
Think it through – why and how could you get government not dedicated to advancing its own cause, having as it does access to other peoples’ money, and the monopoly on the use of legal force.
And relate this to the underlying bias and unrepentant dishonesty that characterizes most government climate science – Climategate, Lewandowky, Glieck , etc etc, and the deafening silence on all this from the bulk of the others.
It’s how they ‘make’ their payroll, every month.
The claim of strawman:
Punksta | June 22, 2013 at 7:24 am |
It’s hard to believe that even the most desperate and dim-witted alarmist would resort to the tired old “conspiracy” strawman ever again; but, sure enough, here lolwot has descended to the challenge.
And Gina | June 22, 2013 at 8:44 am |
So government working to advance its self-interest and reach is a ‘conspiracy’ now?? Where do they come up with this stuff?
The original statement by BFJ | June 22, 2013 at 4:10 am | (OP):
That’s mainly what drives government climate science to come up with reasons to tax.
What would the claims of strawman need to be valid?
They’d need for there be a way for the original statement to be true as they frame it.
Could mere drive for government self-interest and reach be explained without the suppositions of lolwot | June 22, 2013 at 6:10 am | At a minimum some politicians somewhere in the 80s would have to be holding a meeting discussing ways of generating more tax…in the 21st century…Just sitting there thinking about that. Who called this meeting? Why did any of them turn up? Are these secret meetings titled “Conspiracy Meeting in Room 7b”? How do skeptics know about them then? Is it politicians job to hold such meetings? What personal benefit do they get from it?
Let’s skip over the UN, which could possibly be just in it for extending the self-interest, reach of government and promote more tax.. if all the politicians in the world wanted their counterparts in other nations to succeed so much that they’d keep secret about it. Because we know all the politicians in the world show such love and agreement at the UN for their colleagues.. or maybe all the shoe-banging and storming out and hijinx are just an act to convince us they’re not in cahoots for the purpose of taxing us all more? We’ll pretend the UN could pull off such a ruse.
And the IPCC, which isn’t all scientists but includes some economists — two groups famous for their ability to organize self-interested tax schemes — could plausibly maybe be an arrangement inspired by lust for growth of government, if the UN were really a completely-non-conspiratorial happenstance unplanned tax-promoting machine.
Both rely on a foundation of the gathered assembled observations of science. Published science. Sure, there are steps in that collection that are not very transparent, but then anyone can get together and replicate the steps and will either come up with similar results or be shown to cherry-pick and ignore the bulk of scientific study.
Could climate science automatically trigger new reasons for government to tax without a plan to pre-arrange the results of scientific studies ranging from the atmosphere of Venus to the CO2 count of Mauna Loa to the tree rings of Yamal and the ice cores of Vostok and the satellite images of the Arctic and ten thousand other discrete peer-reviewed studies from thousands of scientists at thousands of institutions in dozens of countries, most of which are unconnected except in the most casual way from the IPCC, the UN, or even their own governments?
That is an implausible hypothesis.
Scientists love nothing better than to prove each other wrong. They love it like vampires love blood. Like addicts love drugs. Like drunks love alcohol. To achieve anything like what is suggested by the OP would require strong, secret and intense planned operations of government agents.
So, Gina, Punksta, you’re complaining by assertion a case that cannot withstand scrutiny.
lolwot, Did the ERA ever get passed? We got everything in it and worse, even more. Not that, that would affect you.
A typo correction: regarding lolwot’s mythical angelic types in government, involved in some conspiracy of goodwill.
…
Who’d never hide data, fake hockey sticks, hide declines, fiddle peer review and delete evidence of doing so; and, moreover, never fail to criticize those who do do these things.
It is the sun that controls our weather, the sun cycles into 200 year warm to cooling cycles and cycle 24 and its deep minimum predicted cycle 25 will have the world cooling dramatically. The heat sink of the World’s oceans has the PDO cycle to cold with the AMO soon to follow. Remember the 1680s when 25% of all Scots died from cold driven crop failures. I wish it won’t happen, cold kills more than warming does. Today’s climate is no where near the warmth of the Minoan or Roman warming. Seems like civilization thrives durning warming phases.
I am much more concerned about what is happening to honey bees than CO2 emissions. Honey bees are essential, well, so is CO2 for that matter. Less money should be going to this idiotically named “climate change” and more to honey bee research.
[denier mode]There were far fewer honey bees millions of years ago and life thrived. If bees die out we will just adapt[/denier mode]
[Leftist mode]global warming killed he honey bees. Humanity is doomed if we do not pay for more secular, socialist government drones[/Leftist mode]
“Today’s climate is no where near the warmth of the Minoan or Roman warming.”
That’s wrong. What’s your evidence? (I only ask so I can tear it to pieces, I am pretty sure you are going to post some faulty GISP2 based graph)
Ok, debunk it;
http://evilincandescentbulb.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/real-hot-today-kobashi-40002.jpg?w=640&h=367
In the plestiocine(sp), sea level in San Diego was 120 meters or about 650 feet above current levels. One can tell from the terraces in the hills.
Scott
Actually, poor memory.
The most extensive marine terraces along the California coast are exposed along the sides of the Palos Verdes Hills in Los Angeles County, where a series of thirteen terraces rises to 1,300 feet above sea level. More than twenty stepped terraces are visible along the coast of San Clemente Island. Well-developed terraces along the Mendocino coast near Jug Handle Creek feature five wave cut platforms–the highest, at 600 feet, is 500,000 years old, and the youngest terrace, presently at 100 feet above sea level, emerged 100,000 years age. Other terraces are visible at Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, at Duxbury Reef in Marin County, along the Santa Cruz coast, at Point Buchon in San Luis Obispo County and at Dana Point in Orange County. Submerged terraces to depths of 500 feet lie just offshore of the coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Less than 25,000 years old, these terraces are in the process of forming.
Scott
True, true and in Nevada–e.g.,
Valley of Fire
One of the most beautiful features of the desert are the brillant red rocks that are scattered throughout southern Nevada. These vivid hues can be best observed in the appropriately named, Valley of Fire.
Looking across the barren, hot, desert valley it is hard to believe that 600 milion years ago the entire area was under water…
That’s a pretty active fault zone; can you actually provide links showing the land hasn’t been rising over that period?
Everyone serves their paymaster – scientists included.
Drug-company scientists argue their drugs are safe, government climatologists argue CO2 is unsafe. For parallel reasons – and that’s what they were chosen and hired for. Just because people have scientific qualifications, doesn’t make them seekers of truth any more than anyone else.
Gina, you write “and that’s what they were chosen and hired for”
I hope and suspect that you are wrong. I was a government scientists for 30 years, and I NEVER did anything else but say what I thought the scientific truth was. NEVER. Sometimes I was not very popular.
Yes, there are times when government scientists are ordered to toe the party line, and then, in public, they must do so. But in private, all the scietists I have known do not follow orders from on high. And, in government, there is a process where, in private, scientists can have their ideas tested and discussed at senior levels, if those scientists feel the subject is that important
Oh it’s not a question of being asked to fudge things, but rather a question of selecting upfront those people and projects thought most likely to be in the paymaster’s interests. Institutional bias.
Also, in the case of government, this is something relevant only to issues with direct implications for an expansion of government and taxes. Climatology obviously does, but lots of other sciences don’t; I can’t see much impact on government policy if suddenly we learn a better way to work out square roots or something.
The whole IPCC AR4 work and report were during the Bush administration. The US scientists risked funding by taking their path (EPA, NASA, etc.), but truth prevailed. There was friction for sure, remember muzzling, which was government censorship of their own scientists, but they were able to pursue the more difficult path, which is encouraging. The administration even had to fund the science because they espoused uncertainty while recognizing it was important to solve. The combination of uncertainty and importance certainly help when determining funding priorities. For that reason, the loud mouths of the “skeptics” actually helps the science funding more than if everyone accepts the science as it is. But is does delay the step where we say the earth will warm a lot, now what? Which is a whole debate waiting to happen.
Muzzling is one of those really comical exaggerations. Tens of thousands of government employees dead set for decades on doing what is best for government (and hence themselves), and a handful of muzzlings were claimed. The British comedy Yes, Minister springs to mind – with bureaucrats running circles round the Prime Minister, who ridiculously imagines he is in control.
My analogy is more akin to the scientists needing a “minder” when in public places. Something like you see in Russia. Thankfully we are past that phase now.
Jim, you do know that Hansen complained about being muzzled by the Clinton administration also, right? Glad to hear they have eliminated all that nasty muzzling under the Obama administration.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657655235589119.html
steven, the article seems to be about someone trying to put out a minority “denier” view on behalf of the EPA. Wouldn’t that be a different case? I wouldn’t blame his boss for blocking it.
Jim, exactly. If you aren’t the one in charge you don’t get to state your point of view in such a way as to make it seem to represent the views of the organization. Now, can you show me where any climate scientist was told he couldn’t express his views as long as they weren’t stated or written in such a way as it could be confused with the position of the organization? If not they weren’t muzzled.
The muzzling took exactly that form. Government scientists were not allowed to say anything while representing their organization without approval, even if it is the same as all the university scientists and those in other countries were freely saying anyway. It wasn’t like the censoring was preventing an unusual view, it was even preventing the normal prevailing view from being expressed. I would feel justified complaining about that.
Jim, Hansen does not have a consensus view even if you happen to like it. The consensus view as found in the peer reviewed literature is full of caveats and all his superiors wanted to do was include these caveats. A fully reasonable and justifiable stance by the administration and one that is appearing to be much more correct than Hansen’s with the passage of time. Not that it matters who agreed with Hansen other then the fact that those responsible for the organization didn’t. They get the final say. Hansen was allowed to say anything he wanted as long as he didn’t try to decide what the opinion of his boss was. As far as the guy from the EPA, that is actually a more serious issue since that is one where the administration broke the rules to muzzle the opinions of an employee. All agency documents that pertain to an endangerment finding are to be made public. It doesn’t matter if your boss agrees with it or not. You should be much more concerned about the latter situation despite your personal beliefs.
I just had to comment after wading through this post….
Call me a “one horse junkie”, but I am fixated on the actual cost of implementing the “fix” for global warming based on a reduction of atmospheric CO2, as measured in Hawaii. All sorts of foolishness has been placed on society in the US – like CFL light bulbs that cause me to squint.
And Wind Power that does not live up to the hype. Or Ethanol in my gasoline which causes actual harm to my poor auto’s engine, and which causes a world-wide increase in corn prices.
Nope, I need some order of causation that CO2 actually increases atmospheric temperature that is such a global menace! Even if the actual temperatures are increasing thoughout the world, if the projection is +2C by the end of the century, so what?
The real question, for us Engineers, is “what can we do about it?”. Which, of course, relies on correct attribution. I do not want to spend $Billions (maybe $Trillions) only to find that it didn’t do the job….kinda like the first effort to save the ozone hole enlargement.
lolwot, you listening??
“one horse junkies” often quite rationally focus on the net costs and benefits of proposed actions. It’s the only way to ascertain whether costly proposals are in the public interest or not. If you can’t ascertain the costs and benefits, you don’t have much rationale for taking action.
This statement is like a punch in the guts:
“But the “consensus” never extended to the intricacies of the climate system, just the core belief that additional greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet.
If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived.”
Nik
Quite so. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science which is that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
Pingback: CO2 realists have scientific and ethical high ground yet fail to claim it. Two simple charts show it’s never been about CO2. GOP ‘leadership’ won’t let members talk about CO2 science, that CO2 isn’t a danger, instead forces them to change subjec
“But there’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases.”
Cynical me:
Some time ago a thought started popping into my head. It said that the “urgency” about policies was because the proponents of AGW realized that a hiatus was going to come, and they wanted policies IN PLACE before the hiatus, so they could claim credit for the hiatus.
Isn’t that really distrusting of me to think that of my fellow human beings, to suspect them of such fraud?
Some time ago a thought started popping into my head. It said that the “urgency” about policies was because the proponents of AGW realized that a hiatus was going to come, and they wanted policies IN PLACE before the hiatus, so they could claim credit for the hiatus.
Or, feared the hiatus might continue, and wanted political action entrenched before it did.
Alzo the pivot to climate change and then to weirding. An ancient technique to attach guilt to weather. It was a foolproof method for eons ’til invasion by an enlightening virus, to which the body politic is now becoming immune.
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Isn’t that really distrusting of me to think that of my fellow human beings, to suspect them of such fraud?
Oh please. Government climate science is riddled with fraud and bias and vested interest (nurtured with piles of tax money). It would be disturbing of someone ~didn’t~ suspect foul play.